This morning after 7.5 hours of sleep, plenty in other words, I felt horrible. Well, actually, I felt anxious and bad. More precisely I felt 2 out of 5 as shown at the right side of this graph of the last 7 days:
I was thinking a couple of things in a loop, which were basically as follows:
I am not going to succeed at getting out of bed and getting going because I feel horrible and useless, and this is what happens sometimes and is unavoidable and when it happens I am helpless before it and so I am not going to achieve my goals.
I think if I lie here and think my way around this problem I can get into a better mood and then I can get up.
Then I remembered something I had tried yesterday or the day before when I was feeling down. It wasn’t the exact same thing but similar.
I’d been feeling unmotivated and exhausted and like I just wanted to be useless, and I decided that I would stop thinking about it and handle my fundamentals and then reassess and see if I felt better or worse. I’d gotten the sink cleaned, the table cleaned, and all the beds made, and reassessed, and noticed I felt much better.
So then I thought, maybe I should do the opposite of my instinct here, and instead of thinking myself into a better mood, I should stop thinking, handle certain fundamentals of the hour, and then reassess.
I got up, took a cold shower, and reassessed, and I felt a lot different upon reassessment.
As soon as I realized I was feeling so different I decided to punch this newsletter out to capture it, so I’m still feeling almost exactly the same:
1) My anxiety is still present but it’s optimistic and motivating instead of pessimistic and paralyzing
2) The gluttony I feel about time has passed
3) I feel instead like I can achieve my goals
What’s interesting here is that I did not exert an enormous amount of willpower to get into action. I just decided to change my effort from mental to physical.
I don’t know if this will work as well next time, but I think it has worked for me in the past, and I think it’s an important “Another One Of Those” for me to be aware of, and I can see there is the beginnings of a useful principle that works for me that I can remember next time I run into Another One Of Those.
Move Your Muscles* Thoughtlessly to Physically Act Your Way Out of A Paralyzing Mood
* Yes mom this sounds like Dr. Low
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