Am I writing this post just to use the photos of Hoges that I took this afternoon?
Possibly
He is a cute dog and a very messy one who has never met a mud hole that he didn’t love
Nonetheless, this post is not about him
It’s rained a lot lately, every ditch and gully, pothole and divot, is full of water. The water isn’t clear, it’s muddy brown, and because of that, there isn’t much reflection.
And if there is no reflection, the photographer in me is a little annoyed, it seems a waste of a good puddle if I can’t see a reflection in it.
This made me think of our minds and how we can’t see anything in them when they are full of turbulence and distraction. When the mind is muddy, it becomes pretty useless.
Mine does, anyway.
A few months ago, my stress levels were apparently alarmingly high. Yet I didn’t feel anything; I was fine, fine, fine.
A bit preoccupied, distracted and worried, I suppose, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Yet my Garmin watch was tracking my stress, and it was telling me stress was stupidly high at night when I was supposed to be relaxed and recovering.
Stress is such an overused word, and we hardly comprehend it. It feels like a drama, something important, something imperative, something requiring an exclamation mark at the very least, and I just didn’t feel like I had anything of that sort of magnitude happening to me.
But wearable tech like my watch simply provides feedback of physical signs my body was sending it. Just because the app called it “stress” and I didn’t like the term didn’t mean something wasn’t occurring.
The bright orange bars on the graph and warnings when I checked my sleep data each morning began to get to me. So for a while, I stopped checking them. Which isn’t very helpful and certainly didn’t change the situation. I gingerly peeked a week later; the orange bars were even higher and thicker, and the scores were dire. Damn.
I take my health seriously. Sleep is incredibly important. Quality sleep staves off all sorts of deleterious diseases of aging that I do not want to attract.
I began hunting around for clues. Was it my husband’s snoring? Well, there was that, but nothing had changed there, so why was it suddenly adversely affecting me?
The first thing we humans almost universally do when faced with an issue as to what is causing something is to look around for what or who is to blame
Spoiler alert, it wasn’t my husband, even though he is to blame for many things
I knew that nothing “out there” was really causal. I am responsible for my own mental state. I just wasn’t sure what exactly I was doing to upset my Garmin while I was unconscious.
Difficult to question someone who is comatose, even trickier when you, as the interrogator, are also asleep. So I figured I had to get to the next best state – meditated.
Meditation works. It has always worked for me in the past. Unfortunately, I became a lapsed mediator due to being busy (which I know is the worst excuse not to meditate but here I was).
We cannot control anything “out there”, which is why I didn’t even bother analysing it. Obviously, somewhere inside, I was having a bad reaction, I needed to find out where.
My thoughts were the problem. Tuning into my thoughts, I was a bit shocked by the negativity I was producing throughout the day.
You would think sleep is an escape from thoughts. Actually, it is worse. Our dreams are just our subconscious replaying our thoughts back to us in new and creative ways.
Welcome to the nightmare.
Nightmares are not all ghouls and ghosts and post-traumatic stress. Nightmares are also arguments and pettiness, leftover rumination, agitation and unspent resentment. Nightmares continue whatever odious bile we have been thinking about all day. Nightmares are embarrassing things that we are too ashamed to even think about during daylight hours. Nightmares are repressed and depressed thoughts that we are not allowing ourselves to have because we are too busy being bloody skipdedo cheery.
Sigh
So I had to take a look at all that and do so honestly
I began working on my internal dialogue, particularly before I went to sleep. I returned to journaling and thought dumping and actively changing the negative patterns that I could see once I paid attention to them. But first, I had to let myself be heard. Properly. Not just jollying myself into being “not so negative, Kate”
It’s not a crime to be a bit sad and cranky, or even a lot sad and cranky. It’s frowned upon to inflict your mood on others, but you are allowed to inspect it in yourself. And we should do so honestly, out of respect for who we are as humans living this wild ride called life.
It took some time because I’m a complicated bit of paper, but it worked
The mud began to settle. I reignited my yoga practice, I incorporated box breathing, and I kept listening to my journal rants, even though sometimes it was with eyes rolled towards the ceiling. As much as we may try and deny our foibles and flaws during the day, or gloss over that small human whimper that wants to be heard, eventually, the whimper is going to become a roar, and the roar will increase our heart rate, and it will upset us, even if it has to do so while we sleep.
With time and attention, the alarming overnight orange graph lines faded and became a pretty calm blue again.
My sleep scores increased
My resting heart rate came down.
Everything stopped galloping
My mind became useful, and I actually began writing things other than boring monologues in my journal. God help me if anyone finds my journals – I have told my sister she is to come immediately if she hears news of my death (to put aside her terrible, paralysing grief – just for a moment) and burn the damn things. I should probably do it myself. Journals are – journals are beside the point, sorry, a moment of panic thinking of someone finding my journals
Sorry
Back to the very slippery point of this post
Here is a quick list that probably isn’t overly helpful (but we bloggers love a list) of all the ways in which to settle one’s mind in order to make it (eventually and with dedicated practice) clear and calm.
Meditate – just sit still and commit – use an app, a timer, a hammer – just do it
Exercise, but don’t flog yourself harder and fill your veins with even more cortisol – take it back a notch and try yoga, go for a walk
Get plenty of sleep – go to bed at the same time every night, no matter what. Yes, that means being firm and walking away from the television no matter how thrilling the latest episode of Yellowstone is or ruthlessly closing the book in the middle of a chapter
Breathe – intentionally – box breathing is excellent
Avoid social media – like the plague, it is
Journal – and have a backup plan for disposal of said journals (further note, never bitch in your journal about the person who is your backup plan, just in case they are also writing your eulogy). Listen to yourself, answer your own questions, ask yourself the things you need to know and discuss everything just as you would with a dear friend. Laugh at yourself, cry with yourself. If you haven’t worked it out – the relationship with yourself is incredibly important because you really need to get a good night’s sleep.
Eat healthy food and stay hydrated – standard stuff, I know, but it works, so I have to include it
Don’t waste your time reading fluffy blog posts about mindfulness with dog pictures
Why are you still reading this? you should be meditating whilst eating an apple and breathing – actually, scratch that, NO! You will choke. Don’t do that. One thing at a time.
Don’t take advice from bloggers and wellness gurus. Obviously, we are all flawed. Listen to yourself, and follow your own intuition. Again, journal – it’s the most important conversation we can have.
Life gets in the way of all sorts of good intentions. It’s turbulent, but we don’t have to be.
The mind is the CEO of the body for a reason – it impacts everything
Keep it clear. Keep it calm. Keep it meditated.
I forgot the importance of this for a hot minute, and if I weren’t such a fan of personal health tracking, I would have missed the timely reminder that our mind impacts our physical health, with quite serious consequences.
So to round up this somewhat sprawling and slippery pointed post
Here’s another photo of Hoges, because I can, and yep, he came out of this mud puddle and jumped all over me, and then I had to walk the rest of the way home with giant muddy paw prints all over my white shirt. But everyone who passed us smiled and waved.
It was a beautiful sunny sparkly evening after the rain. What’s not to enjoy?
Have a lovely day yourself 😊🐾🦴 take a walk – if it’s one thing to change in your life, to make your mind clearer, take a walk (or in your case Ellie, if you’re reading this, a roll💕) there is something magical about sunlight, oxygen and moving along at the same speed at which our brain processes things. It all just …clicks.
