summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2015-04-08 11:23 am
summercomfort) wrote2015-04-08 11:23 am
(no subject)
So a random offhand comment by a friend the other day about Catholic indulgences made me think about the idea of Indulgence in my life.
I used to be able to say "okay, imma do this" and then just go and do it. Sure, if "this" is odious I might procrastinate or whine, but never in a way that ends up inhibiting my actual ability to do the thing in question. To-do lists worked.
For the past year, this has no longer been true. And I've basically been trying to figure out why, and how to get some of that back.
I think part of it is still that niggling fear/apprehension from 2013 (holy cow has it been so long?). I pushed myself too hard and the miscarriage happened, and that brought up a lot of questions of "why am I working so hard" and "is my life sustainable" and "if I did have a baby would I be at all ready to embrace the life change." And basically since then my life has been in "baby anticipation mode" -- not eating cold things, not drinking alcohol, trying to eat healthy, trying not to overload on work, etc. Even though the moratorium is technically over, I still do most of those things. I can't figure out if it's out of guilt or fear or habit.
But part of that is that whenever I think about doing something, there's that hesitation there. That "maybe" or "but what if" that keeps me from just throwing myself into some task. It's like I don't trust myself anymore.
Of course, when I was teaching, there was a rock hard schedule. There were clear, immediate needs that had to be addressed, so it wasn't so obvious. That hesitation was very brief before I plowed forward. It's what happens when you have your back to the wall.
It's different with my current job, because there's very little of that. The hesitation can linger, can distract, can seek alternate channels.
Which brings me to the indulgences.
Too often in recent months I find myself going through the following cycle:
1) "Oh yeah, I'm going to do this!!!"
2) ::looks away and does the exact opposite::
3) "What am I doing I'm a horrible person" ::guiltguiltguilt::
4) Either embrace #2 and take it to the extreme (the "I'm too far gone"), or attempt double down on #1 as a form of self-castigation. (Which isn't really the right attitude for #1, which then repeats the process.)
Examples:
- vowing to eat healthy, then turning around and eating all the chocolate I can find. "Maybe I can eat healthy after I've removed all the chocolate from my presence"
- vowing to sleep early and wake up early, then turning around to stay up until 1 or 2am reading fic. "Well, if I wake up early that'll force me to fix my schedule"
- vowing to put in a solid day's work, then turning around and spend 3 hours online. "I feel more comfortable doing work after work anyways, so I'm just getting the procrastinating out of the way."
Basically whenever I hit that moment of hesitation, I turn to all these indulgences, like salami and chocolate, like fic and tv, like tumblr and chat. Easy indulgences, immediate channels for that sense of fear. Instead of hitting a rock and being forced to go forward, it hits all these alternatives and takes them.
So: hesitation + indulgences is a bad combo.
So what I can do about it?
1) I feel like I've already done a lot in the past few months of Working Through Issues to cut down on some of the hesitation. I no longer associate work with a sense of dread, so that's good. I think one thing I'm going to try for is picking smaller tasks that can be done in less than 30 minutes, and just tackling those. Sometimes I spend too much time trying to coordinate those tasks into something more time-efficient, but maybe at this juncture it's better to have accomplished 4 tasks in the wrong order than to have accomplished none because I was too busy trying to accomplish 6 tasks in the correct order.
2) Exercise more meta-cognition when I start to stray into indulgences. I've kind of proved to myself that availability is not the issue -- even when there's no chocolate in the house, I *somehow find a way*. So I need to be better at harnessing these distractive, indulgence moments. They should be 5-minute micro-moments and not hour-long binges. Every time I feel like eating chocolate I should channel that rastive energy elsewhere.
3) Come up with good alternatives.
Absolute rigidity doesn't help because it just leads to rebellion/meltdown later. But maybe having a limited palette of choices? Like, "either do THIS or THAT," and have both options be good, productive options? And also adjusting the indulgences to be something more fruitful as well?
Of course, all of these require me having the mental energy to self-intervene. Do I have the willpower to re-exert meta-cognitive control over my life and not just run from one indulgence to the next?
Let's see how I do this afternoon. :)
I used to be able to say "okay, imma do this" and then just go and do it. Sure, if "this" is odious I might procrastinate or whine, but never in a way that ends up inhibiting my actual ability to do the thing in question. To-do lists worked.
For the past year, this has no longer been true. And I've basically been trying to figure out why, and how to get some of that back.
I think part of it is still that niggling fear/apprehension from 2013 (holy cow has it been so long?). I pushed myself too hard and the miscarriage happened, and that brought up a lot of questions of "why am I working so hard" and "is my life sustainable" and "if I did have a baby would I be at all ready to embrace the life change." And basically since then my life has been in "baby anticipation mode" -- not eating cold things, not drinking alcohol, trying to eat healthy, trying not to overload on work, etc. Even though the moratorium is technically over, I still do most of those things. I can't figure out if it's out of guilt or fear or habit.
But part of that is that whenever I think about doing something, there's that hesitation there. That "maybe" or "but what if" that keeps me from just throwing myself into some task. It's like I don't trust myself anymore.
Of course, when I was teaching, there was a rock hard schedule. There were clear, immediate needs that had to be addressed, so it wasn't so obvious. That hesitation was very brief before I plowed forward. It's what happens when you have your back to the wall.
It's different with my current job, because there's very little of that. The hesitation can linger, can distract, can seek alternate channels.
Which brings me to the indulgences.
Too often in recent months I find myself going through the following cycle:
1) "Oh yeah, I'm going to do this!!!"
2) ::looks away and does the exact opposite::
3) "What am I doing I'm a horrible person" ::guiltguiltguilt::
4) Either embrace #2 and take it to the extreme (the "I'm too far gone"), or attempt double down on #1 as a form of self-castigation. (Which isn't really the right attitude for #1, which then repeats the process.)
Examples:
- vowing to eat healthy, then turning around and eating all the chocolate I can find. "Maybe I can eat healthy after I've removed all the chocolate from my presence"
- vowing to sleep early and wake up early, then turning around to stay up until 1 or 2am reading fic. "Well, if I wake up early that'll force me to fix my schedule"
- vowing to put in a solid day's work, then turning around and spend 3 hours online. "I feel more comfortable doing work after work anyways, so I'm just getting the procrastinating out of the way."
Basically whenever I hit that moment of hesitation, I turn to all these indulgences, like salami and chocolate, like fic and tv, like tumblr and chat. Easy indulgences, immediate channels for that sense of fear. Instead of hitting a rock and being forced to go forward, it hits all these alternatives and takes them.
So: hesitation + indulgences is a bad combo.
So what I can do about it?
1) I feel like I've already done a lot in the past few months of Working Through Issues to cut down on some of the hesitation. I no longer associate work with a sense of dread, so that's good. I think one thing I'm going to try for is picking smaller tasks that can be done in less than 30 minutes, and just tackling those. Sometimes I spend too much time trying to coordinate those tasks into something more time-efficient, but maybe at this juncture it's better to have accomplished 4 tasks in the wrong order than to have accomplished none because I was too busy trying to accomplish 6 tasks in the correct order.
2) Exercise more meta-cognition when I start to stray into indulgences. I've kind of proved to myself that availability is not the issue -- even when there's no chocolate in the house, I *somehow find a way*. So I need to be better at harnessing these distractive, indulgence moments. They should be 5-minute micro-moments and not hour-long binges. Every time I feel like eating chocolate I should channel that rastive energy elsewhere.
3) Come up with good alternatives.
Absolute rigidity doesn't help because it just leads to rebellion/meltdown later. But maybe having a limited palette of choices? Like, "either do THIS or THAT," and have both options be good, productive options? And also adjusting the indulgences to be something more fruitful as well?
Of course, all of these require me having the mental energy to self-intervene. Do I have the willpower to re-exert meta-cognitive control over my life and not just run from one indulgence to the next?
Let's see how I do this afternoon. :)