When you are on the verge of collapse, the point where you find it hard to keep up with all your schedules and commitments and you would like to schedule the whole day and try to see if it is possible... do the mental exercise.

Come on, imagine it. You would take a vacation without traveling, or you would grab a backpack and go around the world. You'd watch your favorite shows all day, or read until your eyes were tired, slipping guiltlessly into several naps throughout the day. You would change your routines, sleeping during the day and dancing at night, or the opposite: you would wake up before dawn every day with the clear horizon of dedicating yourself to your business, those you never had time to undertake before this new phase. You would visit the universes of your favorite people, with no end time, until they would start to blink because they would not have the privilege of changing their routine at will.

Or would you end up building the same life in the long run? The same commitments you worked so hard to get rid of? Maybe you'd do it an octave lower: a little less of this and a little less of that would probably be enough. In that case you wouldn't need to destroy everything, it would be more a matter of dosage.

Now another visualization: you go on the road in your favorite vehicle, car, bicycle, roller skates.... You don't have to arrive at any fixed time, no rush. You can stop to eat something on the way, you can get off to watch the cows, get wet if it rains, or stop until it stops. After a while, you will spontaneously get into your cruising speed, which you will maintain most of the time. You tend to stabilize at a certain speed, because that saves effort: a constant pressure on the accelerator, or a rhythmic movement of the arms and legs, or a breathing and pulsations that trigger a body rhythm. Of course, you can modify that monotony by proposing to go faster or slower, but there is also something economical and easy, pleasant, in surrendering to it. It is an equation that works for you at that precise moment, considering the millions of variables.

How much room is there in your life for you to move at cruising speed?

More on this subject in the free book Viva mais e melhor, by Professor DeRose and in O método DeRose e a gestão do stress, by Joris Marengo.