Thursday List: 5

Things I am grateful for, for real.

 

1.     Awesome family and friends.

2.     Eggs.

3.     Murder mysteries.

4.     Cardio exercise, especially spin and swimming.

5.     Sweaters.

 

Obviously not an exhaustive list.  What’s on yours?

Gratitude 2

I have a Secret Weapon that helps with gratitude practice.  I learned it from the amazing and talented Bronwyn Emery of Live. Write. Be.

(This is a plug for Bronwyn and her coaching services.  She is an awesome and talented person with a gift for drawing good work out of people who write.  Check out what she has to offer here.)

 

If gratitude practice in the classical sense doesn’t work, may I recommend What Went Well and Why.  Here’s how it works.  Every day, you notice three things that went well and you write them down and then you also write down why they went well.  The trick is that you have to say what you did to make that thing go well.

 

Let me give an example.  Let’s say you notice that you had a fabulous workout.  That went well.  When it comes to why, you don’t get to say it was because your trainer is amazing.  You need to look at what you did and maybe you’ll write that it went well because you actually showed up instead of crawling back in bed or because you have finally figured out how to breathe and do pushups at the same time or because you didn’t let how mad you were at your boss derail you, but in fact used the rage as power.

 

What I like about this practice is that not only does it train us to notice the good stuff like gratitude does, but it also builds a sense of agency in us.  Things went well and it wasn’t all blind luck or other people being fabulous, but rather because we did stuff.

 

Try it!

Gratitude 1

For Reasons, I tend to resist gratitude practice.

By Reasons, I mean that gratitude practice doesn’t play particularly well with my depression.  The Monster gets gleeful when I look around at my life and all the many blessings I have because he gets to point out that I have all that and I am still a depressive and that’s just messed up on a whole different level.  I mention this in case anybody else has a similar Monster.

 

My experience notwithstanding, there is research that says that practicing gratitude is good for us.

 

In point of fact, even I benefit from it at the times when the Monster is under the bed or wherever he goes when he’s not actively sitting on my chest.

 

It doesn’t have to be complicated.  I can be grateful that there are dogs sleeping under the tables on the patio at the café where I like to write blog posts, or that there is a moon in the sky when I get up in the dark, or that it is not actually possible to stab annoying people through my computer screen when they say irritating things in Zoom meetings.  There aren’t rules, really.  I can be snarky and grateful at the same time!

 

The point of the practice is that we notice.  We have, evolutionarily, a negativity bias.  Times being what they are, it is not surprising that many of us conclude that everything is terrible.

 

That might even be mostly true.  But, again, there is sunlight on raindrops and hot cocoa and the sound of little kids laughing.

 

Let it transform us.

Monday Workout: Distraction

There is a fair amount of weight-bearing on the arms in this workout.  That’s all right:  the hamstring curls will distract us.  (Or, as always, we can choose to modify.  We are adults and can make our own good decisions.)  The short circuit means—you guessed it—four rounds.

 

1 min cardio
mountain climbers	30
renegade row	20
hamstring curls	10
burpees	10
flies	20
plank to pike	10

 

Thursday List: 3

Experiments to try:

 

1.     Eat a new food.  This can be as simple as trying a veggie you’ve never had or as complicated as taking a trip to the library to check out a cookbook for some kind of cuisine that is new to you.

2.     Have a movement snack.  You know that time in the afternoon when you think about having a cookie or another cup of coffee just to get through whatever the afternoon holds?  Try taking a five minute walk, or doing a minute of squats, or a few stretches instead.

3.     Turn off the extras.  This one can be hard.  Instead of jumping on the treadmill or bike or elliptical or whatever and plugging in to the music or TV, just go.  Even better, take the workout outside and do it without the distractions.  You might learn stuff about the content of your head or about how your body works or other things I haven’t thought of yet.

Experiments 2

As I mentioned yesterday, I like experiments.  Probably because I like learning things.  There is one important prerequisite to experiments, though.  I have to remain unattached to the outcome.  Or, in other words, I have to be willing to fail.

This is not easy.  We live in a world of picture-perfect everything.  Social media could give us the impression that everyone in the entire universe is well-groomed, acne-free, and stylish.  Spoiler alert:  I live in the blooper reel as well as the highlight tape.

 

I suspect that everybody does, but some of us hide it better than others.

 

Experiments, like practice, require that we do things we’re not familiar with and maybe not good at.  We can’t control the outcome.  We might get sweaty or messy.  We might even cry a little.

 

But we might also discover something beautiful or useful or amazing.  There was a time before I tried sushi, for example.  My first experience was not entirely successful, but I was willing to try again and now I will eat it any chance I get.

 

Similarly, the first time I went skiing, it was mostly about crashing, but there was something there that kept me coming back.

 

What would you like to try?  What’s worth failing at for a while?

Experiments 1

Recently, I did a little experiment on myself.  (OK, that’s almost always true.  I like to experiment.)  For a long time now, I have routinely worked out as one of the first things I do in the morning.  However, what with the dark mornings and various other stuff going on, getting up early enough to get the workout in before work and the rest of my responsibilities was proving challenging.  So I tried sleeping in a bit and doing the workout in the afternoon.

The thing about experiments is that no matter how they turn out, we learn stuff.  What I learned is that working out in the afternoon doesn’t work for me.  It just doesn’t.  I have ideas about why, but that really doesn’t make much difference.  The point is that I learned that I have the habits I do for the very good reason that they work, most of the time.

 

Changing the workout time was not the solution I was looking for.  But I would not have known that had I not tried.

 

What might you want to experiment with this week?