I woke up in the middle of the night fighting for my life…in my dream of course kakaka.
In the dream I was surrounded — a slow, relentless horde closing in, and a group of us beating them back with whatever we had in our hands. They didn’t tire. They just kept coming. I remember thinking, inside the dream, how easy it would be to stop fighting and let it end — and how much I did not want that. I wanted to live.
Then I woke up, tired and rattled, looked over at my wife sleeping peacefully beside me, and told myself it was just a dream.
It wasn’t just a dream. It was a status report. And I’d been refusing to read it.
Here’s the thing I’d have told you at the time, if you’d asked how I was doing: I was managing. And I had evidence. I’d been scheduling more exercise. Building in more rest. Outsourcing more of the work. On paper I was handling the load — the renovations, the cashflow, the business and marketing pressure, the people who simply will not think rationally no matter how much patience you spend on them.
So when my own mind staged a survival scenario at 3am, I filed it under “weird dream” and went back to sleep.
What finally got through wasn’t my own assessment. It was someone else’s. Around that same stretch, a person at one of the sites I did locum work for mentioned — almost in passing — that I hadn’t been smiling as much as I used to.
A near-stranger clocked it before I did. That should tell you something about how much my own read on myself was worth.
Here is the uncomfortable principle I took from it, and I now treat it as a rule:
You are not a reliable instrument for measuring your own state.
Think about it.
Everywhere else, you don’t trust an unverified reading — you check the numbers, you get a second source, you confirm before you act. But on the single question of “how am I actually doing,” you accept your own self-report without verification. And your self-report is the most biased data you’ll ever collect, because you have every incentive to grade yourself “fine.” Admitting otherwise means slowing down, asking for help, or facing something you’d rather not. So you score yourself “managing” and keep moving.
Meanwhile the honest instruments are running the whole time, and they don’t share your incentive to lie:
- Your body. Sleep, dreams, the tightness you stopped noticing, the thing you used to enjoy that now feels like a chore. The body files its report whether or not you read it.
- Your behaviour. You stopped smiling. You got short with people. You went quiet. You couldn’t make a small decision you’d normally make in seconds.
- The people around you. The ones who see your face daily — and especially the near-strangers, who have no reason to flatter you and notice the change precisely because they only catch the contrast.
So the build is simple, and it’s the opposite of what I actually did that year. Don’t trust the self-grade. Instrument it externally — and then, this is the part that matters, act on the reading instead of overriding it.
For me now, that means treating physical signals as data, not noise.
It means a small number of people who have standing permission to tell me the truth about how I’m carrying something, and whom I’ve decided in advance to believe over my own “I’m fine.” My wife first. It means that when the instruments disagree with my self-report, the instruments win — because I already know which one of us has a reason to lie.
The lesson I’d drum into the version of me that filed that nightmare under “weird dream”: the danger isn’t the load.
The danger is being the last person to know what the load is doing to you. Everyone around you can already see it. The job is to build a life where you find out at the same time they do — and then to actually do something about it, instead of grinding on and calling that strength.