There’s a way to shift ourselves out of a dour mood. From a pre-pandemic blog I originally wrote for Psych Central (when I actually had a physical counseling office!), here’s how I returned to feeling more alive and happy.
We’ve all had those days where we feel off, or maybe worse. Sometimes, we’re down, overwhelmed, or in a funk. Yesterday was one of those days for me.
Everyone has been talking about bucket lists for years, but I find they just create more anxiety. Here’s what I do instead.It’s all over social media. Just checked one off my bucket list, as they post an amazing selfie from the Himalayas or while scuba diving with sharks. People have jumped on the bandwagon of this trend to create a list of all the things they have ever wanted to do before they “kick the bucket.”
I like lists, too. I have my to-do list, my goal list, my list of classes that I would like to take someday, etc. But the idea of a bucket list bothers me.
It’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself; to have these 10, 50, 200 things that you want to do before you die. When I was in my 20’s, that was a cool idea. I hadn’t done that much and hadn’t seen that many places. So it made sense to me back then (although the term hadn’t come into use at that time).
Having that bucket list feels anxiety-provoking. What happens if you get older, and things still aren’t checked off? A competition begins with others who are ticking off their items – will you feel that you’re behind? What if your fear about trying some of those things holds you back? What if you spend so much time planning for fulfilling X amount of bucket list items per year that you aren’t really appreciating what you have? The idea of a bucket list should be fun and exciting, not stressful and overwhelming.
photo by Kristie McLean
I’m not feeling all that well today – my stomach is upset, my neck hurts, and I feel kind of sluggish. But I realized that I can still feel happy.
Most of us tend to feel that if we don’t have things that we want, or situations don’t turn out the way we’d like, or if we’re not feeling how we want to feel, that we shouldn’t be happy. We believe that we can only be happy if we get what we want.
Aarrrrgh. There it goes again. You know, that voice that gets after you for yelling at your kids, or leaving the laundry piled on the couch for a week, or wonders if you had offended someone – weeks after you did it. Yeah, that voice.
When it arises, it seems to get front and center, doesn’t it? It just takes over whatever you were thinking about, and suddenly, like bad news on TV, it makes headlines in your thoughts. On CNN they play the disaster over and over again on the screen, and you play out what you did “wrong” just as relentlessly.
It’s as if nothing else matters in that moment except feeling guilt or shame about whatever it was you think you did wrong or didn’t do well enough. A negative thought comes up, and for some reason, it’s much more compelling than the positive ones.
