I’ve noticed something as I’ve gotten older that I think a lot of successful people experience without realizing what it’s doing to them. They spend most of their lives trying to catch up.
You wake up thinking about what didn’t get finished yesterday. You check your phone and immediately see emails, messages, meetings, and things that need your attention. Before the day has really started, you already feel behind. So you start moving, handle what’s urgent, and tell yourself that once you get through this week, things will settle down. Then next week looks exactly the same.
We all go through busy periods. Business gets demanding, family needs more attention, travel disrupts your routine, or something unexpected happens. That’s life. The problem is when temporary catch up mode becomes your normal way of living.
You’re always trying to get back on track with something. You need to catch up on sleep, get back to training, clean up your nutrition, return calls, spend more time with your family, or schedule the appointment you’ve been putting off. There’s always something waiting for you.
After a while, you can start believing this is simply what being productive looks like. I don’t think it is. There’s a difference between having a full life and constantly feeling like you’re behind in your own life.
Your body doesn’t understand that you’re almost caught up. It only knows what you’re asking it to handle today. It knows whether you slept enough, whether you’ve recovered from your last workout, what you’re eating, how much stress you’re carrying, and whether you ever give yourself enough time to recover.
At 63, I pay much more attention to that than I did when I was younger. After more than 40 years of training, I’ve learned that the body is incredibly adaptable, but adaptation can work in both directions. Give it a good training stimulus, adequate nutrition, and enough recovery, and it can become stronger. Continually give it too little sleep, inconsistent training, poor nutrition, and more stress than it can recover from, and it adapts to that environment too.
The changes usually aren’t dramatic at first. You feel a little more tired. Your workouts become less consistent. Your strength declines. Your waist gets a little bigger. Your blood pressure or glucose starts moving in the wrong direction. You need more caffeine to get going and stop waking up feeling rested.
This is something I see with high performers. They can become extremely good at functioning under conditions that aren’t particularly good for them. They can work long hours, travel constantly, sleep five or six hours, skip workouts, and still perform at a high level professionally. Their ability to function becomes evidence that everything must be okay.
But functioning and thriving are two very different things.
Living this way also creates a habit of borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. You stay up late because you need another hour to finish something. The next morning you use caffeine to compensate. You’re too tired to train, so the workout gets pushed back. You grab whatever food is convenient because you’re running behind, and by evening you’re exhausted but still have things to finish.
You made it through the day, but you borrowed a little more capacity from tomorrow. Do that occasionally and it probably doesn’t matter much. Do it for years and eventually there isn’t much reserve left to borrow from.
That reserve becomes increasingly important as we age. Recovery matters more. Maintaining muscle matters more. Cardiovascular fitness, metabolic health, and sleep matter more. You can still accomplish a tremendous amount as you get older, but the goal shouldn’t be proving how much you can tolerate. It should be maintaining enough capacity to continue doing the things you care about.
For me, that means I want to continue working and helping people. I want to train hard, travel, go fishing, spend time with my family, and enjoy the life I’ve spent decades building. I don’t want every available ounce of energy committed before the day even begins.
Training has taught me a lot about this. More work doesn’t automatically produce better results. At some point, additional training simply becomes more work your body has to recover from. The stimulus matters, but so does your ability to adapt to it.
Life works much the same way. Work, training, travel, poor sleep, dieting, family responsibilities, and financial concerns all contribute to the total load your body has to handle. That’s why I’ve become much more interested in managing capacity rather than simply managing time.
You can have room for something on your calendar and still not have the physical or mental capacity for it.
One of the biggest changes I’ve made as I’ve gotten older is that I no longer automatically assume doing more is the answer. Sometimes the answer is doing less, but doing it better. I don’t need a two hour workout if I can create an effective training stimulus in 30 or 40 minutes. I don’t need to accept every opportunity because it’s a good opportunity. And I certainly don’t want my health receiving whatever time and energy happen to be left over.
The biggest cost of perpetual catch up mode may not even be physical. You can become so focused on what comes next that you stop experiencing where you are. You finish one project and immediately think about the next one. You take a vacation and spend half of it answering emails. You sit down with your family while mentally working through tomorrow’s problems.
At some point, it’s worth asking what exactly you’re trying to catch up to. There will always be another email, another project, another problem, and something else you could be doing. That doesn’t mean you have to do all of it.
Longevity isn’t only about how you eat, train, sleep, supplement, or what your bloodwork looks like. It’s also about the environment you create for your body and mind to live in every day.
Maybe the question isn’t, “How can I finally catch up?” Maybe it’s, “What am I continually falling behind on, and why have I designed my life this way?”
Because there’s a point where constantly catching up stops being a scheduling problem and becomes a way of living. I don’t think we should spend decades building a successful life only to discover that we were too busy trying to keep up with it to actually enjoy it.