Seven Habits of a "Highly Effective" Erinn

[A note from the editor (haha): I started writing this on Wednesday night, and revisited it several times between then and when I published it to try and get it to a place that feels solid. Even though Wednesday was a day of big relaxation, it was also a day of big progress, and by the end of all that, my brain felt pretty jubbly (which may have also had to do with being at the end of a couple weeks of flitting around from Melatonin to Magnesium to CBD to Benadryl, in attempts to get to and stay asleep - which worked until it didn't). As a measure of the 'psychological flexibility' I'm working to grow (more on that below), despite my history of 'getting it all out in one sitting' when I write, I opted to set it down then and revisit later. I think the writing below is all the better for it, good evidence that I deserve to offer myself some shifts :)  With that note registered, here's the post.]

Ooooof. Deep breath. Lots of them. I both love and loath this satirical title. 

'Highly Effective.' Something I thought I WAS to my core until anxiety came to get me. While I started experiencing insomnia on occasion in November, it became more frequent and intense in mid-April and has become chronic, which was the trigger for me to seek help. I got access to that help a couple weeks ago, when I started talking with a therapist and a sleep psychologist. Long story short, all signs have pointed to anxiety I've been able to muscle my way through until I couldn't anymore and it broke my sleep.

It's been frustrating to not know WHY the dam broke, but break it has, and now there's some hard work to do in the wake of that. So I'm working hard - not to rebuild the dam, but to find more flexible ways for the currents to pass through. I will say that in talking with my dear friend Jesse today, she helped me realize that the intensification of my insomnia (along with mysteriously developing a B.O. smell when I've never had that before) times perfectly with when I had my IUD removed. MIND. BLOWN. This, paired with the therapist having noted that hormonal changes due to pregnancy can be culprits of anxiety formation, gave me a WHY on Wednesday, and that's feeling really good. A great deal of the pressure that's been building and remaining in my chest in the last couple weeks was released with this revelation. It has definitely snuck back in a bit, but I gained a bit of ability to feel it there, yet also say to it "Hi. I see you, and I understand a little better why you might be there, and that's helping me."

So here, in a return to writing after a couple week break, I take some time to identify and consider what I'm jokingly referring to - as a way to cultivate some fucking levity (!!!) - as the "Seven Habits of a 'Highly Effective' Erinn." It's tongue in cheek, as I feel I'm learning these 'habits' or tendencies are both what pull me down and bring me up. It has been hard for me to learn, while I seek help, that things I like about myself - that feel like part of who I am (like moving a mile a minute) - are also causing me pain. In other words, they kept me "highly effective," until they didn't. As a part of this big process, I'm trying to consider these tendencies as things that need examining rather than extermination, working to negate how they hinder and uplift how they help. I think it will help me say to them "Hi. I see you, and I understand a little better why you might be there, and how you might go from hurting to helping me." So here goes:

1. Habit - Efficiency: My approach to 'getting things done' has been, for as long as I can remember, moving through them as quickly as possible, in order to have any 'free time' at all. While I have long seen this as efficiency, talking with the therapist I've started seeing has help me come to see that this is also a way I can move around without having to really feel the present. Subconsciously, it's perhaps been a way to stave off anxiety that's now moved from the background to the foreground. The therapist asking me to pick something up at half and quarter speed of how I usually move around really made this clear for me. In the couple weeks since, it has been really helpful for me to ask myself to SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. All the time. Is it causing me to get (just a little) less done in a day? Yes. Is it helping? Yes, it feels like it. Interrogating my physical and mental habits is feeling really hard - it feels like it's taking up all of the brain space and time I don't have to dedicate to caring for Niko and keeping myself functioning well enough to manage my work commitments. It also feels like something I NEED to do. I am working toward accepting this not as something that needs to be solved as quickly as possible, but an ongoing project that will take as much time as it needs. A relaxed project, if you will. All of this said, I do believe there is still space for managing my time Efficiently - I just have to learn how to do it without employing the kind of hyper-speed that keeps me from really feeling the present.
2. Habit - Conscious Consideration: I've long prided myself on being someone who consciously considers what's going on in her mind. I've maintained a pretty consistent journal practice since 8th grade (I've got a whole row of black and white composition notebooks on a shelf in my basement to prove it) as a way to sort it all out and figure out what to do with it all. And this was effective. Until it wasn't. While crying talking about all this during a recent session, the therapist asked if I ever cry while I write. After giving it a little thought, I realized that I NEVER cry when I write, but I cry when talking with people about this (and plenty of other things - I've never been shy about feeling the feels in front of people) ALL. THE. TIME. It seems sorting my thoughts by myself sometimes causes me to logic my way into solutions without feeling my way through what's going on at any give time, which I'm thinking might be contributing to my anxiety. It's been really helpful to realize that, while writing may assist me in thinking logically my through challenges, it does NOT provide an outlet for the emotions that come with. Since realizing this, I've been actively seeking people to talk with about all this, and it's really helping. It seems that Conscious Consideration can remain one of my super-powers, IF it's done both by myself in writing AND verbally with other people.
3. Habit - Assessing Critically: As I've been working my way through this learning process and coming upon new tools that might be help fun yet challenging for me to employ, my first thoughts have often been things like "Oof. Good luck, Erinn." As much as I consider myself a pretty positive person, I often subconsciously frame things about myself negatively. I think I need to work on harnessing that self-talk toward better ends, critically assessing them and arriving to something more like, with this example, "You've done plenty of hard things and you'll do it again." Assessing Critically imply the application of an objective lens, which can help me strip the negativity away in attempt/s to understand how my attention to my thoughts can help me. 
4. Habit - Two-Sidedness: Part of me thinks I need to recognize the 'negatives' of how I think and act in order to reframe them. Another part of me thinks that seeing things I usually like about myself as negative has added to my difficulties as of late. The 'negative' v. 'positive' of this reminds me I of mainstay of Chinese philosophy 'Yin & Yang,' but I'm beginning to think there is a third space (or maybe fourth and fifth spaces and beyond, too). As much as we often want it to be, it seems life is rarely ever as uncomplicated as 'This bad, this good,' or even 'Sometimes this bad, sometimes this good.' Perhaps the tendencies and habits that are part of what make a person who they are manifest differently at different times in life, in response to different challenges and excitements. It seems that what is necessary to accessing these third, fourth, fifth spaces is having enough psychological flexibility to accept and respond to WHAT IS. Not 'What was supposed to be' or 'What I wanted it to be,' WHAT IS. Perhaps the two sides here are not 'the only two ways a situation can unfold - how I expected v. anything else,' but whether or not WHAT IS will be accepted in order to move to responsiveness based in calm self-trust.
5. Habit - Thinking Forward: When thinking through something, I tend to move very quickly from what is happening in the present to what could happen, a practice in which I tend to let fear of negative future outcomes take the fore. I've experienced this over and over again, with a specific example being fear that one night of difficult sleep for Niko will turn into him not sleeping well from there on out. While this fear has yet to manifest, something Kris reminds me of frequently when he's trying to help, it just keeps coming, in this example and with many others. Once again, I think I need to lean into developing more 'psychological flexibility,' a concept I came across when learning more about 'Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (upon suggestion of the therapist with whom I've been talking). I believe being able to accept what is will help me figure out how to commit my tendency to Think Forward toward flexible plans rather than fears.
6. Habit - Considering Long-Term Affects: Related to the above discussion is my tendency to assume - when considering the long-haul - that things I am fearing will become permanent when they haven't even happened! Take the example of when Niko has a tough night's sleep. Not only do I think forward to it becoming a pattern, I tend to assume that the pattern will be permanent! Not helpful. That said, I do think part of how I've been able to live a conscientious life is my tendency to consider the long(er)-term affects of my actions, both on me and on others. I think this tendency can be committed toward good in my life if I focus on it generating thoughtfulness rather than fear.
7. Habit - Taking Everything Seriously: While I consider myself a joyful, fun-loving and funny person, I take most of what comes at me and what I do very seriously (even the creation of joy and fun - perhaps because much of my work, which I take seriously because I want others to do so too - involves the creation of joy and fun). This tendency has made building, much less maintaining, a much-needed sense of levity hard for me, but it has also been part of what has allowed me to accomplish a lot of things of which I'm proud! Writing my first exclamation point within the body of this post feels like a little levity. I feel that encouraging myself to feel more levity - about everything, really - would work wonders in my ability to build that psychological flexibility I've been talking about. In other words, if I take what comes at me a little less seriously, I believe I will be less likely to see each thing that goes differently than I expected as potential for a permanent crisis. Doing so would leave more room for seriousness surrounding things that might actually yield significant consequences. 

So, there it is. My "Seven Habits of a 'Highly-Effective' Erinn." It's felt really difficult but encouraging to identify and assess these tendencies, taking them from things I like about myself to things that are causing me pain to understanding that these are things that will likely continue to hinder and help me. The encouraging part is that the more I understand and accept these things, the more likely I am to be able to direct them toward the later. 

I do have fear that getting help might be making things worse, or creating problems I don't really have: I've never been more down on myself since starting therapy and appointments with a sleep specialist. I feeling like I still LOVE myself, as I always have, but that I don't LIKE myself right now. I HONESTLY don't feel that anyone else struggling with aspects of their mental health is weak, but I tend to think that way about myself. Despite evidence that my current experience of anxiety has manifested due to the hormonal change of having my IUD taken out, I'm having a hard time letting go of the belief that the anxiety first I experienced two years ago while breastfeeding Niko hasn't gone away but I've been muscling my way through it until now - leaving me to think that I should be able to just keep doing that. Regardless of the why, between the near-constant tightness in my chest, crying to hysteria more often than I'd like and lack of reliable, quality sleep, I DO LOVE and DON'T LIKE myself right now, and that's why I'm getting help. I'm starting to recognize the fears at the root of this as what they are - fears, not reality - and I'm committed to working my way past those fears and toward seeing my 'seven habits' not as 'problems to be fixed' but 'tendencies to reframe.'

And now feels like the right time. It HAS to be the right time. Emergent anxiety has broken my sleep! It is helpful to remember that I have help with the day-to-day and grant writing for Rhythmically Speaking for the first time, which has helped to ease up what has previously felt, mostly, like manageable commitments. I actually DON'T feel all that stressed or overextended, a state of being I have come, since finishing grad school I think, to not prize. While this may be part of why I have felt confused about why anxiety hit now, it might also be part of why this is the juncture at which things I haven't known are packed away are begging to be unpacked.

I DO LOVE myself. I think - or at least I have thought before - that I'm pretty fucking rad. And I know I can think that again. It's already starting. So for now, I will say thank you for reading (assuming anyone does!), state that if any of this resonated with you that you can and will like yourself again too. 

With that, I will wrap this up, post it, enjoy some down time and pop a Benadryl before bed. Because yes it's getting me to sleep in the short-term, yes getting several nights of solid sleep in a row will help me with ALL OF THIS, no it is not habit-forming and yes it's ok to take night after night if need be say both the sleep psychologist and family-doc-dad, and no it does not have to become permanent! G'nite :)