The Productive Pessimist

  I don't usually write personal accounts. That's not what The Productive Pessimist  is about, I tell myself. Problems are universal. Problems don't have names. We're here, as a company, to solve anyone's  problems. But The Productive Pessimist also claims to provide the solution by living through  the problems.  We talk about how our lived experience informs and complements our professional expertise.  Which means, sometimes, personal accounts are exactly  what The Productive Pessimist is about. The recent EHRC legislation around access to "single sex" spaces is deeply personal. So is Kathleen Stock's recent musing on "why are  so many young people using walking sticks, hmmm?" I won't be linking to either of them. They'll come up easily enough on a Google search. I'll be speaking on both of them, because of both of them bring up problems for businesses, and both of them are deeply, brutally personal. The advisory in the title isn...

  Every article that comes up when you search "How to recover from burnout" is either just the usual bare-minimum basic "human life maintenance" of "oooohhh, get enough sleep! Eat fruit and veggies! Exercise! Be outside! THERAPEEEEE!!!!" - okay, tell the "get enough sleep" to my insomnia.  I go to bed around 10pm routinely. I don't scroll my phone or bop about on my laptop when I'm settling to sleep. I know I need to have background noise, so I set that up before I settle down. I take half an hour before I start to try to sleep, I check in with whether I need more/fewer blankets, or if I need the window open.  I sleep alone (I'm married, my wife and I have very contradicting sleep needs.) I'm a grown adult without food sensitivities or allergy triggers - I eat fresh fruit and vegetables as a routine, daily thing.  Along with knowing my body's tolerance for protein (I have high protein needs owing to multiple physical health ch...