Breaking The Cycle

I'm supposed to be practising being positive (aka not being a miserable cow), but lately I seem to have got myself into a very negative cycle. It starts off with one bad day, and spirals out of control until you realise you've been in the mother of all bad moods for several days / weeks/ months and you can't really remember how you got there. It's difficult to explain to other people, but I'm going to try.

Imagine a regular bad day for you. Prior to this, a bad day for me would probably have involved travelling to a far away office, having my train delayed, being late for my work appointment and worrying about this, only to find the person I was meant to be meeting isn't in the office, and eventually ends with being late home because (you guessed it) my train was delayed. Or something like that. The solution? Watching trashy TV with a bar of chocolate and a huge mug of tea. You might include a rant to your significant other / parents / confidant of your choosing. Perhaps even have a take away tea. The point is, it doesn't take a lot to shake off a normal bad day. You go to bed, you wake up and everything's pretty much okay again. Obviously, this doesn't work for more serious bad days and awful life events, just regular bad days.

Now a bad day starts with waking up feeling as though I've never been asleep, or worse still, like I've been giving birth in my sleep. I can't imagine giving birth is fun any which way you try it, but my version is decidedly nasty. Sometimes I will wake up with funky marks and bruises where I've clearly been beating myself up in my sleep. That's a bad start. Let's face it, no good day ever started with a bad night's sleep, did it? Then something will add to that bad start: S will be growing a tooth and grouching, the buggy will break, something else will break, I'll get a letter or email that's far too hard to deal with, have to go to the hospital, lose my house keys or whatever. All boring mundane things that add to a regular bad day, but which suddenly feel like the end of the world. My default position is to stuff my face full of chocolate (because chocolate boosts your happy hormones), except all that does is make me feel like a blimp, which makes me mad at myself. Not just a little annoyed, but really mad. I'll take a couple of sleeping tablets and decide to have an early night: tomorrow's another day and all that. Then I won't be able to sleep, because my mind is spinning with things I can't pin down, or stupid things that are irrelevant to life, the universe and everything in it. I'll spend half the night worrying about something that doesn't really warrant worrying about, or something that does warrant it, but which I can't do anything about. And so the cycle begins. After a few days, I can't even remember what made me mad in the first place. I will find myself wide awake at 3am typing out a complaint letter, or (better still) watching back to back episodes of Buffy (The Vampire Slayer) with mugs of weak, milky tea, whilst doodling on a piece of paper, or when that runs out, my leg, because why wouldn't you draw a picture of a tree up your leg at 3am? I didn't say it made sense. It's a negative cycle. It just does what it wants and goes on and on and on and on and on until something breaks it.

Well, it turns out, I'm meant to be the one to break it. Supposedly by focusing on happy things, or setting goals or something. It was S's idea (S, the fabulous person who takes care of my Mental Elf, not S the baby). So, in that spirit, I decided to do a post of happy. Ish. To be fair, it's probably going to be more ish than anything else, but I'm doing it all the same. It is a post of my current favourite things. Actual things, not ideas of things (like world peace) or things I can only have if I win the lottery (a house in the Lake District).

It's coming next. I just wanted to warn you so that you didn't keel over from the shock of me posting something less grouchy.

You're welcome.