Position Before the Current

What if you acted on what you already know about next week?

Most rest advice arrives after depletion. It assumes you're already underwater and offers techniques for surfacing. Useful, but reactive.

There's another move available—one that treats your future self's challenges as real now.

DBT calls it "coping ahead": anticipating a difficult situation and preparing for it before you're inside it. Not anxious rehearsal. Strategic positioning.

The difference matters. Reactive recovery asks: how do I restore what got depleted? Coping ahead asks: how do I enter this so less gets depleted in the first place?

Here's the friction: we already know what's coming.

December's demands aren't mysterious—or substitute your own predictable crunch. The holidays, the year-end compression, the family dynamics, the schedule that stops respecting your rhythms—these are predictable. We proceed as if they're not.

We hope this year will somehow be different. It isn't. Then we react to conditions we could see from weeks away.

This is swimming against the current instead of reading where it's going.

Coping ahead means treating next week's you as a real person.

Someone whose energy you can roughly predict. Whose constraints you can see from here. Whose experience you could make easier with adjustments made now—not heroic ones, small ones.

What would change if you looked at the week ahead and asked: what container would make this sustainable?

Maybe it's blocking recovery time before the demanding days, not after. Maybe it's lowering the baseline now so there's somewhere to compress to. Maybe it's one conversation this week that prevents three difficult ones next week.

The specific moves matter less than the orientation: your future self's depletion is predictable. Act on what you already know.

This isn't about anxiety or hypervigilance. It's about respect for the current you'll be swimming in.

Recovery is harder than preparation. Not morally—physically. The energy cost of restoration exceeds the energy cost of positioning. This is why "I'll rest after" so rarely works. By the time after arrives, the debt has compounded.

The lens for this week:

Look at the next seven days. Not with dread—with honesty. Where are the demands concentrated? What do you already know will be hard?

Now: what small adjustment, made today, positions you better for that? What structural change lets your future self move through it rather than push through it?

You're not predicting the future. You're respecting what you already know about it.

Position before the current strengthens. That's the move.

Most of us won't do this perfectly. But even partial positioning—one adjustment, one structural change—shifts the ratio. You arrive at the hard part with something left.