So Much Happier Blog
Just This
“ In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”
Many cultures have historically celebrated, in some way, the winter solstice, which marks the return of the light—in other words, the lengthening of days after the longest night of the year. The darkest time is now past, and we are once again looking forward to longer, warmer days and the fruition of seeds that are only being dreamed now, until they can be planted in the spring. And yet, there’s not much to do now. It’s still dark and cold, and we feel like hibernating, especially if the fall season was busy and social.
Now may be a good time to remember that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. It’s appropriate sometimes to relax and enjoy the comforts of home, family, and the appreciation of what the passing year’s harvest has brought. In today’s harried world, it’s easy to think that taking downtime is lazy or selfish, but what if this is an important time to bond with those who are closest in your life so that in busier times, you’ll have great memories and the confidence that these people are on your side? Playing games, telling stories around a fire, and catching up on rest are traditional things to do at this time of year, and they help us build resilience for later.
There’s one more week of holiday social activity before us, and then with the passing of the old year and the advent of the new, we all begin to break off again to envision and work toward our own ideas. The new year brings with it a sense of possibility and fresh starts, and many people experience a resurgence of motivation and zestfulness about what is possible. Don’t miss this final week of celebratory enjoyment! It’s important for maintaining your morale to take breaks from your normal stressors and appreciate natural rhythms and the good people around you.
New ideas, projects, and stimulation will be along soon enough. This week, have fun, sleep deeply, appreciate the love you have now and have experienced throughout your life, and acknowledge yourself for all the good work you’ve done this year. There will always be more to do and experience, but let your actions flow from joy and enthusiasm in right timing. Right now, and always, without doing anything, you are enough.
There's No Place Like Home, Part II
“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
In the last blog, we examined the importance of your feelings of safety from the outside world while you're at home. This week, we'll talk about maintaining a safe, secure environment inside the home, which is just as vital to your health and happiness for all the same reasons. There are two aspects of safety we’ll touch on, both physical and emotional safety; both need attention if we are to feel that we are truly free to reach confidently for the things we most desire out of life.
When we're spending time in at home, in the space that's supposed to be just for us, we deserve to feel supported, loved, understood, and protected. We live in environments that we ourselves have created in our imperfect image—we are constantly confronted with the choices that have made it what it is; we've made these choices over time, sometimes without even realizing that we're doing it. The countless small decisions of the past add up to an effect that we feel every time we open the door. Let’s take a few moments to consider what you’ve established and whether you feel good about it. For instance, do you feel comfortable with how being at home generally feels to you? With the way you spend your time there? With the others who populate the world of your home? If not, you have the power to modify the conditions inside your home to improve your comfort and safety.
The louder of the two aspects of safety is the physical—if you feel like your safety is in jeopardy because someone close to you is violent and may potentially harm you physically, this will tend to be very obvious to you, very upsetting and hard to ignore. That’s as it should be! Someone who can’t even treat you with the respect required to refrain from hurting you outwardly does not belong anyone near you. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why we sometimes put up with behavior from others that is completely inappropriate. Those may include that this person is a family member, and we can’t just choose not to be related to them anymore (it can seem unthinkable to cut someone out of your life who has been such a long-standing part of your life.) It may be that we love and care for this person, even feel that we understand them, and so we wish to be a loving influence in their lives. It may be that we fear change and are afraid to be alone. Whatever the reason you might give, there is a lot of great information out there in the world on dealing with abusive relationships, and while I certainly hope that you’re not a part of anything that looks like this, if you are, there is help for you. I encourage you to go find it. No one should have to live in fear for their physical safety.
On a slightly different note, it is also possible to feel physically threatened by a pet that lives with you. Sometimes it’s necessary to be honest with yourself and admit that a pet that seemed like a good idea at one time is not conducive to your happiness and safety any longer. This can be very difficult for some of the same reasons as described above regarding threatening people. Our pets are family to many of us, and recognizing that a relationship with one isn’t healthy and taking action to correct the situation can be extremely painful. However, it may be easier to change/”train” a pet than a human, so if this is your issue, you may want to look into getting professional help with the animal’s behavior. You’ll still need to be ready to make a new choice if the relationship feels threatening after your best efforts. Your safety, again, should come first.
In order to create an environment that really feels safe and secure from the inside, we must also consider the emotional quality of our relationships with people, as they are at the core of our home's overall effect on us. If you feel that those who figure importantly in your time at home are likely to attack you, your choices, your character, you are not going to be able to enjoy the sense of harmony from which you can be at your best, see clearly, have good ideas, and live a high-functioning life.
· Most importantly, who gets to live in your personal space with you? As anyone who has ever had a bad, or even just incompatible, roommate knows, this affects so many areas of daily life. If someone in our space is at cross purposes with us, it can seem like the whole world is opposing our every move! On the other hand, if you enjoy the people you live with, you get to experience a sense that life is more fun because you’re not alone; you get to feel that others are looking out for you and the home base you share. Ideally, those you live with love and support you in such a way that you feel seen and accepted for who you are when you're around them. If this in not what you generally feel at home, you are dealing with unnecessary stress and dissonance, and you can improve your happiness dramatically by giving some thought to the situation and taking appropriate corrective action.
· Who visits regularly? Who else you allow into your space with regularity also has a lot of bearing on how you will feel at home. If you’re allowing people into your personal space who don’t seem to be on your side, people who are judgmental, selfish, or overly demanding, you will begin to feel that you cannot relax even at home. It will be hard to rest and enjoy downtime there. Again, you are inviting stress into your experience that could be eliminated through the establishment of some better rules about how you use your home.
· Who calls your home number and expects you to pick up the phone? You train others to expect your time and attention by demonstrating when you’re available to them, as well as, in this case, giving out your digits in the first place. If you’re in the habit of giving away all your time and energy to others over the phone when you’re at home, this is another way in which you may be creating a home environment that doesn’t feel safe, calm, and supportive to you. While I’m not suggesting that you should act like a hermit and refuse to talk to anyone once you’re home, I do think it’s important to make sure you get some time to yourself regularly that’s free of unwelcome demands. You decide what time you will give to your community of friends and family, and must make sure you communicate what time is off limits.
· Who has a key and can let themselves in? This level of trust belongs only with those you know you can trust no matter what, and it pays to be very selective on this count.
If a relationship with a family member or other roommate is not supportive to you, and you want to restore your feelings of safety, you'll need to find a way to communicate your experience and ask for changes. This is an area in which we tend to be woefully uneducated, and the idea of confronting others about what’s not working can be frightening because we’re not confident that we can lead the situation to a helpful resolution. There are many excellent books available on building your communication skills, and I highly recommend that you make it a priority to brush up on them if you ever have trouble talking to people in your life about important subjects—and who doesn’t, really? One of the books I like to recommend is Crucial Conversations, by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler, because it deals specifically with isolating the bad habits we usually fall into when attempting to communicate important content and finding ways to break out of them. I think that communication skills are a critic necessity for living a happy life, and I encourage you to consider yourself a lifelong learner here. Being able to accurately and confidently express yourself makes it possible to achieve so much more in your life. You deserve to be able to handle whatever comes up with other people in the most constructive way possible.
Beyond verbal discussion, there may come a time when you need to set some boundaries and enforce them in order to create a sense of lasting safety for yourself. Again, many of us have not been trained in confidently discerning and putting into place the boundaries we need. If you are in a situation that feels bad to you, particularly at home, and you don’t see a way to resolve it, you’ll need to find an advisor to help you find a way through. A smart, balanced friend or family member or a professional counselor of some kind can help you to see the situation more clearly and find the course of action that is most appropriate for you.
Taking some time to review how safe you feel at home, both physically and emotionally, is extremely important to the overall quality of your life. It’s very difficult to be your best self if you don’t feel that you have a place to be in your downtime that is basically supportive and peaceful for you. Please allow yourself to really consider this and see if anything stands out to you as needing your attention. Confronting these issues can be most uncomfortable, but is well worth it in the long run. Proving to yourself that you can improve this aspect of your life will improve your confidence in yourself and your ability to improve other areas of your life as well.
There's No Place Like Home
“He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.”
Sometimes daily life can seem like it's all about just trying to keep ourselves and our families clean and fed. Certain periods of our lives may need to be very much about those things—for instance, when we first move out on our own after our schooling (everything from cleaning to paying bills is new and takes conscious effort), or when there are young children in the house (who need a great deal of time, energy, and care). But there are times, hopefully, when we have more energy and focus available for pursuing projects for the sake of interest, self-improvement, career marketability, or creative expression and enjoyment. In order to have the stability to apply ourselves in satisfying ways to these projects, we need to handle a few other things than just physical needs. After we've satisfied our most basic needs, our old friend Abraham Maslow posits that we need to feel safe in order to keep progressing. There are several important areas to consider as we attempt to care for ourselves at this level, all of which are important in allowing us to move forward in life with enough confidence to achieve more than just staying alive every day.
The first one I want to address is the home. Humans are uniquely evolved animals, but animals nonetheless; we crave a retreat that can keep us warm and dry as well as safe from marauding predators. This may not be something you think about consciously all that often. It’s something you no doubt assess in some way when looking for a new place to live, and you may give it some thought in the first few weeks after moving into a new home, but after that you may find that you drop into a routine and take your safety somewhat for granted. While I’m not suggesting that you encourage yourself to be paranoid, I am going to ask you to think about whether there is anything about your home base that you feel uncomfortable about. Perhaps every now and then you have a thought about how you wish there was more light in a certain area outside, or a better lock on your door, and you experience a low-level sense of fear about something you haven't yet defined. If you find that there is something like this that comes up for you, consider that you may be wasting some energy on these worries that would be far better applied to the things you’d prefer to be spending your time on.
Most of us do not realize how much mental, emotional, and physical energy we waste on worrying about things that are in our power to easily change. The things that touch on our sense of physical security affect us on the level of our animal selves, and this level is instinctive. When it feels threatened, we go into “fight or flight” mode, which means that our bodies rev up an array of chemicals to help us prepare for running away from danger at top speed, or for combating the enemy, real or imagined. The body reacts the same way in either case, as it can’t tell the difference between thought and reality. In his book The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton details how when we’re in the fight or flight response, blood rushes away from the organs and toward the extremities to fully enable movement, and the organs slow their processes; that means that the body is using energy, but not creating much of it from the resources at hand. The immune system also is greatly disabled in favor of the emergency chemical response. And the center of conscious mental activity, the forebrain, slows in favor of the instinctive hindbrain, because reflex is faster to respond than reason; by boosting the hindbrain’s activity, the brain joins in to help the body survive while the state of emergency persists. While all of this is happening, the body can’t engage in may of its normal activities, including growth processes that repair damage. This overdrive cycle greatly contributes to physical problems over time if it gets activated too often—and in modern life, with its hectic pace and constant demands, this is often the case.
If you could halt or slow this exhausting cycle by choosing to address a few things at home, such as adding a brighter light bulb or springing for a better lock, or even just hanging thicker curtains in the bedroom so it feels more private, why not make that a priority and give yourself more ease on a daily basis? These things may seem small, but they can add up over time. We’ll be looking at other ways to feel secure in future blogs, but in the meantime, just give a thought to how you could make your home feel more relaxing by addressing anything about it that makes you feel nervous or unnecessarily vulnerable. These small changes need not cost much, and they can yield far more than the value you invest.