The Ice Tray Moment: When High-Frequency Living Costs Your Soul

I couldn't get the ice out of the ice tray, and I cried.

It was such a simple thing. A stubborn ice tray after three days of what hadn't even looked that busy on paper—never more than four sessions or meetings scheduled each day.

I manage my time well. I protect margin. I know my limits. But this wasn't about time. It was about frequency.

Three days of unexpected distractions. Necessary, life be 'lifing' interruptions. Each one legitimate, even important. But the cumulative effect was like revving an engine at high RPMs without ever letting it cool down. By day three, an ice tray was enough to break me.

That moment—tears over something so trivial—was my check engine light. A warning that I'd exceeded safe operating parameters. For me, this was an anomaly. I recognized it, could name it, knew I needed to adjust.

But here's what concerns me:

For many business leaders, what was my anomaly is their baseline.

The High-Frequency Trap

We're excellent at capacity planning for our businesses. We know not to run operations at 100% indefinitely—equipment breaks down, quality suffers, flexibility disappears. We build in buffer, plan for maintenance, monitor for warning signs.

Yet we do to ourselves what we'd never do to our organizations.

And it's not because we're overbooked. It's because we're operating at too high a frequency.

The Variables We Don't Count

Traditional time management counts hours and meetings. But it misses the things that actually drain us:

Frequency of switching. Each interruption isn't just the time it takes—it's the cognitive load of context switching. Emergency mode to strategic thinking to pastoral care to problem-solving and back again. Your brain never settles into a rhythm. You're constantly accelerating, alternating gears and rev's, never cruising.

Intensity over duration. An eight-hour day of steady, focused work is entirely different from four hours of high-alert crisis management. Some tasks deplete you exponentially faster than others. You're not just working—you're managing your own stress response all day.

Cumulative depletion. Day one, you handle it. Day two, you're running on reserves. Day three, an ice tray breaks you. This isn't weakness—it's mathematics. You need recovery time proportional to intensity, but most leaders don't pause long enough before the next high-frequency period hits.

The Pauses We Don't Take

A colleague and I laughed about this recently: When a meeting gets delayed by a few minutes, we immediately fill those minutes with tasks. Quick emails. Rapid-fire to-dos. We optimize the gap.

But what would it look like to use those few minutes differently? To stretch. To breathe. To re-center. To simply be present for a moment.

For high-capacity, high-output people, this can feel almost offensive. Non-productive. Fluffy. Self-indulgent.

We've trained ourselves to see every empty moment as wasted capacity. The same instinct that makes us effective leaders—the drive to maximize, to optimize, to fill—becomes the very thing that depletes us.

The Space Within

In his book Calm Creative Courage, Adam Botha writes about the importance of cultivating a space of stillness within ourselves—a space untouched by external turbulence, a space that holds the potential for lasting calmness.

This isn't about adding meditation to your morning routine or blocking "self-care" time on your calendar (though those might help). It's about something more fundamental: recognizing that you need internal space to remain fully human, fully present, and fully yourself.

Without this inner stillness:

You can't hear yourself think. Discernment requires quiet. Wisdom emerges in the margins, not in the chaos.

• You can't be truly present. You're with people but not present to them, physically there but mentally triaging the next thing.

• You can't receive. Inspiration doesn't arrive on command. Divine appointments happen in margin, not in the plan. Joy is often a surprise—but surprises need room to land.

• You lose your capacity to care deeply. When everything is urgent, nothing is sacred. The people and purposes that matter most get your exhausted leftovers.

The Soul Cost of Overheating

Here's what happens when you run at high frequency for too long:

You lose your ability to absorb small frustrations. Grace for yourself evaporates. Grace for others disappears. The minor annoyances you'd normally brush off become breaking points. You become brittle.

You lose access to your best self. The wise, patient, creative, generous version of you needs bandwidth. High-frequency living keeps you in survival mode. You can't access perspective, wisdom, or peace when you're overheating.

You lose the ability to sense what matters. Everything feels urgent. You can't distinguish between the truly important and the merely loud. Discernment requires calm; high frequency produces only reaction.

You lose your capacity for presence. With God—prayer feels impossible when your nervous system is fried. With others—you're physically there but not actually available. With yourself—you don't even recognize you're running too hot until you're crying over ice.

The Dangerous Normalization

The higher your capacity, the longer you can sustain high-frequency living before breaking—which means you push further into dangerous territory before you realize the damage being done.

Many leaders have been running at this pace for so long they don't remember what sustainable feels like. They think this is just what leadership requires. That everyone operates this way. That they'll rest when the project ends, when the quarter closes, when the kids are grown, when they retire.

But you can't operate at redline indefinitely without damage:

• To your health

• To your relationships

• To your judgment

• To your soul

• To who you're becoming

A Different Kind of Capacity Planning

What if we applied the same rigor to personal capacity that we apply to organizational capacity?

This means accounting for:

Frequency, not just volume. How often are you context-switching? How many interruptions? What's the pace of change and the rate of acceleration?

Intensity, not just hours. What's the emotional and mental load? How much is crisis versus steady state? What's actually depleting you?

Recovery time. Are you building in cool-down proportional to intensity? Or just powering through to the next thing?

Cumulative load. How many high-frequency days in a row can you sustain? What's your runway before breakdown?

Early warning signs. What's your ice tray moment? The small thing that tells you you've exceeded capacity before major damage occurs?

The Invitation

Your soul needs space—not someday, but now. Not just on vacation, but in the daily rhythms of your life.

This isn't about doing less (though that might be part of it). It's about protecting sustainable rhythms. Building in recovery. Monitoring frequency. Creating space for the internal stillness that makes you capable of wisdom, presence, and depth.

Consider:

• When did you last have a thought that surprised you?

• When did you last feel deeply moved by something?

• When did you last sense God's presence clearly?

• When did you last feel genuinely rested, not just "caught up"?

• When did you last have margin to be generous on a whim?

These things don't happen at high frequency. They require space. They need the pauses you're not taking.

Even Jesus withdrew—to pray, to rest, to be with the Father. If the Son of God needed margin, what makes us think we don't?

What Grows in the Space

The Sabbath principle isn't just about rest—it's about acknowledging you're not God. The world doesn't need you running at 100% all the time. The command to rest is also a command to trust.

Transformation happens in stillness, not in striving.

Character is formed in the spaces between activity. You can't become who you're meant to be while running flat out.

What needs space to grow in you that the fullness is crowding out?

Maybe it's:

• Reflection and contemplation that leads to wisdom

• Wonder that restores perspective and opens possibility thinking

• Grief that needs to be felt and joy that needs to be embraced

• Deep presence with the people you love and reconciliation of relationships

• The still, small voice you can't hear over the noise

You were made for more than surviving at redline.

Your capacity is a gift. Your drive to make an impact matters. Your commitment to excellence honors the gifts you've been given. But none of that requires you to operate at a frequency that costs you your peace. The question isn't whether you can sustain this pace. The question is: What are you losing while you try?

A New Year, A New Approach

As we head into a new year, most of us are thinking about goals, objectives, and what we want to accomplish. We're planning to do more, achieve more, become more.

But what if the most important planning you do isn't about what you'll add—but about how you'll protect the space you need to sustain it all?

Before you fill your calendar with new initiatives, consider:

• What frequency can you actually sustain long-term?

• Where do you need to build in recovery time?

• What are your early warning signs that you're overheating?

• How will you protect space for the internal stillness that makes wisdom, presence, and depth possible?

The new year isn't just an opportunity to set new goals. It's an opportunity to redesign how you operate—to build capacity management into your rhythms from the start, rather than waiting for your ice tray moment to tell you something needs to change.

In my next post, I'll share specific, practical strategies for year-end reflection and planning that actually honor your humanity—ways to set yourself up not just for productivity, but for sustainability and presence in the year ahead.

Because the best gift you can give yourself, your loved ones, and your work in the new year isn't a bigger to-do list.

It's a better way of being.

What's your ice tray moment? When have you noticed that you've been running too hot for too long? I'd love to hear your story.