Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. So, as we live Bright and we experience the world opening up to us as we keep our food simpler, weighed and measured meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner, food on the scale, keeping our food black and white so we can live our lives in living color. As we walk forward on that journey, what happens is our relationship to certain areas in our lives starts to shift. I wanted to talk with you this week about my relationship to work, and a couple of things I've noticed about the interplay between work and feelings. Like whether I feel like I want to work and how I'm feeling in general, whether my mood is up or down.
In particular, I'm going to talk in this Vlog about when my mood is down, when I just don't feel good, when I feel logy, tired, depressed, down, emotional, lackluster, just like, ugh, I just don't want to work--which happens. Sometimes it feels like work has to get done, and there's a part of me that kind of questions that, like, "Really? Does the work have to get done?"
So, in the olden days, well before I had a Bright Line Eating Program to lean into, or healthy food to fuel my system, or weighing and measuring, and meditating, and all these tools at my disposal, like back when I was a kid, I had a pretty binge/purge perfectionistic orientation toward work. I was a good student, and I would start every semester with visions of, "I'm going to do all the reading. I'm going to keep up on all the assignments, I'm going to read the chapter." I mean, this is me in seventh grade thinking, "I'm going to read the chapter and highlight it, and then read it again and make flashcards." Then I would procrastinate on that. I wouldn't do it, and I would stay up all night the night before an exam and binge study and then ace the exam and then swear that, starting immediately on Monday with the next chapter, I was going to read the chapter and highlight it and take notes and make flashcards, and I wouldn't do it. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I never got punished for it by my grades. I always got straight A's, but I did it in a really unhealthy way, and I developed a perfectionistic part of me and I developed a taskmaster part of me. The taskmaster part is always on us to be working. The taskmaster in us berates us for sitting on the couch and relaxing. It's thinking, "There's something you should be doing. Should you be doing dishes? Should you be doing laundry? Should you be wiping down the counters? Should you be getting ready for work Monday morning?" The taskmaster always sees things that should be done and thinks we can never afford to be resting. We never deserve to rest. We never need to rest. We should be in motion doing things.
The taskmaster gets self-esteem from ticking things off the to-do list. I had a strong taskmaster part, and what I found as I stay Bright, and now I just recently celebrated two decades--20 full years--of putting my food on the scale, not perfectly, but since I started this 20 years ago, my orientation toward work has really shifted, and I want to share two big lessons that I've learned in these 20 years.
One is that it doesn't behoove me to push through with my work. It really doesn't. What I've noticed is that the difference in my productivity, like the effectiveness and output of work per minute spent working, is I really think a full hundred times greater. Not just twice as good, not just five times as good, not even 10 times as good, but I think it's literally a hundred times greater if I'm feeling motivated, sharp and up for it. If I'm like, "Yeah, let's go."
If I have an email to write that's going to go out to the Bright Line Eating email list and I am really up for it, I can get into a flow and just bang that out, like... "With Love, Susan," and feel great about it, send it off to the team, and it's so smooth. If I feel logy and resistant and tired and muzzy-headed and down and not up for it, I can spend hours doing everything but that email. Even if I sit down at the computer to write, I'm staring at a blank screen for a long time, I mean, forcing myself to work. And mainly the issue is whether I'm hanging that over my head like, "You've got to get this done. You've got to get this done now. You've got to get this done now." It's just not worth it. It's really not worth it. It's literally better to just say, "You know what? Now's not the time for writing that email. I'm just going to relax now," and trust that the email will get done later.
So here's the lesson that I've learned is that my motivation to work comes back if I just fully let go, and I mean with full permission, to not work now, to take the morning off, to take the afternoon off, to take the weekend off, whatever time off I need. If I let go of the expectation of working and wait, my motivation to work will come back. And then if I engage with that task or that to-do item with a keen mind and a full tank, it'll just get done, so much easier.
So, I think of this as kind of the ebb and flow of work. It really does not behoove me to expect that I'm going to get it done now. Now, here's the other thing, and this is where a couple decades in Bright Line Eating style recovery really serve me well is there's a flip side to this coin, which is sometimes when I am feeling depressed, feeling down in that way of feeling like, ugh, what I really need to do is to get into action, and it might not be working. It might be like, "I need to take a hot shower. I need to get out of bed and make my bed. I need to get to the grocery store. I need to make a phone call to someone in food recovery that I love. I need to get into action."
There's this great Indigo Girls song called "Hammer and a Nail," and it says, "I got to get out of bed and get a hammer and a nail, learn how to use my hands, not just my head. I'll think myself into jail. And a refuge never grows from a chin in a hand and a thoughtful pose. Got to tend the earth if you want a rose." It's a beautiful song, great lyrics, and it's saying, "Get up and do something. You got to move a muscle to change a thought." And that's true too, and for me, there's a subtle difference between the down feeling of "I need rest" and the down feeling of "My mood is in a slump and I need to get into motion." It really behooves me to notice that difference, notice that difference. Is it that I need rest, or is it that I need to go do something like make my bed and take a hot shower to just feel better?
Oh, my goodness. Yeah, and then one final thought I have about feelings. I've shared this with you before here and there in different courses, and maybe in a Vlog, I'm not sure. But it's that it's really interesting, if I don't feel good that I want to scan the tools of my Bright Line Eating program and notice, "Do I not feel good because I haven't been working my program, because I'm not making phone calls, because I'm not meditating in the morning, because I'm not doing my food prep and writing down my food the night before?" If I'm not feeling good and I'm not actually doing those things, well, that's a huge opportunity because I can just start to do those tools again and I'll feel better really soon.
But similarly, if I'm not feeling good and I am doing all of those things, that's good news too, because it means that my feelings are almost surely about to catch up, and I'm about to feel a lot better. Because if we're doing the right things, the feel good is going to follow. It sometimes just lags a little bit. So yeah, just some musings this week about work, about feelings about action, getting into action. Yeah, I just want to leave you with just the emphasis point of... I just cannot emphasize enough. I just recently got back from a vacation. It was incredible. Two and a half weeks on the West Coast, camping in Oregon, hot springs in Northern California, staying with friends in Santa Cruz. Oh, my gosh, I had the best time.
But when I got home, reentry was a bear, and it took me a long time to feel right again. I had a lot of work to do, and I really had to ride the accelerator and the gas on the... There were moments where I could get work done, and there were whole hours, hours and hours and hours where I had to be like, "Well, I'm just going to lie around this morning." Even though I thought I had a bunch of videos to shoot, I'm going to have to trust they're going to get done later because I'm not doing them now. I need to rest. I did a lot of crawling back into bed and getting extra sleep, and I really had to ride that accelerator and gas to feel like, "When's the moment to get the work done, and when's the moment to just let myself rest?" Again, if I just trusted and I let myself rest, the work would get done, just maybe not right them.
So, that's the Weekly Vlog. I'll see you next week.
