The Three Dials

I’ve been tired. Not the kind you fix with sleep — the kind where everything feels like effort.

For ages I figured I just needed to push through. Work harder. Be more disciplined. The usual.

But something shifted recently. I started seeing myself differently. Not as one engine running at one speed, but as three separate dials: Spirit, Mind, and Body.

And when I actually looked at where those dials were sitting?

Spirit: 100%. All fire, all the time.
Mind: 100%. But in emergency mode — always scanning, always preparing for the next thing.
Body: Basically zero.

No wonder I was wobbling.


My first thought was to turn the spirit down. Let the fire burn lower. Find some calm.

Terrible idea.

I felt flat. Depressed. Like I’d turned off something that was actually keeping me going.

Turns out you don’t fix the imbalance by dimming what’s working. You fix it by bringing up what you’ve been ignoring.

I went for a ride yesterday. Nothing heroic, just got out and moved. Felt good. Really good. Not because I achieved anything — just because the body finally got some attention.


That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The body wasn’t asking for punishment or some brutal training regime. It was just asking to be included. Fed. Encouraged. Given the same attention I throw at ideas and projects and plans.

When one dial sits at zero while the others run hot, the whole system wobbles. You feel it as exhaustion, or restlessness, or that weird flatness where nothing quite lands.

The fix isn’t to stop. It’s to notice which dial has gone cold.


I’m not saying I’ve got this sorted. I’m still figuring out what balance actually looks like — 70 here, 55 there, whatever. The numbers don’t matter.

What matters is checking the dashboard occasionally. Noticing when something’s been neglected.

And then doing something small about it.

Not a revolution. Just a ride.