Self-Care 101

Do you ever wake up before the sun, not because you are rested, but because your internal engine is already screaming?

It is 1:34 AM.

Then 3:00 AM.

Then 5:00 AM.

By the time the alarm actually rings at 5:50 AM, you have already lived three versions of your morning.

You have fought every argument, solved every crisis, and anticipated every mistake.

You aren't being productive; you are being defensive. You are trying to solve a puzzle that doesn't have any pieces yet.

When your default mode is 'survival', peace doesn't feel like a gift. It feels like a threat.

The Pre-emptive Strike

I stayed in bed for exactly two minutes after my alarm, but my mind was already three hours into the future. I was bracing for impact, running through every conversation I might fail and every task that might slip.

I call it 'preparation', but it feels more like a frantic attempt to negotiate with a day that hasn't even started yet.

It is the heavy price of a brain that views a quiet morning as a security breach.

I went downstairs and turned on the radio. The familiar voices of a Foshan talk show filled the kitchen — a tether to a home thousands of miles away.

I tried to interact, sending a message to the hosts. I'd tried before with my English name, and they never read it.

This time, I used a pseudonym.

When they finally read my message aloud —

Morning! Still supporting you from the UK!

— it felt like a micro-victory.

A small data point confirming that I exist, that I'm seen, even if the app's tracker thought I was still in Guangdong because I'd disabled my location permissions for security.

The Friction of the Small Things

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from over-optimising the mundane.

I saw the bus pull away when I was still 300 metres from the stop.

My first instinct was a primitive, raw urge to sprint.

I MUST catch it at all costs!!

But I forced myself to stop.

I checked my watch: the next one was six minutes away. I was forty minutes early for class. Why was my heart racing?

I sat on the bench and wrote. I am starting to see the delay as a room to breathe rather than a disaster.

When the next bus arrived, the driver stopped me.

My heart started racing again, cortisol started rising.

"Is there wrong with my ticket??"

"the route had changed," he said. "It won't go to Walsall,"

Exhalation. Relief.

I didn't need it to go to Walsall. I just needed to get to school.

But then, the micro-failures started stacking up:

My Bluetooth headphones glitched in the bathroom, swapping my power-up morning radio for late-night ambient tracks.

A social interaction went sideways.

A peer said "Thank you," and my brain short-circuited. I replied,

"You too."

I spent the next three minutes internally demanding to know why I'd said that.

These aren't "problems." They are frictions.

But when you are operating on a hair-trigger, every "You too" and every missed bus feels like a crack in the armour.

From Survival to Observation

The shift happened during a "water" class — the kind of lecture where the content is filler and the air is heavy with student apathy.

Instead of letting the stagnation frustrate me, I started reading.

I stumbled upon an article about "Slow Marketing" — the idea of building a "quiet shop" rather than a "neon sign."

It mirrored another piece I read about how "strength" isn't about the absence of noise, but the ability to stay steady when the noise is at its peak.

I realised I had been treating my life like a high-speed marketing campaign — always "on," always optimised, always loud.

When a classmate lashed out at me in the group chat, accusing me of "snitching" to the teacher, my old system would have fired back instantly. I felt the heat in my chest.

But I waited. I didn't reply until I had the facts.

When I finally did, it wasn't an attack; it was a correction. The tension evaporated because I refused to fuel it.

True clarity doesn't feel like a software upgrade; it feels like exhaling.

By the afternoon, the "exam" we were all panicking about turned out to be a minor check-in. The "impossible" 70% pass mark was actually a manageable 50%.

The teacher had been playing a bit of a joke, framing a routine task as a crisis.

I watched my classmates relax, and for the first time in a long time, I let myself join them.

I even spent my lunch hour walking seven flights of stairs with new acquaintances, just to help them find a deck of uno.

We didn't even find the cards. We just walked and talked.

The "old me" would have called that a waste of time.

The "current me" realised it was the only part of the day where I wasn't running away from a ghost, where I can finally be seventeen-years-old boy, where I can actually just be me.

To anyone else who is also stressed out..

The 2-Minute Pre-play

Mentally rehearsing your day isn't a sign of weakness; it's a tool for lowering the "activation energy" of a difficult morning.

Just don't let the rehearsal become the performance.

Delay as Data

When the bus leaves without you, it isn't a personal slight from the universe.

It is a 6-minute window to breathe, write, or simply exist without a destination.

The "You Too" Moment

Forgive yourself for the small social glitches. Everyone else is too busy worrying about their own "You too" moments to remember yours for more than ten seconds.

Remember that even sometime machines can glitch too.

Build the Shelter, Not the Sign

True competence is quiet.

You don't need to prove you're the smartest in the room; you just need to be the one who doesn't break when the software breaks.

Permission to be "Inefficient"

Walking seven flights of stairs for a deck of cards you don't find isn't a failure of optimisation.

It's a success in being human.

We are all just trying to configure our systems as we go.

Some days the code is clean. Some days, we're just sitting on a bus, listening to the wrong music, and realising that we're still going to make it to the destination anyway.

Date of Reflection: 26 February 2026

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