In the last post I wrote about why we wait for a crisis before we look at the mind. About how previous generations survived on willpower and we inherited their silence as a template. About how the car gets serviced and the mind gets nothing until it breaks.
Today I invite you to read a story. The name is changed, but the archetype is many of us.
Meet Arjun.
I have met many Arjuns. Over coffee, in conferences, at dinner parties, in close family circles, and in my neurofeedback practice.
Arjun had built something real. Thirty-eight. Co-founder. 140 people on payroll, investors had bet on him twice and kept betting. He could read a boardroom in thirty seconds, who held the real power, where the resistance was, which objection was genuine and which was just posturing. He also had three drinks most evenings to come down from the day. Specific brand, specific number of ice cubes, specific chair. His body had learned to expect it by 9pm. Without it, sleep took two hours to arrive. With it, he woke slightly foggy. Seven, eight hours of sleep most nights but not quite rejuvenated. Nothing that a coffee could not fix. He did not think of this as a problem. He thought of it as daily drill.
You might recognise some version of this. Maybe not the drinks. Maybe it is the golf every Sunday, not because you love golf, but because two hours on the course is the only place the phone stays in the bag. Maybe it is the meditation retreat you book once a year, knowing the calm will last about eleven days before the city reassembles itself around you. Maybe it is Netflix after the kids are asleep, not because you want to watch anything in particular, but because the blue light and the noise fills the space where your own thoughts would otherwise be. Maybe it is two drinks at the club, the familiar faces, the easy conversation, enough to take the edge off without anyone asking what the edge actually is.
None of these are wrong. All of them are intelligent.
And all of them are the mind managing, rather than the mind actually recovering.
There is a difference.
Managing means getting through the day and the evening and the week without anything breaking. Recovering means actually returning to baseline, to a state where the nervous system is not quietly carrying the accumulated weight of everything that came before.
Most high-functioning people are exceptionally good at managing. They have built entire lives, careers, routines around it. The golf, the retreat, the drinks, the Netflix, these are the infrastructure of management.
What they have not built is recovery.
At a routine checkup Arjun’s doctor noted borderline blood sugar, slightly elevated liver enzymes, and blood pressure sitting at the higher end of normal.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing that required immediate action. The kind of report that gets filed away with a note to watch it.
His doctor mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that chronic stress loads can drive all three. Arjun nodded. But the numbers in his head, quarterly growth, burn rate, market share, felt far more real than the vague concept of stress.
Said what most of us say in that moment. We all have that, doc. A little bit of stress is normal, right?
His doctor smiled. Did not disagree. Mentioned a colleague who did stress profiling. Gives you an accurate picture of how much stress the nervous system is actually holding. Worth looking at, he said, almost as an aside.
Arjun took the number, put it in his phone, fully intending to forget about it.
But the comment stayed with him on the drive home. Not because it alarmed him. More like an unskippable YouTube ad, appearing between thoughts, gone before he could fully address it, returning at the next gap. He had read something recently about heart attacks in men in their early forties. The numbers in India were going up. He remembered the statistic clearly because he had filed it under relevant but not urgent. The category where most things about his own health lived.
But I do not do anything bad, he thought. Not really. Last year he had gone to a mindfulness retreat. Three days, no phones, breathing exercises, the whole thing. He had come back genuinely lighter. He meditated most mornings, not long, ten minutes sometimes, less on bad days, but the intention was there. He had a gym membership he used. Not every day but enough. A whiskey occasionally was not a problem. One drink to help sleep on certain nights was not a habit, it was just practical. Everyone did something to come down. What more can a person do.
The drive was an hour. These drives had become, over the years, the time he took stock. No calls, no meetings, just the car and the city slowly thinning around him. He checked his phone at a red light. Two missed calls from his mother. None from his spouse. They had argued two days ago. Not a big thing, or so he had told himself. She had raised something, the same something she had been raising in different forms for months, and he had listened and explained and she had gone quiet in the particular way she had learned to go quiet. Not angry. Just absent. She had grown distant. He knew it. He kept meaning to address it properly, when things were slightly less busy, when he had more bandwidth, when the quarter closed. Will she leave? The thought arrived without warning, the way those thoughts do. Not as a question he was asking. As a question that was already there, waiting for a gap in the traffic.
He put the phone face down on the seat. He remembered a colleague who had gone to counselling last year. Someone had mentioned it in passing at a team offsite. He had nodded at the time, said nothing.
Is this when people go? Should he… He laughed even before the thought completed itself. Come on. What would talking change? He knew the patterns. He had read the books, understood the frameworks, could probably name what was happening in his marriage better than most therapists half his age with their fresh degrees and their worksheets. Self-awareness was not his problem. He had too much of it, if anything. And therapy. The talking kind. Sitting in a room explaining your childhood to a stranger. He had colleagues who had tried it, one had been going for three years and was still going. Still processing. Still arriving at insights that seemed to lead to more insights. Where did it end? Besides, he did not feel it was necessary. Private matters stayed private. He did not trust easily and anyhow in his experience nothing much came of it. Some things you handled yourself. That was just how it was.
His phone buzzed. A Slack notification. He looked. His thumb hovered over the number for a moment. Then he put the phone in his bag.
Somewhere on that drive he had started doing what he always did with a problem that would not resolve. Breaking it down. Work: on it. Health: managing better than most of his peers. Home: obviously. He was doing what was required of him. Shared the household load also sometimes. Then a bike rider cut him off without warning. He hit the brakes hard. Cursed out loud.
So, what is the missing piece?
I am not writing this to tell you to take therapy or not take therapy. And if therapy as a word is too loaded, call it something else. A coach. A mentor. A thinking partner. Someone trained to see what you cannot see from inside your own game.
I am saying this: keep your tools sharp. For most of us the primary tool of trade is the mind. Sharp not just for today, not just for this quarter, but optimised for the long run. We live in a time where gadgets track thousands of data points. Sleep cycles, heart rate, blood oxygen, step counts. Numbers are useful. But numbers alone do not create change. Better feedback loops do.
The avalanche does not announce itself. A wrong accident. A health number that is no longer borderline. A spouse who stops trying. A body that has been managed for so long it simply stops cooperating.
Kafka wrote a story about a man named Gregor Samsa who woke up one morning transformed into something unrecognisable. His family had depended entirely on his functioning. The moment he could not function, everything, the love, the warmth, the belonging he had assumed was solid, revealed itself to be far more fragile than he had known. We do not need a metamorphosis to get the message.
As for Arjun, he was feeling something he could not quite name. The fights drained him. Not emotionally, he had managed that. Practically. Three, four hours to get his head back to work afterwards. The mental residue of it sitting on everything. He could not afford to lose that kind of time consistently, not with the quarter he was having.
And there was something else.
A missing piece he kept reaching for and not finding. He knew he was stressed. Everyone was stressed. But how do they actually measure it? Is it another HRV tracker? Another sleep score? He was intrigued enough to find out. He called to discover.
Need met curiosity.
He went. He stayed because of what the map showed him.
That is a story for another post.
If something in this resonated, you know where to find me. shunyaneurofeedback.com
Chetna Punia
Counselling Psychologist, Biomedical Engineer, Neurofeedback Specialist
Auroville · Delhi · Remote
This is Part 2, If you missed Part 1, start here: The Mind Needs Maintenance Too
#HighPerformance #MindMaintenance #NervousSystem #Neurofeedback #ShunyaNeurofeedback
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