Life doesn't get easier. Hopefully you get better at carrying it.

We talk endlessly about productivity on LinkedIn.

We talk much less about what allows people to stay productive without making themselves miserable.

Over the past year, boxing has become one of those things for me.

Somewhere for the stress to go

I didn’t start because I particularly wanted to become a boxer. I think I needed somewhere for the stress to go.

Full-time work. Family. Building Editorial Intelligence. Thinking about AI probably more than is healthy.

And underneath that, the ordinary weight of being an adult. Visa applications with a deadline and a fee attached. Health. Money. The family responsibilities that don’t pause because you happen to be having a busy quarter. Some of the past year has been considerably harder than any of that, in ways I’m not going to write about here.

There is only so much of it you can solve by thinking harder.

When I’m hitting a heavy bag, I’m not thinking about work. I’m thinking about my feet. My hands. My breathing. The next punch. And, when I’m training outside in Thailand, occasionally wondering why I have voluntarily chosen to do this in that heat.

It clears something out.

Yoga slows me down. Boxing lets something out.

I used to get a different version of this from the yoga and meditation studio I went to in London, and I was genuinely disappointed when it closed. I still do yoga at home.

Yoga slows me down. Boxing lets something out. Football gives me something else again. I probably need all of them.

And your outlet doesn’t have to be boxing. Maybe it’s gaming. Maybe it’s watching television. Music, cooking, walking, gardening, going to the pub with your mates. Whatever genuinely takes you somewhere else for a while.

Not everything has to be optimised

I’ve increasingly come to think we don’t talk enough about this when we talk about work.

Wellbeing isn’t something that happens in a separate compartment from your career. How you’re coping outside work affects how you think, concentrate, communicate and behave inside it.

LinkedIn has a habit of turning even this into optimisation. Meditate to become more productive. Exercise to improve performance. Sleep so you can work harder tomorrow.

I’ve never been particularly attracted to that tech-founder idea of life where relentless work becomes evidence that you’re serious. You only get one life. Look after yourself because you’re a person, not because it might increase your output by 8%.

The funny thing is that the productivity tends to follow anyway.

Over the past year I’m better at focusing at work. I’m better at switching off from it. I’m more present with my family. And I’ve had the energy to build Editorial Intelligence alongside a full-time job without feeling as though I’ve simply added another shift.

I’ve also coped with some things that have been much harder than anything happening on a laptop.

Life doesn’t necessarily get easier

There’s an idea I remember from the film Before Sunset that has stayed with me. The problems don’t necessarily get easier as you get older. What can change is that you accumulate enough experience and enough resilience to get better at carrying them.

That’s what I think I’m actually trying to build. Not a perfectly optimised life where nothing difficult happens. A life with enough around it, family and interests and exercise and perspective, to absorb the hard periods without letting them take everything else with them.

For me, boxing has become part of that.

Sometimes you can’t think your way out of the stress. Sometimes you need to put the gloves on and give it somewhere to go.