Drift
Day 30: The 5 Factors of Health Challenge
Ben has been thinking a lot about “drift” lately.
Not the dramatic kind. Not the “everything just fell apart” kind. The quiet kind. The kind that happens while you’re busy doing your life. The kind that doesn’t set off alarms or raise red flags. It just slowly, almost politely, moves you a few inches at a time away from who you meant to be.
He shared his “drift” document this morning. Pages of thoughts about health, leadership, entropy, systems, and the way life has a current that will carry you somewhere whether you’re paying attention or not. At first, I skimmed it the way you skim something when you know the person who wrote it is brilliant and intense and probably went down a very deep rabbit hole. Then I stopped. Then I went back and actually read it. And by the time I finished, I felt uncomfortable in the best way. Because once you see drift, you can’t unsee it. You start recognizing it in yourself, in your routines, in your excuses, in the tiny ways you’ve been negotiating with your better instincts.
Drift doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up with sirens and flashing lights. You don’t wake up one morning unhealthy. You don’t suddenly feel disconnected from your family. You don’t lose your edge overnight. It happens quietly. 8:30 bedtimes creep back by a few minutes each night. “No screens during the week” turns into Monday Night football and sharing “quick” Instagram Reels over dinner. Family sit-down dinners turn into sporadic microwaved dinner plates eaten at the counter. Quality group classes at the gym are sacrificed for a quick jog around the block to save time…or, worse yet, another “rest day”. Work projects take over weekend mornings and 5 minutes here and there when you think your family doesn’t notice.
You start telling yourself you’ll get back to your “good” routine soon. Soon becomes later. Later becomes never. Nothing feels dramatic in the moment. But over time, it adds up.
I see this every day at COMPTRAIN. People walk in and say, “I don’t know what happened. I used to feel less tight. I used to have more energy.” Nothing happened. They drifted. Most of us have. We’re swimming in a river with a very strong current, and pretending that standing still is an option.
Ben describes life like a lazy river, and I LOVE that metaphor. There actually is a lazy river on the Cape that we go to a lot, so this example is easy for me to relate to. If you relax and float, you will end up exactly where most people end up. More sedentary. More dependent. More tired. More focused on managing something than building something.
And the strange part is that we’ve normalized that destination. We call it adulthood. We call it busy. We call it responsible. In this area, we call it winter. Then we look sideways at the people who are swimming against it and decide they’re too intense. Too disciplined. Too much. As if effort is a personality flaw.
Think about Bryan Johnson, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever. While he is, arguably, “too” all of those things…why do we need to be so judgey about a guy that wants to test what his body is capable? Why are we so ready to attack him for not having balance in his life? Why do we feel so much anger over someone else’s extreme level of commitment?
The truth is, health requires resistance now. Two hundred years ago, people didn’t need systems to live a healthy lifestyle. They ate real food. They moved all day. They slept when it got dark. They lived in community. Health was automatic.
Today, health is COUNTER-cultural.
You have to actively protect it.
You have to choose health over convenience, over conformity, over what everyone else is doing.
I’m not writing this from some perfectly optimized pedestal. I live in this tension constantly. Some weeks I feel grounded and strong and clear. I’m sleeping a true 8 hours, training 6 days a week, cooking real food for dinner every night, finding patience with Bode and Harley Love, being present in Maya and Jonah’s lives even though I don’t see them for days or weeks at a time, feeling present in my own life.
Other weeks I’m in full reactive mode. Up late writing blog posts when everyone else is upstairs brushing teeth and snuggling in bed together. Eating tortilla chips and drinking more coffee for lunch. Skipping class warm-ups because I’m prepping the middle school training room and watering the office plants. Half-listening to conversations because my brain is still at work. Snapping when I shouldn’t. Nothing is “wrong.” I’m just drifting.
That’s the part of Ben’s writing that landed the hardest for me. He talks about informed drift. The people who know better. The podcast listeners. The book readers. The journalers. The ones with Notes apps full of quotes and life principles. The ones who understand that health matters and relationships matter and time is precious. Us. We’re not ignorant. We’re just inconsistent.
We’ve confused awareness with alignment.
Knowing what matters isn’t the problem. Systems are.
This is why COMPTRAIN exists. Not to just make people sweaty. But, to build resistance. To create environments where effort is normal and standards are shared and showing up for yourself isn’t heroic, it’s expected.
I see it with our middle schoolers all the time. If we don’t structure their time, someone else will. If we don’t teach them discipline, TikTok and YouTube will. If we don’t normalize discomfort, comfort will win. The same is true for adults.
Left alone, life doesn’t optimize you. It erodes you.
That’s not pessimism. That’s physics.
Health isn’t optimization. It’s the floor. It’s not about gadgets and hacks and extreme protocols. It’s about going to bed. Eating real food. Moving daily. Staying connected. Managing stress. Doing the unsexy basics consistently enough that you don’t slowly decay. In a profoundly unhealthy culture, that’s radical.
Ben also wrote about leadership, and not in the way people usually mean it. Not titles and influence and charisma. He meant the version of you that walks into the room. Your energy. Your patience. Your clarity. Your calm. That version is shaped by how you live. When I’m exhausted…more specifically, any time after 7:40pm, my patience shrinks. When I’m disconnected and feeling like I’m existing alone on an island, my empathy drops. When I’m burned out, my judgment suffers. I can’t lead well on empty. None of us can.
Even our 6 month old puppy, Buoy, fits into this conversation. Our sweet, AI-cute little shadow who follows me everywhere. She’s adorable and grounding and part of our family now. She’s also work. She forces planning: preparing meals, remembering her leash, leaving time to take her out instead of just flying out of the house and getting in the car, and time between working out and making it to a meeting on time so she is given a proper walk before sitting in an office for the next 3 hours.
Sometimes I resent that. Sometimes I’m grateful for it. Mostly, she reminds me that nothing meaningful runs on autopilot. Not relationships. Not health. Not leadership. Not joy.
Ben ended his notes with a question that I keep returning to: would your eighty-year-old self be proud of how you’re living today? Not as a judgment. As orientation. A way to gently recalibrate when you’ve drifted a little too far from yourself. I think about it when I choose a yoga nidra sleep meditation over scrolling through FB Marketplace for Cape house furniture and Poshmark offers. When I choose a proper warm-up over writing up the middle school programming white board. When I choose paying attention to what my mother is saying on the phone over coming up with my Instacart grocery list. When I choose the actual phone conversation over the text message when I need to call one of my coaches out on something.
I’m not trying to be perfect. I’m trying to stay awake.
Life has a current. It will take you somewhere. You don’t get to opt out of that. You only get to decide whether you’re floating or swimming. Some days I’m swimming swiftly in my Pamela Anderson lifeguard red string bikini. Some days I’m lunging for my old full body triathlon wetsuit because I can barely float. Both count. What matters is noticing. Adjusting. Choosing again.
That’s the work.
And, it’s worth it.
Pamela Anderson red string bikini?!?
Wow that’s a nice one! I think EVERYONE should and need to read this! It’s clear, very well explained and so true!!