Image credit: Anastasia Gepp via Pixabay. Image of a woman holding a phone looking into the distance.
There are days where my brain feels like molasses, and every part of my body cries out to hibernate under a blanket. There have been more of those days in the past year than the preceding ones (thanks, pandemic). Today is one of those days.
While my brain and body could be affected by seasonal depression, pandemic fatigue, or plain old exhaustion from burning the candle at both ends, I propose a much simpler explanation: boredom. According to Marriam Webster, boredom is “the state of being weary and restless through lack of interest”. Dictonary.com further reiterates that boredom is “the state of being bored; the feeling of being wearied by dullness, tedious repetition, etc.”
In a nod to psychiatrist and author Dr. Dan Siegel, we must “name it to tame it” – naming the emotion will help us to move through it. Yes, I am weary. Yes, I am restless. Yes, life now has quite a bit of dull and tedious repetition. This is a shared experience that many people have, especially right now. Stating the emotion takes some of the wind out of the sails. It creates well-needed distance that stops the cycle of resistance or spiraling deeper.
When we resist an emotion, the emotion doesn’t stop existing in our body – it can come through in other ways because the thought is still there. We lose trust with our intuition and ourselves, we don’t value our own existence, we learn to avoid our own emotions by telling ourselves that they aren’t ok, and then we bring that belief into the world. What can you imagine that creates when we don’t even trust ourselves with our own emotions?
On the other extreme, when we sink into an emotion, we lose touch with reality and become clouded by a filter of the emotion. Everything we do and see becomes cast in the same negative light. This is normal – it is our brain working the way it should. Our brains have evolved over thousands of years to focus and hold onto negative information. Long ago, our ancestors whose brains focused on negative information were more able to remember the fruit that made them sick or that bears were not good pets. Because the world was a much more dangerous and unknown place, people who had a bias for recalling negative information were more likely to survive. Your brain doesn’t know the difference now between a bear charging at you and an email from your boss. The limbic response taps in here to rush stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into your body so that you have increased strength and heightened coordination (and an ability to run or fight with that bear). But what doesn’t work here, because the body is focused on safety during survival, is any logical thinking. The best laid plans are no match for the body’s fight, flight, freeze (FFF) response.
You can take back control by recognizing the emotion and accepting it (yes, I am bored) to create distance from your feelings. You can move from “I am bored” – the emotion defines your identity - to “I’m feeling bored” – you notice that your emotions are a part of you, not your entire being. And that starts the first step of having some control over your feelings, and being able to do something about it. Taking back control of your life starts with recognizing and owning our feelings. Transformation happens when we understand that there is a way out of misery and a way forward toward our goals. Bringing your logical brain back on board means you can take a next step toward your values, and that is where real control lives. Now that I’ve created some distance, I’m going to take a step toward my values of connection and supporting people who need help with their career transformation. I’d love to help you take control too – I’ll see you when you’re ready.
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