Has productivity-maxxing killed sexiness?

“My mind had become a social media algorithm centred on ambition.”

I got concussed last week. I’d started riding my bike after decades of avoiding it, concerned that the old adage ‘it’s just like riding a bike’ didn’t apply to me. 

It didn’t. My bike, almost completely still at the intersection, went down and took my brain with it. 

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It was only when I was concussed, my memory betraying me in the worst possible ways (where did I put my vape?!), that I was forced to stop and reflect in 15-minute intervals. I felt annoyed, restless, ghosted by the smart part of my brain. I wasn’t sure it was ever coming back.

It did, of course. Eventually. But my concussion ended up providing the perfect excuse for a reinvention.  

I’ve always loved reinvention. Give me a new career, a new city, a new friend, a new idea, perhaps a brain injury: anything that gives me a sense that this is it. This is the thing that is going to change me. 

As a chronic Type B, I’d made a New Year’s resolution to embrace habits. Routines. I began listening to girl boss podcasts, bought trendy new glasses, and sliced my day into tick-boxes like a competent CEO. I rode my new bike, determined to look good while doing it and wearing my beloved cowboy boots that, famously, have the world’s smoothest sole. I’d like to formally apportion all blame to them.  

But, I can’t really be mad at my cowboy boots or my treacherous bike. As it turns out,  when I was concussed, I had so much fun. I ate nectarines all day, forgoing the perilous journey of making a meal, juices freely staining my dress. I had to allow the day to unfold before me without intervention, tuning into whatever I wanted in each moment: do I want to sit in the sun? See a friend? How about another Diet Coke? 

As the symptoms improved, I swam for hours at the beach with no looming cloud of meal prep and laundry at home. I felt disinhibited – I wanted to go skinny dipping, to flirt with vigour, to fall in love with freedom and pleasure again. 

I felt sexy, like my life was sexy again. There was no one to impress or perform for. No rumination after an event, no moral scalpel ready to cut when I let something slip. My to-do list consisted of talking and tending to my tomato plant, reading articles, or smoking cigarettes when my vape ran out and I couldn’t tackle the walk up to the shops.  

I’m not sure exactly when my life had become unsexy, but I do know the last few years – navigating a new job as a psychologist, a new city, general anxiety about the state of the world – had changed me. While I’m a sucker for reinvention, in reality, change is a bitch. Like a newborn, I often find myself nestling into the familiar womb of old patterns; escaping myself through to-do lists, achievements, and a calendar that screams ‘I can’t say no’. 

My mind had become a social media algorithm centred on ambition: What’s your 5-9 before your 9-5? How to secure your money in a world that feels like it’s collapsing? Are you wearing what the It Girls are wearing this summer? Do you make your own chilli oil?  What habits are secretly destroying you? 

This desire for hyper-productivity and optimisation whittled me into AI with no exhaustion, an endless stream of availability and ‘yes, sirs’. It was only when my brain was literally injured that I saw what my safety net had done to me.  

In Schema Therapy, there’s a concept of different ‘parts’ of us that may come out at different times in our lives. A particular part, coined ‘the demanding critic’, coasts along so subtly in our culture that I forget it’s there. 

It’s born from an external critical voice – usually a parent, or a teacher, a friend, a lover, an influencer – that we eventually mistake for our own. It’s the voice that tells us to do more, to be good, to get up, to sacrifice and soldier on. It forces you to the Pilates class even after a shitty sleep, or to make a nourishing meal at home when you just want to splurge on the overpriced pizza. It twists even the things we love into a productivity game.  

The thing is, it doesn’t matter how many times I follow the critic’s orders; I’m always  back at square one. There’s something I’ve failed at, someone I’ve disappointed, or sheets that still haven’t been washed. And meanwhile, my sexy life is tied up in the corner.  

I actually don’t think the critic is trying to be mean. It’s not trying to suck the life out of me. It’s just scared. And desperate – for safety in a world that feels increasingly unsafe, for someone to tell her that she can rest now, that the dishes will get done, that the money isn’t going anywhere, that no one hates her.  

My concussion symptoms have mostly disappeared, and when I try to explain this whole epiphany to people, it feels like a fever dream. But when I see my bike collecting dust in the garden, I know my sexy life truly did come to visit. It’s not that I’m exclusively eating nectarines and skinny dipping my time away; instead, it’s been a gentler shift. One that leans towards playfulness, spontaneity, and an emptier calendar.

Maybe my sexy life wasn’t another reinvention but an intervention, a reminder that I kind of like myself underneath all the noise. A reminder to let life surprise me, rather than treating it as a very serious, life-long project that is due (to whom?) when I’m dead. Concussion or not, my sexy life had been waiting for me all along, I just had to put down the to-do list and let it out to play.

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