Field Notes from the Tea Party: On Overwork, Regulation, and Hobbies
You’re getting a taste of our Tea Parties
Every month in Say Yes to Desire, we get on a call and let the conversation go wherever it needs to go. Here’s what came up on our August 2026 call.
For a long time, making something in my business was the only time my brain slowed down. It runs a million miles a minute otherwise, but if I was building something I actually wanted to make, my brain would slow down. That was the closest thing to quiet I knew how to get, and I was getting it from work.
Which is a problem, because it's still work. Once work is the thing that regulates you, it’s hard to work less. So you don't and over time, you lose perspective, and once perspective is gone you can't tell what actually needs doing from what you're doing to feel better.
And just deciding to work less doesn't fix it, because if work is the only place you get relief, taking it away leaves you wound up with nowhere to go.
So you have to build somewhere else to go. Here's the order I did it in.
Get the system in place first. I didn't reclaim a single hobby until I'd built my system. Getting everything out of my brain and into somewhere I could see it is what gave me the feeling of safety and capacity that I needed. Once everything was out of my head I started to feel the bandwidth to embrace hobbies and art.
Move the self-care during the work, not after it. I have a cadence now where I do a little bit of work and then an act of self care. Then a little bit of work again and then another act of self care. (This is the approach I built into the Tender Timer). When I take a break and do my five minutes of face yoga, there's this feeling of, “Oh, there I am.” When I work without stopping, I forget I'm a person, or I slip into hyperfocus and forget I have a body. Taking self-care breaks throughout my work time keeps me connected to myself.
Stop treating it like a reward. A treat is something you “earn” after something. Waiting until the end of the day to focus on self care is exactly why it never happens. By 9pm you're too tired. Instead, see self-care as an act of self-regulation and do it throughout your day.
Make it small enough to survive a bad day. On a day when fifteen minutes of self care or working out feels like too much, do 5 minutes. On a day when 5 minutes is too much, do 1 minute. Keep shrinking it until there's no hangup left in it, no well, if I didn't do it properly then I can't do it at all. 1 minute on a “bad day” keeps the thing alive, and a thing that's still alive in six months beats the perfect version you gave up on in week two.
Find something that doesn't pay you. Something that slows your brain down and isn't work. Mine is crochet. Nobody's waiting on it, there's no launch, it's just my hands doing something while my brain quiets down. I started with children's colouring books because that was all I had capacity for at the time. Next is learning a musical instrument.
When you're wound up and need to come down, what do you reach for?
