I completely forgot to do a post yesterday!

This is what comes of doing things out of order, I guess.

Well, I’ll have to keep that in mind from now on.

It’s funny, this feels like a very busy weekend but there’s only three fixed points in it.

This afternoon I’m hosting something online for an hour. This evening I have to go somewhere for an hour and tomorrow evening I’m performing at an event.

So I have big chunks of the day today and the whole daytime tomorrow but still my brain is feeling like ‘Well, that’s a really busy weekend.’

And I think that’s just a sign of how my time feels a bit slippery overall. I always have trouble with a mental clock and a mental calendar but over the past year it has been even more difficult to make the connection between the actual clock/calendar and the one in my brain. I’ve been caught by surprise more often than usual with things like not realizing that the 19th and Tuesday were the same day. Or forgetting that after lunch for me means after 2PM but for other people, it might mean 12:30.

I suspect that I need to spend more time figuring out a calendar and a schedule that is closer to my mental perception of both. And that I probably need more dedicated rest than I am regularly getting.

The rest is not going to come easy because this is a very busy time with setting up things for the future.

But I think that if I really focus for the next few days and then some of the next week, I will be able to get myself into a position where other people can take up more of the tasks at hand.

Some days I feel like thinking into this space.

Some days, I just feel like posting a monster.

I had a great work day yesterday.

I got to my desk pretty early and I felt a sense of ease in my tasks – no sense of being rushed or of trying to fit too much in – and I had lots of time to do some family/personal tasks too.

I like my new/renewed approach of thinking in terms of ‘ working on’ instead of ‘finishing’ things.

After a great day yesterday, I was kind of expecting to be too tired to work steadily today but it’s early afternoon and I have been able to work in the way I wanted to work for most of the morning.

So, that’s pretty good, I think!

Most of the time I make my way to my desk around 9 or 9:30am and putter along through my day.

That gives me a decent amount of work time in the morning and then I do a few more hours after lunch.

However, sometimes, if I have a lot of work ahead of me or if I have a strict deadline, I get to my desk around 8am instead.

Usually, on those days, I enjoy a feeling of clear focus and it feels like I am striding forward through the busyness.

Today I found myself wondering if it is just the clarity of the deadline that gives me that feeling or if it is the fact that I started my work day earlier.

I’m sure rhe deadline is a major factor but I am going to get started early today to see how it affects my feelings about my workday.

Science!

(Ok, maybe not science. Maybe it’s just science adjacent. Carry on.)

So, a few months ago, when I was still struggling with the worst of my seasonal depression (this year’s bout was complicated by grief, of course), I was working on relaxing.

‘Working on relaxing’ is a ridiculous phrase but an apt one.

At a certain point, my nervous system got so revved up that I couldn’t relax naturally. I had to make a conscious choice to do so.

Or, perhaps more accurately, my physical and mental stress was so high that casual relaxation didn’t bring it down enough for me to actually feel the effects.

It was the equivalent of drinking a cup of tea that someone refills every time you put your cup down. Sure, you could keep holding your cup so the refill doesn’t happen but then your hand and arm getting tired and you end up stressed out in a different way.

So, yeah, that was happening.

In order to lower my resting point, I started doing relaxation exercises. They were really helping and I was starting to feel better.

Then, practically overnight, my overall feeling of depression lifted.

It was such a relief.

I felt great.

My head was clear.

I was no longer just putting one foot in front of the other.

And that’s when I made the classic blunder.

(I’ll give you a minute to go through the Princess Bride quote…)

Yep, I stopped doing the relaxation exercises.

And I didn’t notice for a while because the heaviest weight had been lifted and that felt so good that the smaller issues weren’t as obvious.

Lately though, I’ve noticed that I’m a little too revved up about small things, that I’m unnecessarily tense.

It’s time to bust out those relaxation exercises again before things get any harder.

Because I don’t need to wait to feel really bad before making myself feel better.

I can lay the foundations for feeling better at any time.

And I’m starting now.