Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

This week was hard to write for a multitude of reasons, the top one being that there is SO MUCH to write about!

There's a quote going around lately that I love.

It goes something like this - "When you're overthinking, write. When you're underthinking, read."

I've been overthinking lately, so I am grateful to have a place to write down some of my thoughts.

This week I write about how I try to calm my brain down by avoiding burnout, controlling my environment, perceiving failure as a good thing, and breathing. As always, please excuse any typos as I threw this together this morning. We go raw and unfiltered here in the Wise Owl Wednesday newsletter.

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here. 

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🦉🧠 Wise Owl Thought(s) of The Week: Mental Health Quickstarter

My day job is becoming increasingly fraught with burnout. I'm an Agile Coach for a healthcare "startup." I put that word in quotes because we aren't really a startup anymore. The company raised Series D funding at the end of 2020 and proceeded to expand from 90 employees to 900. In a year.

When this happens it is common for many employees to start to experience burnout as the new environment, new people, new teams, new systems, and new culture is added on to the normal expectation of daily workload.

So I am starting this off by discussing burnout.

Thing 1 - Burnout

Let's talk about burnout for a bit.

Burnout is a situation where you get into the habit of overworking for a period of time that completely drains you mentally, emotionally, and physically. Sometimes to the point of actual physical health issues.

This happens when everything at work feels both Urgent and Important. This is an impossibility, but for some reason without conscious and mindful attention to how teams operate at work, this kind of mentality will always grow.

The Eisenhower Matrix, created by General Eisenhower showcases a breakdown of the categories work tasks should fall into.

How can we create a sustainable balance at work when everything is in the "do" box? The answer is we can't.

Try to avoid letting this kind of thing happen in both your private life as well as your work life. There is always a top priority, singular. Figure out what it is and focus on that alone.

Take breaks. Take advantage of PTO (paid time off). Take a vacation that is longer than one f*cking week.

Thing 2 - Your Environment matters

The environment you operate in is the most important part of your life.

It's the foundation of everything.

I write so often about taking consistent action, building systems, creating routines, etc. but none of that can work properly unless the environment you're building in can sustain that!

Flowers won't bloom if their environment is wrong.

Take stock of your environment.

• The people
• The distractions
• The food
• The control you have over it

How much of your environment is aiding you?

Do you have a place to retreat and recharge if you start to exhaust yourself?

Are there too many distractions in your environment that will drain your focus and slow you down?

Are there any toxic people, places, or things in your environment that might derail you at a moment's notice?

Find an environment you have control over and forge it into the best environment for YOU.

If you have a family, then claim a single room for yourself.

If you can't do that, then find a place outside of your home that better suits you.

There will always be excuses for why you can't fix or change your environment, but until you do change it for the better, everything you build on top of it will eventually crumble.

Thing 3 - Perceive Failure as good

Humans learn through failure. Trial and error is a cornerstone of our evolution as a species.

Fortunately for you, you live in a day and time where the consequences for failure are so small compared to the rest of human history. So don't let failure weigh you down. Use it as a tool for learning and growth.

Of course, failure in isolation isn't valuable.

We have to analyze why we failed.

• What contributed to the failure?
• What could I have done differently?
• What will I change next time?

One of my life principles is to acquire knowledge and improve. We gain wisdom by pairing knowledge and experience.

Well, you can get a lot of knowledge from your experience, especially the experience of failure.

Thing 4 - Breathe

Ready for a quick anatomy/biology lesson?

Humans need to breathe to survive.

Every breath we take allows us to bring fresh oxygen into our bodies and expel carbon dioxide.

The oxygen in our lungs is snatched up by our blood vessels and circulated throughout our bodies thanks to our hearts.

Our muscles and organs make use of this oxygen for a multitude of reasons.

Each breath you take affects your entire body.

You can use breathing techniques to change what is happening in your body.

The greatest athletes in the world use breathing to help get them into flow.

You can even use specific breathing techniques to fire off your adrenal glands to make taking cold showers less annoying. Seriously. Google it.

I use breathing techniques to calm myself down every day, multiple times a day.

When I play poker I am always having to slow my heart rate during big hands so I don't freak myself out.

So breathe, preferably through your nose.

Learn some breathing techniques to help you do some mental maintenance on yourself throughout the day.

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.5% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter. BlockFi is currently not accepting new customers from the USA for its Crypto Savings Account. Non-US customers are still welcome.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.