When I’m Feeling Down

When I’m feeling down…

I don’t do laundry

I come home from work and grab a handful of halloween candy and head to bed

I walk past the sinks full of dirty dishes

I eat ice cream

I walk past the baskets of clean unfolded laundry (and the dirty loads too)

I scroll on my phone hoping to find something

I wear extra sweatshirts over my sweaters because I’m cold

I wake up in the morning at the last possible second and just do the basics

I feed my family frozen pizza

I do this, when I’m in a funk.

I googled how to get out of a funk because I was curious what resources were out in the world for us women. A lot of the things I found were yoga, or meditation or reading a good book with a cup of tea. All external things to help something very internal change.

While all of those things are lovely and give us an opportunity to become more self aware.

Drinking tea isn’t going to solve my problem.

Yoga isn’t going to solve my problem, I can barely get myself out of bed.

These external things are just opportunities and environments for us to focus on the REAL work.

The real problem of why we are in a funk comes from our thoughts. Sometimes we need to recognize that we are in a funk.

We woke up and are feeling that heaviness.

It’s there…. Give it a nod, recognize it.

We need to do that or ignore it…. And ignoring it will only aggravate it. When we ignore problems they get worst. The dishes pile up, the laundry piles up, and so do our emotions.

When we indulge in the funk it’s like we are letting it get in the drivers seat and take over. It takes us to the fridge to get a bowl of ice cream, it takes us to the couch to take a nap, it takes us past all of our obligations, it takes us to bed at 8pm on a Friday night, it takes us back to the cave.

Our lower brain (our primal brain) just wants to avoid negative emotion so if we let our funk drive us, it will. We will just haphazardly be living our life.

That’s when we have to stop and get back in the driver seat and use our upper brain (our prefrontal cortex) the decision part of our brain and say yes, okay, funk you are there.

I see you.

I can allow myself to feel bad. But I will NOT let you drive.

If I allow myself to feel bad without indulging in it then I can make a decision from a place of compassion for myself. I can tell myself yeah maybe this afternoon after I do a couple of loads of laundry I will take a little rest. I will give my brain a bit of a reward. That’s when I start making those 1% tiny tiny changes.

Today I folded laundry, and made dinner.

That was the extent of my productivity.

My 3 year old watched a lot of tv and I told myself “it’s okay, today it’s okay, we are doing the best we can today”

I met myself with compassion.

Aware of the awful feeling, tipping my hat to it and saying “Yes, I see you. You’re still there.”

Acknowledge it, but then deciding for yourself what you want to do with it.