My Messy Reality Check Before July Hit
Look, I gotta be honest, July started kicking my butt before June was even over. You know how everyone talks about summer ease? Yeah, forget that. I was drowning. Not literally, but emotionally. Everything felt heavy, like wading through thick mud. I was trying to push ahead on three massive projects, ignoring the nagging feeling that I was totally burnt out. I kept slamming my head into the wall, thinking, “Just power through it.” Total disaster strategy.
I’m usually the guy who builds systems for everything. You have a problem, I build a spreadsheet, a checklist, and a detailed timeline. That’s my comfort zone. But around the end of June, I noticed my systems were just making the noise louder. Every time I looked at my meticulously planned week, I felt this enormous resistance. My anxiety was spiking, my focus was shot, and I was making stupid, careless mistakes because I wasn’t actually present. I was running on fumes and ignoring the obvious fact that my internal battery was flashing red.
Then I saw the calendar layout for July, and without getting into the nerdy astrology weeds—because who has time for that?—I just knew this wasn’t going to be a month for brute force. All the emotional, chaotic, intuitive energy floating around felt like a massive wall. It felt like the universe was telling me to stop rowing against the current and just float for a bit. That’s when I finally decided, okay, if this is a ‘Pisces energy’ month—meaning I need to be more sensitive, intuitive, and set serious boundaries to keep from escaping reality—I needed a totally different playbook. I had to ditch the logical planner and grab the intuition.
The Unexpected Pivot: Why I Stopped Answering Emails After 3 PM
The biggest hurdle I faced was the constant mental noise. I was trying to listen to my gut, but the noise from client demands and endless Slack pings drowned it out. I knew I needed deep focus, but I couldn’t get it. The tipping point wasn’t some spiritual breakthrough; it was totally mundane and embarrassing. I was sitting there, trying to write an important proposal, and I kept getting distracted by this stupid, irrelevant argument happening in a group chat about which office coffee was the worst. I actually felt my chest tighten in frustration over something that had zero impact on my life.
I realized then and there, if I don’t carve out actual silence, this month will chew me up and spit me out. My system for thriving had to become a system for protecting my energy. I wasn’t thriving because I was pushing; I was surviving because I was defending.
I committed to two massive, non-negotiable shifts. First, I literally shut down my communication tools at 3 PM, sharp. That means the phone goes on airplane mode, the laptop closes, and the Slack icon gets permanently hidden. I had to fight the urge to check just one more thing. I blocked the apps. I told my team, “Unless the office is burning down, don’t call me after three.” This wasn’t about laziness; it was about protecting the delicate intuitive space I needed to navigate the month’s weird emotional currents. It was brutal the first week—I felt massive FOMO, like I was missing crucial info—but by week two, the silence started working its magic. My evenings weren’t spent frantically catching up; they were spent actually recharging.
My Actual Pisces Strategies Log: Ditching Productivity for Flow
This wasn’t about setting performance metrics; this was about managing energy and recognizing when I needed to retreat. I tracked everything based on how heavy the activity felt versus how flowing it felt. Here’s what I logged as my mandatory protective practices:
- Practice 1: Mandatory Dream Capture. I started keeping a cheap notebook next to the bed. Every morning, before coffee, before checking my phone (this is the absolute key to it working!), I wrote down whatever bizarre garbage my brain coughed up overnight. It didn’t have to make sense. The goal was just to pull the subconscious stuff out. I found that if I captured the overall feeling of the dream—even if the actual content was nonsense—I had a much better read on my baseline emotional state for the day. If the dream felt anxious, I immediately knew I needed to dial back my output that day and prioritize gentle tasks.
- Practice 2: The 20-Minute Water Reset. Since Pisces is all about water, I started intentionally integrating water breaks. Not just drinking water, but actively engaging with it. I scheduled a 20-minute, mid-afternoon shower or bath where I literally just sat there. I didn’t take my phone. I didn’t try to solve problems. I just let the water run over me. It sounds ridiculous and maybe a little high maintenance, but it dramatically flushed the mental static. I stopped trying to solve mid-day anxiety spirals with caffeine and started solving them with intentional, silent retreat.
- Practice 3: Killing the “Shoulds.” This was the hardest shift. My whole life is built on feeling like I “should” be doing something. In July, I forced myself to ask, “Is this absolutely necessary right now, or is this just guilt talking?” If I felt a massive block on a task, I immediately swapped it for something low-stakes and creative—sketching, listening to old records, or organizing some random, forgotten corner of my desk. I embraced the radical idea that sometimes the fastest way forward is to totally ignore the goal for twenty minutes and let the solution bubble up from the quiet.
What Actually Happened and Why I’m Still Doing It
So, did I hit every single deadline in July? Hell no. I pushed back a few things that weren’t immediately crucial, and I was upfront about it. But here’s the kicker: the work I did complete was exponentially better. Why? Because I wasn’t operating from a place of stress; I was operating from a place of genuine clarity and rest. By honoring that need for quiet and flow, I avoided three major burnout episodes that would have absolutely cratered my productivity for the entire quarter. I learned that trying to force logic onto emotional cycles is just asking for massive trouble. It’s like trying to navigate a ship through a fog bank using only a spreadsheet; sometimes you need to just slow down and listen for the foghorn.
The biggest payoff wasn’t the work, though. It was the feeling. I felt way more connected to my own decisions. Remember how I got stuck on that critical proposal? Once I stopped forcing it at 3 PM and took a mandated ‘float break,’ the entire solution, the perfect structure and tone, dropped into my head while I was washing dishes. That’s the Pisces energy working—it delivers the goods when you stop demanding them. Now I look back at July, and while it was weird and intense, I actually thrived because I finally stopped trying to be a machine and started respecting the flow. I’m keeping the 3 PM cutoff, no matter what month it is.
