On "feeling that everything is an effort": Managing ups and Downs in our Energy and Motivation. Or, the Mastery of Adulting.
One of my least favorite tasks is cleaning the kitchen after 9pm. At that time of day, I am physically and mentally tired. I would like to believe I have taken care of everything that needs my attention, and this is now my time to unwind.
Unfortunately, unwinding isn't always beneficial in the long run if it attracts pests, smells up the kitchen, inconveniences other people, leaves perfectly good food out to rot, or gives food particles that much more time to get stuck to plates overnight. And so, because I know this, I almost always clean the kitchen at some point between dinner and bedtime, no matter how much I "don't feel like it."
Sometimes when I am cleaning the kitchen after 9pm, I marvel at how difficult of a task this seems to be. On the one hand, I have been cleaning kitchens my entire life. I know the drill: put leftovers into containers. Ineptly play Fridge Tetris with said containers of leftovers (if you're me, that is. What can I say? Fridge Tetris is not my strong suit). Hand wash and dry: cast iron, knives, wooden cutting boards. Rinse and load into dishwasher: everything else. Run dishwasher. Clean and sanitize surfaces. If necessary: sweep; take out garbage, recycling, compost. I've done each task thousands of times and, barring illness or injury, I am fully capable of doing them again. But somehow, at 9pm, these tasks seem far more difficult and complex than they do at 11am.
Zoom out of kitchen-cleaning. As someone whose attention, energy, motivation, and mood are all quite variable, there are numerous other tasks in my life that feel easy at times and tough at others. I procrastinate on writing for my blog for months, then churn out three articles in a day. I walk five miles Saturday, yet somehow on Tuesday, just one feels like a chore. I labor hard for months to create a magnificent garden, then struggle to keep up with basic watering, and wonder how I even created all this in the first place. I set brilliant systems into place for myself, but forget to use them consistently. I get daunted by a pile of paperwork, somehow unable to do just a few documents each day to keep up, but finally tackle weeks' worth in a few hours. I share these ups and downs with many people who struggle with periodic depression, bipolar disorder, or ADHD.
My task is not to eliminate my variability - that would be impossible, and rid me of much of my creativity and dynamism. I don't want to lose that spark in me that generates gardens and collages and blog posts, even if half of them never "go anywhere;" the other half got me here, to this rich and complex life I have created for myself: an entrepreneur, therapist and Airbnb managing two successful businesses; an amateur gardener, writer, and sometimes-musician with an abundance of hobbies; an autodidactic, intellectual information sponge who can spout random facts from podcasts and audiobooks and synthesize them to form connections between seemingly disparate subjects; a multi-cultural person with a wealth of life experiences, many stories and several eclectic groups of friends; a semi-fit, adequately healthy mind-body geek who eats something green every day and works out enough to be capable of most tasks. The consistency required to be a person who always does exactly what I set out to do or masters any one domain completely would likely require that I eliminate half my passions. So I allow myself to be well-rounded: sometimes organized, sometimes not; sometimes artistic, at other times mathematical; sometimes driven to be fit, and other times more likely to prioritize writing, though it's sedentary.
My task is to manage my variability in a way that ensures my bases will always be covered. There are certain things that must be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. As long as I stay on top of those, it's okay if other things fluctuate. Sometimes, staying on top of them means structuring those activities intentionally; sometimes, it means doing them when I get the impulse; and sometimes, it means hiring and delegating. But no matter what, taking care of myself has to mean not allowing any one area of life to go too neglected for too long. I can skip watering some days, but I can't let my plants wither and die. I can skip workouts and eat delivery food some days, but I can't neglect my health to the point of chronic illness. I can let my car get dirty, but I can't let it run out of gas. I can put off emails for a few days, but I can't let my businesses collapse.
This is why I clean the kitchen at 9pm, no matter what. Just as I don't want a thirty-pound box to ever feel too heavy to lift, I don't want basic tasks like this one to ever feel too heavy, either. So I keep doing them.
I remember when I worked for a mental health clinic that gave surveys to each client at each visit, to make sure we were regularly tracking their symptoms. One of the questions people were asked to rate themselves on was, "Feeling that everything is an effort." When we are depressed, everything feels heavy. We then reinforce that heaviness with thought and behavior patterns to keep it that way, until we either come out of it naturally, as people sometimes do, or consciously learn to reverse the trend.
There's a fact of life so basic and self-evident it's irrefutable. We all know this, and when we take it into consideration, our lives become manageable. And yet many of us resist this truth:
The more you do something, the easier it gets. The less you do something, the harder it gets.
Like it or not, most of the time, it really is that simple.
So now let's take that old, worn out and brittle saying, "I don't feel like it," and break it.
Let's take that self-destructive and useless phrase, "I'm lazy," throw it out the window, and stop berating ourselves into a self-fulfilling prophecy of dysfunction.
These stories do us no good. Their truthfulness and usefulness are equally dubious. Let's replace them with something more honest:
The more you do something, the easier it gets. The less you do something, the harder it gets.
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." -Goethe
