Reflection
On Being Useful to Yourself
We are so good at being useful to others. What does it mean to serve your own life?
I learned to be helpful young. Not in a story I tell about myself, but in the cellular way — the quiet calibration toward what others needed, the antenna always slightly tuned outward. It made me good at certain things. Reliable. Readable. I knew how to be of service in a room. What I didn't develop, for a very long time, was any equivalent precision about what I needed in order to function.
The question sounds simple when you phrase it this way: what does your own system require? But most people I know — including myself, for years — treat this as a vaguely indulgent thing to consider. Productivity is legible. Output is measurable. The value you produce for others is, at least in principle, externally confirmable. What your own nervous system needs is none of those things. It is not on any dashboard. There is no social validation for recognising that you need an hour alone before you can think clearly. You just quietly build that into the day, or you don't, and either way no one particularly notices except you.
There is a quiet utility in alignment — in the practice of doing what actually steadies you, rather than what looks most productive to an imagined observer. The two overlap sometimes. Not always. The walk I take at noon is not efficient in any conventional sense. It doesn't produce anything. But the quality of thought in the two hours after it is different from the quality of thought in the two hours that precede it. The walk is doing something. It just doesn't fit on a task list.
Being useful to yourself is a strange practice to cultivate because it requires treating your own functioning as something worth attending to — not for what it produces, but because you live here. Because this is your instrument and you are the one who has to play it, for a long time, across many different kinds of weather. The neglect of that is not noble. It is just neglect.
What I am learning, slowly, is to notice what the system is actually asking for rather than overriding it toward some external goal. Drink the water not as an input for better cognition but because the body is thirsty. Take the walk not to clear the head for the next task but because movement is what the body is built for. Sleep not as a recovery strategy but because the night requires it. These things matter whether or not they make you more productive. That is a strange thing to have to learn. But it turns out you do have to learn it.
Jacek Margol spent nearly two decades in demanding global corporate roles before building Brainjet as a framework for sustainable cognitive performance. He writes from both lived experience and the science of cognitive neuroscience.
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