This past week has been hectic. My mind feels like it’s been on overdrive 24/7. I’m hesitant to use the word “stressed” to describe how I’ve been feeling but guys… I’m stressin’!
And it’s all “good stress”, to be fair. I’ve had a lot of positive new opportunities open up this month — new job, another new job, new responsibilities that have come with said jobs, new healthy routines, new social circles, new new new etc… Just. They’re all at once. AHHHH!! It’s resulted in a lot of phone calls to my mom to unload, that’s for sure.
I managed to calm down long enough last week to stop & think about how to handle it all. I’ve firmly decided that my main goal this first year of my career is to avoid burnout. And after giving this goal some thought, I realized that in order to do this, I have to let go of some of my bad habits & patterns. That means letting go of:
- (-) Negative self-talk.
Whenever I’m really stressed out, I catch my inner voice saying really mean things about myself — things that I would never say or dare to think about anyone else. It’s weird, how easy it can be for us to compliment others, and yet how harshly we can judge ourselves. During one therapy session, my therapist asked me how well I was able to perform under stress whenever my inner critic would start being a self-Judgy McJudgerson. I remember thinking… Ohh. Touché. It becomes an unhealthy, vicious cycle of:
Already Stressed –> Putting Your Own Efforts Down –> MORE Stress –> MORE Mean Thoughts About Ya Self –> and so on and so forth.
- (-) Achieving perfection.
And so, hand in hand with being hard on myself is *drum roll*… perfectionism! Classic move. Sometimes I come up with big ideas I want to see to fruition. My rational brain knows I don’t have unlimited time or energy to expend on executing them all and says I should just compromise on the next best thing. My irrational perfectionist brain on the other hand, says, “But you gotta”. But no, friends. I really don’t gotta. (And sometimes, I physically can’tta.)
The best way to change a bad habit is to replace it with a better one. Instead of the above, I’m going to learn to embrace:
- (+) Recounting past & present successes.
Generating positive things about yourself and memories of things you did becomes easier the more you do it — you just have to start and then… keep going. I vaguely remember reading in one of my Psychology courses about a correlation between the amount of positive/negative thoughts and self-perception. More positive thoughts = more positive self-perception, and similarly for the negative side. Gosh, I wish I could remember all the deets of that study! But you know what? Instead of being hard on myself, I’m gonna give myself a pat on the back for even remembering this study from a course I took, like, six years ago. Taking a step in the right direction, folks!
- (+) Being satisfied with “enough”.
This is an ongoing battle for me because I’ve always been an ambitious kid (and I’ve also always referred to myself as “kid”, in case you were wondering?). But I know that while there’s a time and place to be ambitious, there’s also a need for self-care. I honestly love seeing the fruits of my labour whenever I go H.A.M. But I also know how painful it is to be inside my head during that process, and how low my energy dips afterwards. A mantra I like to tell myself during these moments is, “Done is better than perfect.” Better to focus on getting decent quality work done & ON TIME, with enough energy left to keep doing you, than to stress out about minute things like font size or what’s another word for “H.A.M.”
So now, I shall take my own advice, leave this blog post be, and not fret about what else to add to make it snazzier. It’s haaaard, yo! But I’ve got other things that need to be done, some self-care that needs to happen, X-Factor UK to catch up on …
Have a lovely week, everyone ❤ and a GREAT 1st day of October!
xo, M
Lives for Mondays. 