How doing nothing feels counter-intuitive but is often the best advice.
I've been feeling a bit flat for the last couple of days. Nothing major, I've just not got my usual energy and enthusiasm. I don't feel either happy or sad. Just a bit nothingy.
I'm feeling unusually impatient and short-tempered, which isn't at all like me. I am also experiencing slight anger but with irrationally large internal mental consequences. When somebody mentions something irrelevant but nevertheless annoying in a conversation, within minutes in my head I have planned exactly which implement I am going to use to bludgeon them to death with. I must add that that is rather out of character.
Things that normally feel inspiring, I now think are 'boooring'.
The food I normally love to eat, I can't be bothered with.
There's nothing on tv.
All 150 books that I've bought because I needed them but have never read - I'm just not in the mood for any of them.
Music sucks, (apart from music from the year 1984 which can always cheer me up).
I am like the angsty, stroppy, teenage version of myself within the confines of my own head, and I'm trying desperately not to project that out into the outside world and on to unassuming innocents such as my wife and children.
My mind is trying hard to get rid of this feeling. It's telling me that there's something wrong and that I shouldn't feel this way. Normal people don't feel this way. It's telling me that this is a result of something I've done, or not done. It's saying I am stupid and that I've taken steps backwards, just look at how good you were doing.
I have a head full of really bad and unhelpful advice, disguised as the voice of someone who pretends to be my best friend forever.
But, I know better than that. I'm not fooled by that idiotic chatterbox inside my head. It's conned me too many times in the past with its useless counsel.
I'm going to stick to something I've tried and tested and that I know works. It's some of the best advice I've ever received and also ever given. It's a big one.
Here it comes.
I'm going to do.........
Nothing.
I'm going to do absolutely nothing. I'm going to resist every temptation, every thought, every urge to want to push this uncomfortable feeling away and to make it change. I'm going to stop judging myself for having it, and I'm going to sit here with it, feel it, experience it, even befriend it.
It goes totally against any advice my mind will offer me and that's why it works so wonderfully well.
To sit here in discomfort, either emotional or physical (did I mention that my shoulder is niggling me and my mind has already decided my yoga and Qi Gong days are over for good?), and to be totally okay with it and not want to change it, is a powerful antidote to the mind's doomsday forecasts.
Nothing. No-thing.
Comments