Have you ever thought your whole system was just off the rails but then actually it was all ok?

This is going to be a little bit of a weird post and I guess I’m wondering if anyone else’s brain plays tricks on them like this.

Before starting my doctorate, I crunched a lot of numbers.

I made a best possible outcome plan – full scholarship (lol, that didn’t happen).

A this would be very doable and awfully nice plan – some private scholarships and family help (partially yes, this happened a bit).

And a “can we cash flow this if we had to pay every penny?” plan (which – yes, I could, though fortunately I’m not paying every penny).

So I didn’t go into this project blindly, but changing some of my systems – including scaling back some savings and investing goals I have generally had a very easy time hitting over the last several years – has made me sort of anxious.

Changing topics a little bit here – I’ve often noticed fitness and money follow a lot of the same patterns for me.

If you’ve been reading my ramblings for a while, you know that midway through the pandemic I started eating a lot better and exercising and managed to get rid of the early pandemic weight I gained. And then a fair amount of weight I had gained through the first half of my thirties.

I developed some pretty good eating and exercising habits – including tracking (questionably a good habit for some because that can be totally eating disorder triggering for many, but for me it seemed to be a useful tool).

Then I uprooted my life, moved to a foreign country, and spent all my time working online or sitting somewhere reading. Or – on really exciting days – attending workshops and seminars.

The theme here was sitting.

And along with the stress of the changes, my eating habits went out the window. I went for the quickest, easiest choices and also all my favorite lower cal foods were not easy to replace over here.

Maybe a good thing – some of the stuff we’re allowed to put in our food in the States is probably illegal in the rest of the world for a reason. Just a guess though, I don’t know a ton about it.

Anyway, it was a fairly lovely summer of not paying any attention to what I was eating or drinking, my number of steps or hours of swimming. It was also unreasonably hot here and I found myself wearing super loose clothes all the time – thus depriving myself of the usually early warning system of weight gain.

And then one day I was sitting at my computer for hour 8,000 and it got chilly out. And I pulled on a pair of pajama pants and thought “I’m going to have to put on real pants soon.”

I also just felt sluggish and off and like I’ve been eating garbage for months.

And I straight up panicked and refused to try on my jeans.

See, I have one pair of jeans that I felt like I had finally made it when I fit into that size in that brand (because the variety of sizes within a “size” is a joke). I thought, there’s no way at all they will fit. And I will be heartbroken.

So I decided I needed to join the gym and get back into my swimming routine. And eat better. I cracked open MyFitnessPal and it chided me for breaking my like 500 days streak having now not opened it for 4 months.

I dragged a watermelon back to my flat and chopped it up. I mourned the fact that there’s not SkinnyPop in the UK. I chopped up a cucumber I didn’t really want to eat.

I made myself go swim for a week straight and nearly had a nervous breakdown because I literally did not have the time to make this work in my schedule between school and work.

And usually I don’t love getting into the pool but once I’m in swimming is lovely and meditative and feels good.

It didn’t, friends. All I could think about was the massive amount of crap I had to do when I got home and how was I possibly going to squeeze it all in now.

Especially since a proper night’s sleep is really a fairly major tool for weight loss (and happiness. And sanity).

So I finally ordered a scale. Because I an a human who tracks things. I thought, we just have to face the music. Get back on track.

Can you guess how much weight chubby, unhealthy me had gained since I moved to the UK, tracking nothing?

4 pounds.

FOUR POUNDS.

And those stupid jeans slid right on.

I made my life totally miserable for like three weeks for no reason at all.

I mean, I should work more fruit and veg into my diet and I should walk a little more often than taking the bus.

But the wheels have not totally fallen off.

And I realized that so much of that mentality also applies to how I’ve been feeling about money just because everything has changed so much this year.

Sometimes knowing the state of things can indicate that while you’re not in the perfect balance in that vertical that you might want to be, maybe it’s not as wildly off kilter as you feared.

So the pool can wait till life slows down a little more and I can actually enjoy those laps.

And the investments can wait, because even though time and compound interest are magic, you also only get so much time to live. And I have been on top of that vertical for years. Scaling back for 4 years is ok.

Does anyone else absolutely convince themselves that things have gone wildly wrong – when you have no actual proof that they have?

Maybe it’s just me, but if it’s not, you’re not alone.