NOTHING NADA ZERO ZILCH

THE SCIENCE-BACKED, THERAPIST-APPROVED CASE FOR DOING WAY LESS AND ENDING UP BETTER THAN EVER.

- PAUL KIX

IT BEGINS AT 4AM on a Saturday, a throbbing and unceasing pain behind my left temple. I try to go back to sleep but can't the second missed clue-and around 6am I face another day of weekend work.

It's the autumn of 2020 and I'm at risk of losing my job at ESPN. Two decades of outworking others-by writing books and hosting a podcast, among other pursuits-and of taking pride in friends saying, "How do you do it all?" has convinced me I must do even more now. I should find solace in all the skills I've developed to support my wife, Sonya; our three kids and my mother-in-law, who moved in when she retired. I don't.

By midday, I can't focus and have to lie down. Soon I'm hyperventilating as searing pain spreads to my stomach and then to my fingers and toes, suddenly inflamed and too sensitive to touch anything. At the ER, Sonya speaks for me while I undergo a CAT scan that thankfully rules out abrain aneurysm.

The bad news, the neurologist says, is that he's seeing more guys like me, for whom the pandemic accentuated stress that goes ignored until their anxiety levels rise so high that they double over.

Seventy-seven percent of us say we're way more stressed now, according to a Cleveland Clinic survey. Fifty-nine percent say the Covidquarantine did more damage to our mental health than the 2008 economic crisis. Yet 66 percent of us live out the old-line mores of masculinity and rarely discuss the pain and the impact the pandemic has had on our mental health.

"And so you end up here," the neurologist says. His advice? Don't come back.

The stress I'm feeling-I decide I have to do something about it.

LESSON 1:
IDENTIFY WHEN NOT TO HUSTLE

I have to do nothing. That's what I settle on with my therapist: incorporate idleness into my day. "Rest will relax you," he says. Then a few weeks later, I get a call from my boss with an executive from HR on the line and they lay me off.