Time to Recharge

I am an inherently introverted person and often feel the need to shut my brain and body down after social interactions whether they be personal or professional occurrences. After these events, I enter into such a state that I do not want to be or interact with any person, perform any of my responsibilities or do anything at all productive. I just want to be left by myself to recover, read a book, roam around the internet or consume content mindlessly with no apparent destination in mind. I just want to be. I just want to exist without it amounting to anything but getting my bearings together. I call this ‘time to recharge’.

As a full-time white-collar employee, I need this time to recharge almost after every workday as well as the entire weekends. My job as a consultant requires me to constantly be in and out of meetings with clients and colleagues so that I am on top of my job and can satisfy the needs of everyone. Thankfully, eight hours a day is usually more than enough for me to get through my responsibilities in a normal workday, but it means that at the end of every workday I am left overstimulated, exhausted, and overworked. Therefore, when the bell rings and the work is done for the day, I feel like throwing away my laptop, phone or anything else related to work, and go off into the sunset. I can do so to a certain extent because I am not that important of an employee to dedicate my evenings and weekends to work, most of the time. However, as I keep climbing the corporate ladder and become more important, the equilibrium shifts towards working more and more from finding time to recharge. It is as if more the money I earn, the experience I gain and the responsibilities I take result in me sacrificing from my time to recharge just to keep on top of things. This is just my experience, and I am one of the lucky ones since I do not work overtime more often than not. Unfortunately, the rest of the people in the business world do not share my luck. Most of them have to constantly work overtime and sacrifice their free time just to catch up on work; resulting in no time to recharge.

I know others do not have time to recharge because even I, with relatively decent working conditions, cannot find enough time to recharge. Since humans are social animals and I am one of them, I need regular social interactions to keep myself satisfied; I need to participate in social gatherings when I am off work. In other words, even when I find the time to recharge after work, I need to allocate it to socializing instead of recharging, so I push myself to do so. However, even if the event is one in which I get to be with my favorite people in the world, my mind and body cannot take it for too long, and soon after the event starts, the feelings of overstimulation and exhaustion return -like how it happens when a workday ends. Then, even though I want to keep socializing I freeze up and blend into the background while others around me keep at it. It is as if I enter standby mode and wait unmoving until the event ends. Some sort of a pseudo time to recharge. Then, when I finally get home, I am left with no energy to do anything whatsoever, and even though what I need is time to recharge, there is no time left in the day, so all I can do is go to sleep in preparation for the next day, without any time to recharge.

Obviously, I have to keep hustling at work to make money as well as to climb the corporate ladder and I have to keep socializing to satisfy my needs, but I also have to find enough time to recharge. Others might do with less time to recharge than me, but I require much more of it to function. I see my time to recharge as the reason why I am who I am today because I use it not only to get my bearings after working or socializing but also to better myself.  I read, write, watch, learn or just sit idly. The gist is, my time to recharge is when I do not have to adhere to the standards or expectations of others and everything I do in this time is for myself and myself alone. This way, even if I sit idly, I know that I need it and I will be better off with it instead of forcing myself to perform what others expect of me. At first, this line of thought was hard for me to accept, I kept feeling bad because I could have been working or socializing instead of sitting idly, but when I accepted it I found the peace and freedom to do -or not do- what is necessary for my body and mind in my times of recharge.

Unfortunately, tipping the scales heavily towards time to recharge via taking time away from work and socializing does not work either. When an individual spends much more time than necessary in their time to recharge, this creates some sort of a comfort zone or a bubble where they are safe from outside influences, and this sometimes results in the individual not wanting to step out of this zone, almost at all if possible. Because when they step out of it they will enter the real world where they will have to face their fears and anxieties eventually. Life is bigger than just sitting on a couch, but one also should not forget that life also entails sometimes sitting on the couch as well as getting off the couch is much easier after 5 minutes compared to 5 hours. Therefore, there has to be some way to balance working, socializing, and recharging, and since this balance is different for every individual, it is their job to figure it out.