Do you ever have those days where you look around your house or you get to work and you look around at what needs to be done and it just is completely uninspiring?
Like putting the dishes away, again. Starting a load of laundry, again. Showing up at that meeting with those people, again. It's boring. No sparkle, no ta-da, no adrenaline dopamine rush, just I did what I was supposed to even when I didn't want to.
We've been hearing about how phones, social media, and 2-day delivery have really disrupted happy hormones in our brains. We get bored more easily, our attention spans are decreasing, and overall we're less satisfied.
When we think about big projects or big inspired ideas or even horrible things that we don't want to do that we've been putting off, we get a bump in all our excitement signals. Our hearts beat faster, we're pumped (or stressed), and we put our feet to the pavement and we get shit done, excited for the big payoff and it's great and we love it - YAY!! That's sexy.
Maybe you wait until your house is a huge mess, or you put off that project until the last minute, or you give up on daily gentle movement for weeks and weeks until you feel like crap and then you look around and you're annoyed, scared, or you saw a new shiny program to try from a Facebook ad. You're living and creating false scenarios of stressful, sexy, situations so you can get that bump, and live on that high of crazy mom energy. Some people call this self-sabotage. Some people see it as a trauma response from living in environments of high stress where they struggle to manage the low-risk situations in their lives.
And hey, before I go further let me say that I am right there with you. I have been fixing up my fixer-upper and I have gotten to a point where my BIG work is kind of over. Now I have to do that little stuff, keep up with the cleaning of the freshly painted rooms, blah.
As we head into this dark season where it can be less sexy let's try to embrace the unsexy of it all. I think this is why right after Halloween we jump right into Christmas. Fall is sexy, it's nice and it tastes good and there are colors and activities. Then the days get short, it gets cold and rainy or snowy or muddy, and that sucks. Our physiology changes as the days get shorter, our bodies naturally respond to less sunlight and are triggered for more sleep, and when our sleep is disrupted our production of happy hormones get all messed up too. We've all heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
So when we jump into bright shiny sparkly cheery Christmas right away it makes us feel better, especially when actually getting ready for whatever holiday you celebrate in the winter can be a really busy time, sometimes made worse when you're fighting against your natural biological rhythms.
These gap times, the few weeks, here in the US, between November 1st and whenever Thanksgiving is, and then again from New Years until ... St. Patrick's Day? Easter? Spring Break? Life can feel kinda boring, low stress, low sexiness, the doldrums I think is a word to describe this. And we look around at all the boring things we just don't want to do.
Ok all that to say LET'S EMBRACE UNSEXY!. Everything we want is only a mindshift away right? And I'm not saying don't put on your holiday music and don't delay bringing out all the twinkle lights, because Goddess knows we do need to embrace as much joy as we can get in the world these days. But I think what I am trying to say is when you look around and you don't want to do all the unsexy things and you have no big monumental shiny projects to distract you from the undone to-do list, maybe just give thanks for the unsexy time.
Thinking 'Wow, I have nothing big hanging over my head, if folding this laundry while I watch trash TV is the worst thing to do today I am killing it'
Or if you're getting a little tired of the routine that was so exciting just a few weeks or months ago, to the point where you are on the verge of giving up because it's just so blah, change that frown into an 'It's amazing how when I started doing this I would get all excited, and now that I've been consistent for so long, it's part of my life now, this consistency is doing great things for me'.
I know maybe this is a hard sell. Trust me, as I look at the dishes on my counter this morning and my lack of walls to paint, I'm not thrilled. But the unsexy things gotta get done, so I can bitch and moan and feel miserable about it, or NOT!
