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You’re not exhausted from what you did today. You’re exhausted from everything you haven’t decided.
On the morning of April 6, 2007, Arianna Huffington went on CNN to do a news segment, came home, and sat down at her desk. She was two years into building The Huffington Post. Eighteen-hour days, four hours of sleep, running from board meetings to TV appearances to speaking events without pause.
She felt cold. She stood up to get a sweater.
And she collapsed. Her face hit the corner of the desk on the way down. She broke her cheekbone and woke up on the floor in a pool of her own blood.
For two weeks after, she went from doctor to doctor. MRI, echocardiogram, CT scan. They were looking for a brain tumor, a heart defect, something to explain why a healthy woman just dropped. The diagnosis, when it finally came, was almost embarrassing in its simplicity: exhaustion. Her body had shut everything down because she wouldn’t.
Most people tell this story as a cautionary tale about overwork. Get more sleep. Take more breaks. Arianna herself has spent the years since building Thrive Global around exactly that message. But I’ve been thinking about her collapse differently lately, and I think the real lesson is one most of us are missing.
