On Having One Of Those Days

I'm having One Of Those Days. I get them every now and again and it's almost as if my body is trying to give me a not-so-subtle reminder of what it's like to be in the midst of a depressive phase. I wake up, and the black dog is sitting on my chest, panting at me. He proceeds to spend the rest of the day following me around and oozing gloom at me, until I give up and go to bed. Usually when this happens, I recognise that it's only going to last for a day and give in to it, in the knowledge that I'll wake up tomorrow to a new day and all will be well again.

But today I've been driving myself potty by trying to work out what's brought it on. My lovely son (see photo, taken by the splendid Mr Rhys Jones, aka Photo Maestro ) has even tried to coach me through it, bless him. But still the dog remains. So I'm going to use today's blog to tune in to my inner voice, to find out what's going on.

Here are the first things I notice that my inner voice is saying to me:

• Eat chocolate and you'll feel better
• Go back to bed and you'll feel better
• You've let yourself down by not doing your yoga this morning, and even when you tried to make up for it a while ago it was only a half-hearted attempt so you let yourself down again then
• Everything's too difficult today, so don't bother doing anything
• There's too much to do and no-one else is going to do it
• Just sit very still and very quiet and try to stop thinking
• It's too much effort to talk to anyone in the flesh so don't go anywhere and then you'll be safe
  

Blimey, it's no wonder I feel like crap!

Well, I know that eating chocolate and going back to bed won't make me feel better in the long run, so I can discount them, tempting as they are. I guess really they are attempts to soothe my inner child - here, have a magic sweetie and it'll all be all right - my attempts to kiss it better. So, I may be doing it in an unhelpful way, but at least part of me is trying to look after me and at least I've learned that these options aren't actually all that helpful. Now that I think about it, I can see that going for a walk would do me far more good - although that would involve getting dressed first....told you it was a bad day!

The 3rd one, about the yoga, is interesting. I've been having irregular yoga lessons since before Christmas, and when I went on my NLP course last weekend, one of the things I decided I wanted to have different in my life was to practice yoga more regularly. We were learning about swishing and I volunteered to have the technique demonstrated on me, so that I would replace my previous, slug-like approach to the mornings with a desire to leap out of bed and go through my yoga routine every other day. And you know what? It worked! Last week I ached more than I've ached in a very long time, because of all the unaccustomed exercise. I felt fantastic and I was eager to keep doing it, and to banish the slug version of me.

And then this morning, I allowed the slug to take over. It was a conscious choice and as I'm typing this, I'm wondering which came first, the Slug or the Black Dog? Because I'm very aware that my inner voice has been telling me off ever since I decided to stay in bed and finish my book this morning. And actually, I'm now aware that I finished my book, rather than just reading a couple of chapters and then getting up, almost as an act of defiance. It was as if somewhere inside my head my teenage self was saying "The more you keep on nagging, the longer I'm going to lie here reading, just to piss you off!"

How interesting - I've sabotaged myself. And I feel much brighter for having that realisation. I can also see that the rest of the list of things the Inner Voice has been telling me today are further acts of self-sabotage.

I wonder why we sabotage ourselves? I read a fascinating article by Oliver Burkeman in Saturday's Guardian, all about how we are drawn towards the easiest option all the time, and I recognised myself in what he described. And that's what I did this morning - instead of making the effort to get up and get on with the day, I gave in to the easiest option and have spent the day simultaneously punishing myself and stopping myself from making any further effort.

I am fully aware that one of my Gremlins (the things that hold us back or stop us from doing things) is the voice that says "it's all to too much effort, I can't be arsed". These days I'm pretty adept at spotting when it's happening, and I've learnt to ask it what it's trying to protect me from. So, assuming that Mr Can't B. Arsed the Gremlin was around this morning, what was he trying to protect me from when I allowed him to talk me into staying in bed? I suspect that he, and his cronies, are all too aware that a significant change in lifestyle is creeping up on them, and this was an attempt to hold it at bay. If I derail my attempts to change, I can slip back into my old, familiar, comfortable ways of being and doing, and I'd be lying if I said that that's not at least partly attractive.

All change involves effort, and all change involves a certain degree of discomfort. I've been through a monumental amount of change over the past year and I've promised myself that there's a lot more to come. I suspect that at least a part of my self is begging for mercy and just wants to be allowed to go back to sleep again, and that part came to the fore this morning.

But I can't let it have its way otherwise all my hard work up to now will have been for nothing. I'll revisit my NLP notes and make sure that my Swish is brought back to life, so that I can be a better support to myself tomorrow morning.

And for today, I'm going to forgive myself. I am, after all, only human, and everyone's allowed a little stumble now and again. And that's all today has been - a little stumble. My goals are all still as they were and I KNOW that I will achieve them.

So - I'm off to get dressed and do the grocery shopping. And I may just allow myself a very small bar of Green & Blacks as a treat....

On Calming The Inner Voice

I had a bit of a wobble over the weekend.

I started finding it really difficult to switch off at nght, and found myself waking up at 4 in the morning with my head spinning with all the "stuff" I had to do, which led to getting up at silly o'clock to get work done and then fretting when I couldn't think clearly. By Monday morning I was in a bit of a state, and by Monday teatime all I wanted to do was sit in a corner and cry.

Instead of doing that, I took myself off to bed for some quiet time to think, drink tea and calm down.

I listened very hard to what was going on in my head and realised that my inner voice was chuntering away along these lines:

"You've got to think about marketing and you need a PR strategy and there's that workshop you're running on Saturday and you need to be ready for that and have you contacted the people that are coming yet and you're nearly out of business cards and you need to learn how to hold a teleseminar and it's about time you recorded another podcast and when are you going to find somewhere for your workshops and if you held a seminar would anyone come and what kind of cupcakes are you going to make and...and...and..."

It's no wonder I couldn't sleep! Once I started to pay attention to what my inner voice was saying, I immediately realised that I was stressing myself out because I had fallen into one of my usual self-inflicted bear-traps - I had got so swept up with the excitement of new things, that I'd stopped planning and prioritising, and now I couldn't see the wood for the trees.

So, instead of just letting the inner voice keep going and driving me mad, I decided to pay it some attention, and I wrote down all the things it was telling me I needed to do. This immediately helped me to feel calmer. It's like paying attention to a small child - if you ignore it it just gets more and more persistent and insistent, tugging at your sleeve, getting louder, climbing all over you until you get completely exasperated with it. If you listen to what it's saying (provided you're not in the middle of something critical) and acknowledge what it's trying to tell you, it's happy and will wander off to do something else, leaving you to concentrate on what you were doing.

So I acknowledged my inner voice, recognising that, in this instance, it was trying to help me. Once I'd written down all the things it was reminding me about, I was able to prioritise them and recognise that actually only a very few need my attention this week, and the rest could wait. Another huge weight off my shoulders, and a lessening of my stress.

And then, of course, I acknowledged that what I need is to draw up a plan and stick to it, rather than getting carried away with things and wanting to do it all now. And how those of you that used to work with me will be laughing now, famous as I was for chafing against the need to be tied down by plans!

Well, you live and learn. I don't want to allow myself to get panicky and anxious in my new life - I know it's inevitable that there will be some stress, but I'm not going to let it take over as I have before. I've done pretty well so far, and I think this weekend was the first time I've felt anything other than exhilarated since I gave my notice in back in October. Maybe I was due for a reminder that you can't expect to run on exhilaration without getting exhausted, and that I need to take some time to relax every once in a while?

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