Three weeks ago my daughter left to spend part of the summer with her dad, and I did what I apparently always do when the house goes quiet. I filled every hour with work. Fifty hour weeks, then more. The morning walk went first, then the exercise, then the people. I ate at my desk. I told myself I would stop at nine and looked up at 12am.
I want to be clear that I love this work. That is what makes it dangerous. People don’t tend to spiral on things they hate.
Somewhere in week two I caught a glimpse of what substance addiction might feel like from the inside: knowing better, watching yourself do it anyway. Willpower simply stopped working. And willpower was all I had brought with me, because every structure that usually holds me, the school run and the shared meals, all the small accountabilities of family life, had left for the summer with my daughter.
The test that had my number.
I knew what was happening while it was happening, and that is the strange gift in this story. Three years ago I took a DNA test through LifecodeGx, which looks at the gene variants that shape how your body handles neurotransmitters among other things. Reader, it had my number.
I carry variants that make me slow at breaking down dopamine and adrenaline, the exciting ones. They linger in me longer than they are designed to. And I am not efficient at making GABA, the calming neurotransmitter, the one that tells the nervous system the show is over.
Put those together and you get a sensitive, quick to rev nervous system. Hyperactive. Impatient. Sleep that startles at nothing. A person who cannot sit and read a book on a Sunday afternoon. A person who overdoes everything, even the good things.
Reading that page, three years ago now, was a proper Aha moment. The pattern I had spent years judging as a character flaw has an anatomy. My work obsession is not my fault. It is my genes’.
Five per cent.
Except that is not where it ends, and the test report says so itself. Genes set tendencies, not destinies. Five per cent nature, ninety five per cent what you do with it, as the saying goes.
My July proved the saying in both directions. Three years of knowing my wiring had given me time to build a scaffolding of supports around it: fewer stimulants, with green tea in place of coffee (half the caffeine or less, and some L-theanine, which softens how the caffeine lands). No more drastic fasting, and breakfast on the anxious days. Ten minutes of stretching and meditation, daily. Regular bedtimes. And learning to notice the wind-up early, the “here we go again”, and course-correcting before it gathers speed.
When the scaffolding stands, I am well. The moment my daughter left, half of it quietly came down, and the wiring did exactly what wiring does. It was predictable. I could almost have written the script in advance.
What saved me.
A long weekend in the countryside, booked months earlier, in a place with no phone signal. It took two full days for my system to stop spinning. Two more to actually rest. If that weekend had not been in the diary, I would have worked through it, and I know that because I had already worked through every weekend it was not.
That is worth sitting with. The thing that rescued me was a decision made by a calmer, earlier version of me, on behalf of the one who would need it.
Fault and responsibility.
So here is where I have landed, and it applies well beyond work.
Know yourself. A test can shortcut the process, and mine gave me a map I have now been using for three years, but honest self-observation gets you most of the way there without one. Which situations reliably tip you, and what goes missing just before you fall?
And then, the distinction that matters. When you fall off, the falling may genuinely not be your fault. Wiring is wiring. But planning the journey, choosing the right track for the horse you actually are, packing the right gear, booking the rescue weekend before you need it: that part is your responsibility. Nobody else can do it because nobody can know you as intimately as yourself.
Horses for courses. Or rather, courses for horses.
If the difference between willpower and structure rings true for you, Sandrine Fuentes, the mindset coach and hypnotherapist I work with, and I are giving a free evening on Zoom on Sunday 13 September at 7pm UK, Why your reset hasn’t worked, on why effort was never the missing piece and what your body is actually asking for instead. It leads into the autumn Detox of Becoming, the guided reset we hold together at the September equinox, 20 September to 10 October, a built structure of exactly the kind this letter is about.
And if this is the kind of thinking you want more of, you can subscribe to Staying au Fay — my monthly newsletter with practices and recipes.