New Year, Old Me

Just when things were getting complicated in the eye of the storm

Are you ready for "New Year, New Me"? Yep - it’s that time we open a new calendar and create good-natured intent to change. It’s also that time of the week that we get to grace your screens with our thoughts on health and performance.

Before I get started, I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for regularly or not-so-regularly reading these posts. A special thanks to those of you who have deemed our writing worth your hard earned pennies, and donated for our efforts. And an even bigger thanks to those who support Active Edge Health & Performance by trusting us in helping you to overcome pain and injury, performance dilemmas, and to facilitate your own health and performance journeys. Happy New Year, and here’s to 2025!

Now, back to “New Year, New Me”. It’s inspiring, hopeful, and brimming with possibilities. Yet this year, I’m flipping the script. Instead of chasing a “new me,” I'll turn to the “old me” - a version of myself before emotional struggles, burnout, and injury dimmed some of the sparks I used to create. So buckle in, because today is a self-reflective piece.

Over the past few years, burnout crept into my life quicker and less noticeable than the rate of my forehead growing. I powered through all-nighters to meet deadlines and pushed harder when I should have paused. Finally this year, the exhaustion caught up, sapping my energy and joy.

Looking back, I see how long I’ve failed to achieve balance. To be clear, it’s not that I’ve neglected balance - I’m aware. I mean, it’s hardly rocket science when productivity plunges and procrastination soars the week after pulling an all-nighter! And, I wouldn’t change a thing - because that’s me, and it’s the path I’ve chosen to be on. This isn’t about turning back time or complaining that things should or could have been different.

Whilst comparing yourself to a previous version is often mentally detrimental, “New Year, Old Me” is about reclaiming parts of myself that used to feel authentic in a world that often demands more than anyone can realistically give.

Life often feels like solving a puzzle with pieces that keep changing shape. There are no simple instructions. And even when you think you’ve figured it out, the rules shift. This is the concept of a “wicked learning environment” and applies to many domains and industries. For example, medical and health diagnoses, including injury and pain, and also in the world of training and performance (this warrants its own post!).

The key takeaway is that in a world now full of complexity, we operate in spaces where patterns are hard to pin down, and outcomes often feel unpredictable. This impacts clarity and reduces visibility of trends, such as maintaining balance, and becomes more difficult to see.

The “old me” certainly got a lot wrong, but I remember when I approached complexity with more curiosity and less dread. I remember seeing trends more clearly and could recognise what capacity I had left after writing 90% of a lit-review at 2am. Somewhere along the way, the pace of life and sheer volume of decisions left me dazed.

2024 has harshly taught me that my capacity is not infinite. While my nature is to think I can evaluate every option, solve every problem, and meet every expectation, that’s not how the human organism works. It’s incredible, but nothing is that incredible.

We all operate with limits. Limits on time, resources and most importantly, energy: physical and mental energy. Understanding that we make decisions within these limits is called bounded rationality. We make decisions based on resources that are determined by our capacity to do, which as I’ve discussed countless times before, are contextual and in flux. And moreover, we make most of our decisions automatically, too.

The old me did not always recognise those boundaries, but he understood they changed shape and changed rules. The current me has a diminished capacity, manifesting in injury and fatigue, and I’m pretty sure some brain cells have packed up for a teletext holiday!

So in 2025, I will focus more on reclaiming parts of the authentic old me by reminding myself that our complex world is increasing, and in order to better navigate it, dealing with things in real time may be the best approach to handling uncertainty.

Thanks for reading - feel free to comment on the post if you feel anything similar!

Happy New Year!

Shane