Breaker Box
Think of your personal limits as electrical circuit breakers.
These limits could be physical limits (e.g., physical exhaustion), psychological limits (e.g., how much social interaction you can take as an introvert), or boundaries you’ve defined (e.g., what is or isn’t acceptable to you).
In your Project Quartz journal, identify your most important limits.
Then, consider the humble circuit breaker. The purpose of a circuit breaker is to shut off power to the system in case of a fault to avoid burning the whole house down. Several qualities of breakers are useful to consider in relation to your personal limits:
Breakers are precisely sized to protect the circuits they’re connected to. In other words, they are designed to break before the whole system does. Thinking about the personal limits you wrote down, are your “breakers” appropriately sized to prevent system meltdown? If not, how can you resize them to do so?
Good home design considers the kind of load that will likely be applied to each circuit so that, ideally, the circuit breakers won’t be regularly tripped. How can you design your life to avoid needing to rely on your “breakers”? (Consider that the general rule of thumb in circuit design is to avoid continuously applying more than 80% of the rated load to a circuit breaker, since the goal is staying away from the limit rather than continually playing chicken with it.)
Unfortunately, your limits don’t automatically act like circuit breakers. You are your own circuit breaker, and will need to “trip the breaker” yourself. For each of your limits, identify what you will do to “trip the breaker” when your limit has been reached in order to protect the whole house (i.e., you!). Will you take a nap? Say goodbye and head home? Call someone out on their BS?
After the breaker is tripped—and as long as the original fault has been addressed—the switch can be flipped to turn the system back on. Thinking about your personal limits, how can you “address the fault” and “flip the switch,” to get yourself back to normal operation? Will you use some self-care tools? Re-evalaute your calendar for the next week? Have a heart-to-heart with someone about your boundaries going forward?