A quick note: It’s always been a bit of a loose program over here but I wanted to let you know that I plan to scale back to 1 post and 1 roundup a month for a while. Work has been kicking my butt and we’re getting a puppy next week! Both good things in their own way, but it means less energy to devote here. I’m hopeful it’s just a particularly busy season and I’ll be able to get back to more frequent posts soon.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
<3 Cat
A few months ago the latest in a long line of medical professionals told me that I needed to relax. I am relaxed! I always want to argue, defensive. But the absurdity of such a statement stops it before it reaches my lips.
They usually suggest I keep a healthy diet, exercise regularly, and maintain good sleep habits. They sometimes suggest yoga and meditation to which I respond, oh yeah I actually teach both, to which they say, oh, good, and we smile at each other. I thank them to the tune of $30-200, whatever my insurance feels like charging me, and go about my days with my irregular heartbeat and my irritable gut and my dysfunctional muscle groups and my aural migraines. (All minor inconveniences in the grand scheme of things and for that I’m thankful.) The next time I’m at the grocery store I make my way to the tea aisle and think, I really gotta relax, and I stand there for about 20 minutes deliberating over which tea will be the most calming.1
Aging seems to be having a mellowing effect, but after 37 years of living I’ve concluded that I’m just an inherently nervous person. I’ve led a pretty charmed life. Most of my problems are of my own making and most of them on the benign end of the spectrum, nothing debilitating. But still, I startle easily and often. I’m a worrywart to the bone, able to catastrophize and compartmentalize with the best of them. I’m annoyed, though not surprised, that my husband’s resting heart rate is a good 15 beats per minute lower than mine.2 I have to regularly remind myself throughout the day to take a breath that goes past my chest, to stop bracing my gut like I’m expecting a punch, to unclench my butt cheeks. I won’t tell you what my attachment style is. I frequently dream of spreadsheets.
On a call with my deeply compassionate manager a few months back (hi Nicole, if you’re reading), she kindly interrupted me and said, Cat you’re spiraling!, and we both laughed, because she gets it, and because 30 seconds before I started spiraling I had responded to her question about how my day was by saying, I’m good, everything’s good, no problems, and then immediately spiraled.
But, back to this latest doctor. A PT this time, also a kind and compassionate person. She sent me home with some advice that I’ve actually found useful. After her repeated cues to relax were met with little to no physical response from me (despite, of course, my confidence that I was complying…and I hate to fail a test) she said: For you, relaxing might be an action. She was talking about a muscular action and cued me through an exercise (which worked!) but her words have been echoing in my head since.
Relaxing might be an action.
Meaning: it wasn’t doing nothing. Meaning: it wasn’t something I sit around and passively wait for, for relaxation to simply settle over me or for agitation to dissipate on its own. Meaning: it might require work.
Maybe this is obvious to you, but for me it’s new.3 It’s contradictory. It’s revelatory! It feels promising. Maybe I’m not actually incapable of relaxing, I’ve just been going about it the wrong way.
More than that, it makes sense with what I know about myself and the other types of things that allow me to quiet my busy brain: exercise, breath work, mantra, repetition, routine. These things require engagement, they require me to do something. They require the worrywart part of my brain to pay close attention to a specified task while the other part gets to chill out a bit. If I can manage it, I occasionally get a taste of that sweet, sweet elusive flow state or inner peace or whatever you want to call it.4
I can’t think my way into relaxation. It’s a lesson I continually forget, or maybe just refuse to learn in the first place. Things go best for me when I get out of my head for a little while each day. That old mind-body symbiosis.
And here’s the crazy thing. Focusing on the physical side of things with these PT exercises has allowed me to approach some of my well worn emotional narratives from a different angle. My brain, unbidden, has trotted out all sorts of stuff from 10, 15, 20 years ago for reappraisal, asking, Are we ready to look at this again? It all feels a little Freudian for my liking, this emotional repression, but it is what it is.
I feel like someone just handed me a new tool to chip away at the shell I’ve built up — the little behaviors and habits that calcified over time to protect the belief that xyz thing was actually not a big deal and totally didn’t affect me at all bc I’m a very chill person.5 I went in for a specific physical issue and here I am having emotional revelations. The body really does keep the score.
It feels more than a little navel-gazey to be writing about this right now. There are bigger problems at hand, bigger tragedies and catastrophes, for sure. The world does not, in fact, revolve around me and my tiny epiphanies. But it feels related to the understanding that (reminder: self-identified worrywart to the bone) the bad times are here to stay, they’re just gonna keep on coming, so I better get better at coping. I don’t want to sing in the doomsday choir. I’ve already done that and it doesn’t help anything. You have to play the hand you’re dealt and I want to be able to create good times within the bad, even if it’s just for those in my immediate vicinity.
The lesson I’m taking is that everything I want and need requires doing. It requires building, forging, learning, effort. Everything. Even caring. Even relaxing. It’s all active engagement, it’s all participation. But the good news is, it’s all something I might get better at with a little practice.
On a big kick with Rishi’s Lavender Mint lately, fwiw.
I have since stopped wearing a fitness tracker, preferring not to know.
A funny revelation for someone who teaches yoga, but a little inside baseball: the people who need yoga the most are often the ones who become teachers.
See also: a really good book or art that short circuits my brain through sheer sensory overload, but that’s a different type of relaxing, I think.
And some of these things really, truly, aren’t a big deal. Small slights or comments or misunderstandings that, for whatever reason, my brain really took to heart. Even so, knowing they’re ultimately small potatoes I can still say, yeah maybe it’s not a big deal but it did hurt, that part is real, but maybe we can move on.
oh hiiiii! 😊 👋
A message so many of us need right now. Taking relaxation action to heart, as well as the message about not getting caught in the doomsday choir trap.