My downward spiral started when I burned a hole in my exercise ball on the space heater…

 

This thing is HOT!

 

What? How? Let me explain. I had one day this week to work from home and do telemedicine, so I was sitting at my desk calling patients. The mornings have still been crisp and cool, so I turned the disk heater on medium-high and directed it right at me. Sitting at a desk all day hasn’t been helping my hip strain and I had started using my exercise ball to sit on, hoping it would help. But it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped, so I’d moved it aside and brought in a desk chair. Between calls as I was charting, I heard a hissing noise and when I looked over, the ball had rolled into the disk heater and air was leaking out of the hole that the heater had burned into it when it touched the ball.

It was unrecoverable.

 

I tried to fix it with gorilla tape. That didn’t work.

 

Okay, no big deal, I’ll just order another and replace this one. It was many years old anyway and probably wasn’t expensive. Moving on, right?

I could have. But as other things unfolded during the week, they became these nagging little annoyances. I had a conversation with a colleague that bothered me, even though it worked out perfectly well. I went to get groceries and was irritated because I’m tired of having to wipe down all the groceries before they can be put away because of coronavirus. And then when I brought them home, the kids were out at the park and no one was home to help put them all away. Because I wash the clothes I wear out to the office or the hospital I’m doing laundry more frequently, and I’ve gotten behind on putting my clothes away. So my closet is a junky mess and that gets on my nerves. Then both my and the girl’s showers weren’t draining well, so I knew that meant that there was a bunch of hair caught in the trap. I hate cleaning that because it’s nasty and Perry usually does it, but he has so much to do this week that I didn’t even want to fix my face to ask him to do it.  Also, my kids are in the process of learning to clean up the whole kitchen after themselves after meals (not just put their dishes in the dishwasher), so that means my kitchen is also very often a hot mess and I’m sick of calling them back over and over to get them to do their clean up correctly. I want to go get my nails done cause I’m overdue for a mani-pedi, but I just can’t see going to the nail shop just yet.

Eventually, I got to this place where my brain was screaming that I don’t want to go to one more store and if the kids won’t clean up then I’m not cooking and why is there a bag of moldy lemons in the frig and do they think I’m the maid around here and why doesn’t anyone appreciate me and if this coronatine is gonna continue and I have to be in this house with these people and go to work and deal with one more thing I’m going to rent a house on the beach by myself and leave all these people right here and NOT COME BACK!

 

I’m OUT! Okay, not really…

 

I had to take a minute to breathe and pray…

 

What I realized what that I’ve had this hum of disapproval running in the background of my life about the situations in my life. The voice in my head judges the circumstances as negative and slaps on a label of “wrong” on them. The truth is that the circumstances are just what they are – not negative or positive, just neutral. And because they are neutral, they can’t make me unhappy. When I have a negative thought about the situation, that’s what makes me upset or angry or frustrated. When I let a bunch of these negative thoughts pile up on top of each other, that’s what makes me miserable and ready to drop my life like a bad habit.

So I have a choice. I can let my mind offer up all these negative thoughts and allow them to rule my emotions, or I can give my brain something constructive to do. One way I’ve found to do this that’s been very helpful is to ask it good questions. This helps in two ways: One, it keeps my brain working on something positive, and two, it gives me solutions to the perceived problems I need to solve. The question I started asking this week was, What can I do? My brain had gotten very practiced at showing me what was out of my hands – I can’t magically get my kids to learn to clean the kitchen or make COVID-19 go away, or snap my fingers and get the hair out of the drain. But when I ask my mind to find what I can do, options start to come up. I’m very clear that my goal with these kids is to raise them to be independent adults one day, so they leave my house and have productive and self-sufficient lives. So actually, I’d rather put in the effort to train them to do their work completely now, than have them develop into adults who can’t take care of themselves or their homes. So I can choose not to be as bothered because I know that making them come back and do the job right is good for them. With the drains, I just decided it had to be done and I put it on my calendar, but I made sure to ask my husband about it so I’d do the job right and he just handled it. With COVID-19, I’m looking at what we can do as a family that’s fun instead of going to the conference that was canceled. Maybe we’ll go camping or rent a house somewhere.  I can also order the farm box from Fry Farm – there’re no bottles or packages to wipe, we get fresh local produce, and I support local agriculture. Win, win, win! And when I go to the store, I’m glad I can get the food we need and I’m grateful I have wipes for disinfecting, so I’m actually glad I can wipe down the groceries.

 

Not messing around…

 

We get to decide how we want to experience our world. There will always be circumstances that come up in our lives, but it’s up to us how we think about them and whether we take charge of our thoughts or allow our brains to be the boss of us. I’m choosing to put my mind to work for me!

 

 

Have you been feeling frustrated/irritated/overwhelmed while living through this pandemic? What constructive ways have you found to cope? Please share in the comments below!

 

And in case you hadn’t seen it yet, I just started a weight loss basics class on my YouTube channel. The classes come out on Tuesdays and the intro and class 1 video are already up. There’s no need for coronatine weight gain! Come check it out!