I did start a blog about TV this week and I sat down again to finish writing it but I just can’t. It was all very well me saying I’d do a blog every week for 12 weeks but when setting that frivolous little goal I totally forgot than shit happens! You genuinely never know in life when the ground might change from under you…
In the scheme of things the latest shake up (to do with my husband’s career) is hopefully nothing too serious and yet it is still distracting my thoughts; I don’t want to write a happy blog about TV – I want to wallow in worry - because that is my nature! In recent years I have really worked hard on being more ‘mindful’. It has been a battle because it’s like re-wiring the brain - but I’d like to think I’d mastered it to some degree; carved a new circuit in my brain that allowed me to stay in the moment and not race ahead with my usual worrying. I was very taken with the whole idea and loved feeling like I was somehow taking back control. I certainly saw the benefits of ‘mindfulness’ - but then despite all my hard work my default setting still remains and sometimes I quite frankly can’t be bothered battling against it! My default setting is always to worry…not just a little worry but a ‘google everything and find out the worst case scenario’ level of worry. This kind of worrying naturally comes with a whole heap of stress hormones and it could be argued that this is all completely unnecessary stress when the reality rarely works out as bad as the places my imagination takes me. However, when practicing mindfulness I noticed that I still had all these stress hormones…the only difference was I had no control over them. For a period of time I was waking up in the middle of the night with my heart racing because I’d been having an unusually vivid nightmare, or at other random times I was feeling the need to take excessively deep breaths as though I couldn’t get enough oxygen. It was like my brain chemistry still needed an outlet… I totally believe that changing your thoughts and actions can change your brain – and that life and the people in it can change your thoughts and actions. So much can be modified and changed because of neuroplasticity but I’m afraid I just don’t believe you can permanently change your basic personality. If I look back I think I’ve changed and evolved a lot over the years; I’m definitely more cynical than I used to be, less confident perhaps but less bothered what people think of me and I'm also generally calmer, but through all these changes my actual personality hasn’t altered. My personality is sort of what makes me ‘me’. You could have known me at any point in my life and probably have the exact same impression; highly strung, honest, speaks without thinking, poor sense of time, tight with money – I’ll think of a good quality in a minute!! I’ve modified those traits to work around the situations I’ve been in, so I work especially hard to be on time for work or I try hard not to speak without thinking when I’m around certain people – but the point is it is hard work! I can’t keep it up indefinitely. I prefer to be around people with whom I can be myself – I think that’s essentially the spark of why we like some people more than others – there’s less effort required to be around them. Having my personality is quite exhausting so the whole thing about being mindful looked like a great way to modify my personality for the better…only, having put in such a lot of hard work with mindfulness, I find my default ‘worry’ setting probably works best for me anyway. I think there’s positives and negatives to any and every personality trait and sometimes it’s just a matter of owning who you are and making it work for you… The positive element of my worrying means I’m prepared for anything. A lot of the time nothing can beat my imagination in the ‘this is shit!’ stakes and so even if in reality things do turn out a bit shit I’m often kind of relieved and OK with it because – well it could have been worse! Beyond that, my frantic ‘worry’ research can sometimes actually prevent some things from being worse; I can predict what way something might go and then intercept it from actually happening. Over and over the one thing I’m learning as I get older is there are no techniques or nuggets of advice that work the same for everyone. You trial and error your way through them all but ultimately have to figure stuff out for yourself and then make peace with your own personality. People can go through exactly the same experiences, good or bad, and react totally differently to everyone else around them. Sometimes people seem to make the same mistakes again and again and never quite realise why these patterns keep repeating in their lives. I can’t help but suspect that we’re all just victims of our own personality. Trying to pretend otherwise is never going to work out long term… With that in mind I’m learning to manage my personality and right now that will include harnessing my natural tendency to worry; I simply won't feel better till I've had a proper wallow and exhausted every concern! Rather than attempting to be someone I’m not I will focus my energies on being the best version of me that I can be…
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