Did you ever have yoghurts with separate fruit compote sections when you were a child?
I know I did, and I am not sure of the brand, my mind says munch bunch but that's probably wrong. If you can't picture it, google Müller corners. Anyway, I liked to combine the yoghurt and the fruit, and then put some of the combined yoghurt back into the fruit section - giving me what I always thought was more yoghurt.
Doing this always made me feel like I had beaten the system, won, made more from less. It filled me with joy. That feeling has stuck with me, both as memories, but also in the ways that I approach my life now. I have loosely called this the yoghurt pot theory. The theory is that I can somehow split things, to get more.
It doesn’t have a positive impact, like I thought, because in reality there is no such thing as more from nothing.
To explain this, I can use an example of time. Sometimes I will work at the weekend to get ahead of myself so that I can get even more done on Monday. This is the action of splitting the yoghurt. When I get to my desk on a Monday however, I am less rested, and thus I have less energy to get things done, so that extra time I thought I had stolen from nothing, has been taken out of my Monday instead.
The phrase "To rob Peter to pay Paul” comes to mind. This phrase means to take from one person or thing to give to another, especially when it results in the elimination of one debt by incurring another. Working on a weekend to get ahead, severely impacts my ability to work on the Monday.
This of course is made harder by executive dysfunction, whereby on Monday I know how much I need to get done, and how capable of it I am, but simply cannot do it.
I am sure you will have been doing forms of this in your life, and I am here to point out how dysfunctional this is, and how much this does not serve you. It has taken me years to see this pattern in myself, so if this goes some way to help you see how this theory shows up in your life then I am glad.
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