TGIM: When to White-Knuckle or Wisen-Up

Welcome back to TGIM! As life goes, it’s just one of those weeks where I’ve been staying up too late working on final group projects for school, working overtime at the hospital, and then when I go to write this newsletter Google Drive is not working. But that’s life and sometimes it just makes you laugh.

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tl;dr You can white-knuckle your way through short-term changes but you need to wisen up to make a difference in the long term.

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Since it’s been a challenging week (which I’m sure you’ve all experienced before or maybe are experiencing now), I thought we could do a quick crash course on when it’s helpful to white-knuckle your way through something versus when it’s time to wisen up.

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Trying to grit your teeth through to survive something short-term has to be done sometimes. I’m usually a seven-hours-a-night sleep kind of person but this week I’ve been cutting myself short to get some assignments done. Is it ideal? Certainly not. But will I be able to survive a few days and make sure all of my work is done? Yes.

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Similarly, if you are trying to muscle your way through a tough workout or finish your vegetables that you’re not enjoying that much, you can usually get it done. You can deal with the discomfort for the short term because it’s a short tunnel with the light at the end of it in sight.

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You’ve gotten through bad workdays, and awkward social events, passed challenging tests, and summited high peaks before. It’s knowing that the pain and suffering is for a short period of time before the reward. It can be helpful in survival situations or during finals week. It’s part of building “grit” that helps us persevere.

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But sometimes people try to muscle their way through situations that are not meant to be muscled through. For example, did you ever try losing weight just by depriving yourself of any flavor or doing insane, unsustainable workouts? I mean who hasn’t really. You do well when you can deal with the short-term discomfort and then you come to your breaking point.

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The breaking point occurs when the tunnel is much longer than you anticipated and the light is simply not bright enough to keep you moving forward. You embark on a journey too long to simply use grit to endure it. Then your options are to wisen up or fail.

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Situations when you need to wisen up instead are any obligations for the long term. Losing weight (and keeping it off) is maybe the biggest elephant in the room for this. Instead of crash dieting and exercising or participating in crazy detoxes and other nonsense, we can better learn how to develop sustainable habits and lifestyle changes. If we can learn more about how to listen to our bodies we don’t have to white knuckle our way through to lose weight, we instead develop better practices to do so.

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Any changes that you want to make that will be relevant for more than a couple of weeks in your life are worth taking a smarter approach rather than the brash and bold approach. As humans, white-knuckling our way through something only lasts for so long before we lose steam. Instead of losing steam from putting our all into nothing, we should learn how to adjust our approach so we can improve.

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If you got any value from this, shoot me an email and let me know why! TGIM is meant to provide useful strategies for becoming the best version of ourselves, so if you tell me what is useful we can focus on more of that.

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My podcast recommendation is from The Ed Mylett Show, “How Successful People Fulfill Their Full Potential.” I know each of you reading TGIM is a successful person so check out how to cultivate a mindset for continuous improvement and success.

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With that, I am off to sleep! For those of you catching up on this Tuesday morning (or later), make it a wonderful day. Try to consider where in your life you’re trying to white knuckle your way through something and where you probably need to wisen up.

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Until next time,
Shannon