No good deed goes unpunished

My flight back to New York on Saturday capped out a very difficult travel week. My flight back to San Francisco from Vegas after the conference got delayed and I didn’t get back to bed until late on Thursday. I spent most of the day with family, and then saw some friends on Friday night.

Unfortunately, the travel exhaustion caught up with me on Saturday which ended up being a rough day as I was traveling back to New York. After almost 4 hour delay, I didn’t get home until around 1:30am. It took me longer to fall asleep and I probably slept perhaps 4 hours before having to get up and be a parent. I was absolutely a shell of a human yesterday and I’m still feeling a bit of the effects as I write this Monday morning.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole ordeal was that I really did aim to prioritize rest and recovery on this trip. I am not someone who can sleep everywhere and my philosophy in the past was always to power through. I did not want to feel awful coming home after a long week, so I did my best to get to bed early, exercise, and keep the drinks low.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished as flight delays threw a wrench in all my plans. These situations are incredibly frustrating and stressful. There’s the physical toll on my body which I can overcome, but the mental aspect has always been much harder for me. I feel like a shell of myself and happiness is much harder to come by when I’m running on fumes and sleep deprived.

These temporary physiological dips are not fun, and my brain needs time to catch-up. Despite good sleep last night, it’ll likely take another night of good rest to start to feel normal again. Until then, I’ve been doing my best to stay positive and realize that this will all pass soon enough.