Do you ever wake up thinking it’s going to be a good day and quickly realizing you’d rather be anywhere — anywhere — else, doing anything else, being anyone else … than where you are, what you’re doing, who you are? Like, you thought you’d just get some work done then take a nice walk … and instead you’re scraping soggy vegetables out of the bottom of the dishwasher and on hold for two hours with the insurance company, dreaming about mainlining a stiff cocktail?
No. Me neither. That’s why I’ve started using HiFutureSelf, an awesome app that helps me out of my funks and keeps me in the present.
Deep thought coming here, people: life isn’t always easy. It could be the baby. It could be the man we love, or the woman. It could be our home, our work, our friends, our hormones. We respond to these periodic feelings of irritation/anger/sadness/totaleverlastingdespair in various ways, sometimes with determination, sometimes with tears. (Sometimes with that cocktail.)
Recently I’ve come to recognize that something I’ve relied upon for a long time, willpower, won’t always save me. It isn’t always enough to just tell yourself, Buck up! The reasons for this are good: if you are already stressed and tired, you’re low on the very substance — glucose — upon which willpower relies. My hubby and I like to tease each other about our glucose levels, but the fact remains that when you don’t got it, you don’t got it.
So what’s the answer? If you can’t cheer yourself up, and there’s no one else around to do it, what should you do?
Well, sometimes nothing works. But sometimes a relatively tiny boost will really do the trick. The app really helps, actually. I can send myself positive affirmations for the future, and strategically schedule them for times I know I’ll be a little bummed out, or even times I’m happy. For instance, I just scheduled a text to arrive a week after I move this month, asking “Do you love it as much as you thought you would??” I know receiving that text — probably out of the blue, as far as my no-brained future self is concerned — is going to make me think about how much I longed to be done, set up, decorated, and how grateful I am to be in a new, bigger, better home. I also scheduled a text for Monday, when my daughter is home with me, at noon. This is when she melts down completely and I start to have second thoughts about the whole idea of parenthood. The text?
“You had her on purpose.”
Positively Dreaming 