How to help YOURSELF: Why taking a break is necessary, not luxury
This has been a hard week/s/month/s/year/s. You don’t need to keep drinking from the firehose. You do need to take care of yourself.
In the essential book, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, author Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry opens with a blessing:
I wish you rest today. I wish you a deep knowing that exhaustion is not a normal way of living. You are enough. You can rest. You must resist anything that doesn’t center your divinity as a human being. You are worthy of care.
Living in the midst of constantly breaking horrific news is traumatizing. Being traumatized is hurtful, confusing, disorienting, exhausting, and draining.
You do deserve to turn it off and stop those effects. You do deserve to return to yourself and to feel better.
But how?
Put your news consumption into a small and tight container. We were not designed to constantly be taking in alarming events from 10 different viewpoints, each claiming to update themselves after the next commercial break. A client told me that they would get so wrapped up in the news on the office television that they would feel urgently obligated to hit refresh on their browser window to follow a kidnapping story 20 states away. All day long. As if they were going to crack the case in Texas from Massachusetts.
Instead, limit your news consumption to one source, one or two limited times a day.My client moved their desk away from the television and guess what?, their anxiety levels dropped significantly. They no longer followed cases in different states. They just went to work and did their work during the day.
During the pandemic, when there were so many differing directives and suggestions and alarms about what to do about just about anything, I chose to get my advice from one source, Those Nerdy Girls , a bunch of brilliant female health care providers and public health specialists. I would just search their site for what to do about quarantine time or vaccination scheduling and that one answer was good enough for me, eliminating hours of cross checking and distress over conflicting answers.
And, for the love of all that is holy, don’t binge true crime shows. They just freak you out and make you believe that the world is much more dangerous than it is.
Remember: who is broadcasting? A news/broadcast company
What is their purpose? A commercial company’s purpose is to make money
How do they achieve their purpose? Advertiser money
How do they get that? Cultivating viewers who stay watching
How is that best achieved? Generate a deeply felt emotion that does not allow the viewer to look away — fear, anger, outrage
Yes, they are informing you, and that can be helpful;
but they are doing it in order to and in a way that makes money off of you.
Go ahead and turn off the tv.
Instead
I cannot recommend Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Amelia and Emily Nagoski strongly enough. I have been teaching stress coping skills for years, and I love how the Nagoskis describe the importance of discharging the stress that we accumulate through our days. The number one way (I bet you already know this, stored in the same place in your brain as you have stored The Mediterranean Diet…)
PHYSICAL ACTIVITY!
Shimmy in your seat RIGHT THIS MINUTE AS YOU ARE READING!
See how you feel better, right away? Isn’t that cool??
“Physical activity is what tells your brain you have successfully survived the threat and now your body is a safe place to live” say the Nagoskis. I love that. Isn’t it comfy and cozy to think of your body as a safe place to live?
For example, or, How the f#@*ing Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority taught me the importance of dancing in the bathroom:
So one evening we planned to take the commuter rail from Worcester to Newton to meet my folks for dinner. Again, you may already be able to guess where this is heading:
the train was delayed.
When we finally got on the train, it proceeded to crawl from stop to stop, slowing down in excruciating fashion before each stop, while pedestrians briskly walked past us below, arriving, I imagined, wherever they wanted to go whenever they wanted to be there. I texted my parents the ever-increasing estimated arrival times. They had enough time to go to different restaurants for sound level checks and reservation time options as this goddamn train crawled its way east. We rearranged pick up locations as well, and finally, hours later, we were all reunited at a restaurant that could seat us.
But, there I was, having experienced two hours of frustration and being trapped and having no one to yell at, but feeling like I really wanted to yell about something. And I was sitting at a small restaurant table with my dear family. I needed to discharge the anger because how silly to have finally gotten there and be sitting fuming at the MBTA. So I went to the bathroom and I danced around to the piped in music in front of the sinks. The anger went away. I sat back down and we had a fun and lovely dinner.
It is our body’s job to FEEL. And then it is our brain’s job to register, interpret, and plan. My body felt tense and tenser for two hours, so my brain was shouting “I HAVE BEEN WRONGED! ALL IS TERRIBLE!!” When my body moved and danced and enjoyed the music and was silly, my brain was forced into registering, “Oh, look at those moves!, that is a great song, hmmm, all seems to be well.” Even a totally fake and forced smile, done with the intent of trying to help yourself, helps with even a little shift and lightening of mood.
Try it next time you need a break from negativity. Three minutes, big shift.
More classic and awesome stress cycle dischargers:
Breathing: your breath is always with you, which means it is always available to pay attention to. I like to imagine filling my whole chest cavity up with a deep breath, from dropping your diaphragm, to filling up your lungs, to imagining you are filling up to your collarbones. Exhale for longer than you breathed in, and you get a down-regulation effect for your nervous system.
Positive social interaction: there really is nothing better than your girlfriends for making you feel better. And I love that science shows that a heyhowareya with the grocery checker or local barista gives you a meaningful mood boost.
Laughter: Parks & Rec, Brooklyn Nine Nine, The Office. And may I strongly recommend The IT Crowd, which is where The Best Popcorn Eating Gif originated.
Affection: get/give a hug. We know a sweet hug feels great. It was even recommended in an Emotional Freedom Technique training, which is super cool and involves tapping on acupressure points, so they know their somatics. And we all know how much our pets help. Go on and give yours a scritch and exchange long slow blinks with them: I. Love. You.
A “big ol’ cry:” I have to avoid tearjerker movies because sometimes a Folgers commercial can send me. I just cried hard at the Stay Gold Cheesy Boy episode of Reservation Dogs. But, I know those movies are out there, and a big ol’ cry is a great release. Another favorite fun fact: one researcher found that emotion tears have higher concentrations of proteins and stress-related substances than dust or allergy tears do!
Creative expression: here’s a picture of the bookshelf I wallpapered and hallway I painted the day after I ran a particularly stressful substance abuse prevention for adolescents group.
An hour and a half of a room full of 15 and 16 year old boys who wanted to drink and smoke pot and there I am at the white board, trying to help them process why that might not work out great for them. You feel pretty bad for me, right? I could not settle down the day after this one excruciating group, so I painted the whole hallway. It helped distract and center me, allowed me to observe and feel myself making progress and accomplishing something. And, I like that color green. It felt very good to just be immersed in it. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci’s self-determination theory explains that a key human need is competence or mastery, which means feeling capable, effective, and able to master challenges or build new skills. When you are able to see yourself progressing and succeeding, you feel good about keeping on going. Do it!
And finally, consider how you can add NATURE into any of those: take a deep breath outside under a tree and imagine your lungs filling with that oxygen and the tree’s phytoncides — super awesome airborne substances that trees release; stroll in the garden, water your plants, say hello to a favorite tree and tell it how impressive it is; come home and draw what you noticed outside. Nature gives us connection as well as awe, and being outside in the light helps us regulate our circadian rhythms, setting us up for a better night’s sleep. Don’t get hit by lightning, don’t get frostbite, don’t get lost. Otherwise, get out there and drink it in.
You deserve the good rest. It’s the fuel that keeps us going.
I coach women on how to create the space they need for rest and restoration.
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