Be a Body, Not a Project

That’s where your life is waiting.

There seems to be a universal truth to the fact that there always comes a season when life starts to feel mechanical — when the days all seem to blur together or when your to-do list is the only thing that tells you who you are. You wake up, open your phone, check your calendar, your social media, and move through tasks like clockwork. You’re productive, reliable, efficient — everything the world rewards.

And yet, you feel like you’re missing something you can’t exactly pin-point.

That feeling, that subtle ache of disconnection from self, is usually a sign that you’ve started living more from your head than your actual body. Your mind is busy managing, analyzing, optimizing, but your body? It’s asking you, maybe even begging you, to come home.

I think we can all agree that we live in a world that confuses efficiency with vitality. We track our sleep, measure our movement, time out our meals. Even our rest has metrics now — our heart rate variability, our screen-time reports, our “recovery scores” etc.

Somewhere along the way, we made living into a series of technological dashboards.

It’s not that those things are bad per se — awareness can be extremely helpful — but they can trick us into thinking the point of being human is to improve being human.

And that’s where the exhaustion creeps in.

Because when everything becomes a project — your body, your home, your relationships, your healing — you forget what it feels like to just exist inside of something without trying to make it better.

When life gets mechanical, you start to lose the small sensations that tether you to yourself. You drink coffee, but you don’t actually taste it. You walk, but your eyes are on your phone. You eat lunch, but you fill the silence with a podcast about god knows what.

It’s subtle, but it’s real, and that feeling of being here begins to fade.

And the irony is that you can be doing everything “right” and still feel off. Because “right” by society’s standards is often the opposite of what your body actually needs.

When life feels like that.. mechanical, colorless.. the way back is rarely this grand gesture of a fix. To be honest, what I’ve found is that it’s usually something pretty pointless. So very… human.

Like walking without checking the apps to see how many steps you achieved. Standing at a checkout line without pulling out your phone. Cooking something slow and methodical — not because it’s healthy, but because it smells good and feels good to be doing it. Doing the dishes and actually focusing on the water, the soap, the ceramic between your hands. Calling someone you love and actually sitting still, listening with complete presence.

Purpose has its place, but aliveness lives in the things that serve no agenda. Those are the moments that remind you that you’re not a machine. You’re not here to be optimized. You’re here to experience.

So, how do we come back to ourselves then? Here are a few things in my own tool-kit that I’ve found helpful to regain my humanness.