What Enough Looks Like

I had a conversation with my therapist recently that went a little something like this:

• Her: “Do you know what enough is?”
• Me: (Looking around to see who she’s talking to, even though I’m clearly the only one there) “Umm…well…I…”
• Her: “For example, what is enough work to you in a day?”
• Me: “Hmmm….well, maybe it has something to do with…uh…no, that’s not it…”

I’m pretty sure you get the picture at this point without me rehashing the rest of the conversation, which was full of more ellipses than are prudent to write down. The even more annoying thing, though?

This was the second conversation I’d had about enoughness in as many weeks.

Working It Out

In addition to this conversation, I also recently had several conversations with different yoga teacher friends about what enough looks like in relation to practice and teaching. As teachers, it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough if your practice doesn’t include x, y and z uber-difficult, not-even-right-for-your-body poses. But it’s also just as easy to feel like you’re not a good teacher if you’re not out there really hustling, teaching 19 classes/week and trying your best to get on the traveling workshop circuit — all with a big ole smile on your face and no complaints.

In each of these conversations, I found myself both shaking my head in agreement and left with a significant number of questions. I’m a skoch better at identifying what is too much these days. This has been a skill hard-won after years of working four part-time jobs while going to school full-time and/or working too many hours at jobs that suck all that I have to give right out of me–and then some.

But what enough looks like? That’s harder for me to decipher. And based on these conversations, I’m not the only one struggling with this question (although I was, fortunately, the only one awkwardly grappling with it in my therapist’s office at that moment).

Satiety

When I first began learning about intuitive eating, I learned about satiety, which I find best loosely defined as satisfaction or fullness. My nutritionist at the time encouraged me to chart my various meals on a scale: from how hungry I was before eating to how full I was after eating. My underlying goal was to find that point of satiety – where I was satisfied but not uncomfortable.

As is true for many of us who have used outside rules to determine what is best for our bodies, I found this task challenging at best.  Most of the time, I just guessed after the fact. Maybe I went from a 4 to a 7?  Or maybe it was more than a 7 but less than an 8 — a 7.33?

To be fair, I’ve never been good with numbers.

But to be even more fair, I hadn’t had much practice with trusting myself either. What with various personal authority figures, friends, media and whatever else giving me advice on what to do with my body, it’s no wonder I didn’t think I could trust myself. And goodness knows that very little of what you read/hear about your body is based on the concept of what is truly enough for you.  Instead, it’s based on scales, equations, averages, what’s typical.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never really fit what’s typical.

Enuf

Phonetic spellers often spell enough as enuf. It makes sense to me; it does sound like it should be spelled that way. I used to work with adults with limited literacy skills, and this is the kind of thing that would frustrate the heck out of them. And I really got that on a deep level: how can you learn one set of rules (“sound it out”) but then be confounded by all these other seemingly random exceptions and turns of phrase?

I’ve found the same to be true in my own relationship to enough: I thought I knew what it was. I thought that the various diet books and health guidelines and advice from Suzy-what’s-it’s aunt’s friend’s neighbor’s sister-in-law’s nail tech were what I should follow. After all, how could I know better than Suzy-what’s-it? Especially when she was a doctor, writer, TV personality.

But what I’ve been learning is that enough is a moving target. As much as people want to put rules around it, because categorization is often how we make sense of our world, it’s not really possible with enough. Some days enough is 30 minutes of writing. Some days it’s 11 hours of grinding work to get a project done. Some days enough is a bowl of cereal for lunch. Some days it’s Thanksgiving.

The most important thing I’ve learned is that when someone tells you what enough is, that’s the time to go inside and figure out what is actually true for you. You might do this through various practices — journaling, noting what works/doesn’t work for you throughout the course of a week or talking it through with someone trusted. Whatever you choose, the awesome thing about enough is that it’s you-shaped, not anyone else-shaped.

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