Today I’m having one of those days where you start the day badly with one stressful email, and then mope around being unproductive and eating the wrong things and forgetting about all the good stuff you’ve been working on recently and all the people that keep telling you nice things.
Instead you just sit at your desk, or the kitchen bench in my case (quick access to the fridge), and let your mind convince you that this is a Bad Day as you glaze your eyes into your inbox with no real desire to do anything about the chaos in there.
Which is pretty strange for me, because I should be on a high with my new program and amazing feedback and loads of people signing up. And having finally slept a proper night and had a morning off for the first time in over a week!
A few of my clients have been talking about this in the private Facebook group for Bloody Good Lifers (oh my god it’s cool in there!)
– we’ve been comparing stories about the down period that often seems to follow a massive high – an epic weekend followed by a horrible emotional slump, an exciting promotion followed by unexpected self doubt…
Even though I’ve been working flat out, I’ve loved every minute of finalising my launch and sales page for Bloody Good Life Online and I’m so grateful that I love my work so much that I don’t mind pulling late nighters.
I’ve been reading a bit about Taoism lately, which is an ancient Chinese philosophy about life, which explains how life is like a pendulum.
If we go to one end of the extreme (e.g. on a massive high) we’ll not long after find ourselves swinging to the opposite end of the extreme (massive low), and then back and forth again before we equalise and get back into some semblance of balance.
Work, play. Fun, seriousness. Excitement, anxiety. Courage, fear.
Same goes with food, as I keep learning – if we restrict ourselves and never allow ourselves treats, before long we’ll find ourself swinging the other way with no control, secretly eating a whole bag of pineapple lumps on the way home from the supermarket and disguising the evidence in a council bin.
The point isn’t to stop the highs and lows, merely not to struggle or resist our experience at either end of the spectrum (e.g. for me now, not resisting the fact that I feel kinda meh all of a sudden), and rather, allow the highs and lows to come and go.
When we do this, we will naturally fall into a more balanced way of living, which is the way of the Tao – living at the centre of the pendulum between the extremes of yin and yang.
This is also the way of the Bloody Good Life.
Learning mindfulness teaches you the skills to allow whatever happens to happen, ups and downs, happiness and sadness, and everything in between.
It’s a way of living life, backed by robust scientific evidence for a huge array of benefits, from increased productivity, creativity, and subjective wellbeing, to improved relationships and decreased, stress, anxiety and avoidance behaviours. (Those behaviours that stop you doing what you really want in life).
Well, how handy, just writing this all down has made me feel a lot better.
Moral of the story:
Writing things down (or talking things out with a friend or coach) can make our thoughts and emotions easier to handle and suddenly very clear. Much more clear than that monkey in our head running around banging cymbals.
Though my mind Nev prefers to dream up more complex ideas of why I feel so MEH today, I know that the truth is really much more simple.
If we turn into a work horse and forgo most forms of self care including sleep, we will eventually find ourselves just wanting to nap and watch Orange is the New Black for the rest of eternity.
It’s all about learning to accept the swings so that we can more quickly fall back into balance.
Sometimes a bloody good life really is that simple.
