Kind >Productive
A sick day mantra for all days
Resting is hard for me, even when I’m sick. Slowing down my body often revs my brain. The OCD thoughts, the mental to do lists, the hyperawareness of all the things I could (or should!) be doing instead come cascading in.Â
I feel better when I’m working, producing, accomplishing.Â
Yet, I’m finding that in order to foster self-compassion, it’s imperative to slow down. To notice my thoughts, my breath, the sensations in my body. This is not possible when I’m focused on doing doing doing.Â
Maybe you can relate.Â
As I write this, my head pounds and my chest aches. My temperature hovers just below a full-blown fever. I’m sick. Again.Â
With two school-aged kids bringing home all the germs, at least one member of our little four-person family has been sick for, oh, probably 90% of the last four months.Â
As a college professor, I didn’t always have the luxury to fully rest when I was sick during the semester. When a cold spread to my sinuses and the pressure made me lightheaded, I asked my husband to drive me to campus so I could teach. With canceled class comes alternative assignments and restructuring the syllabus, and it’s way more work to get a sub than to just hunker down and go. Thankfully, my husband did not oblige and told me to lie down. That day, I ended up canceling class, but not until I’d found an appropriate alternative activity and emailed the class about the cancellation (which actually took three tries for me to get the date right, so thank goodness I didn’t go in to teach!) I graded the final exam while fighting the stomach flu, doling out grades in between waves of nausea. I posted final grades while my son threw up next to me in our metallic popcorn bowl. I attended my daughter’s last day of preschool party with pinkeye that I thought could be hidden with a ball cap.Â
What I’m trying to say is I’ve experienced a lot of sickness without a lot of rest (which probably explains why I’ve been sick so much). But now that I’m on summer break, I’m giving myself full permission to rest and recover (after I post this, I promise!).
A reframe that has helped me in all of the unexpected sickness is to focus not on my productivity level, but my kindness level. Instead of focusing on everything I’m not getting done, I’m getting better at asking myself, How kind can I be to myself and those around me when I’m not able to be as productive as I’d like to be?
And if you’re not sick, the question still applies. What would it look like for you to be kind to yourself today regardless of your productivity level?
Okay, back to bed to binge watch Madam Secretary while the kids play on the iPad. Have a great week!
I empathize a great deal with what you've described here, especially the way that stepping back from accomplishing "one more thing, one more thing" to slow down will kick off angry cascades of thoughts in my brain about what a lazy, incompetent, blameworthy, shameful, and doomed person I am if I can't get *something* substantive done today, but how it really needs to be several substantive things from my mile-long to-do list so as to make up for all the days over the past week, month, year, or decade when I did not get enough done, and how not getting enough done means that *I* am not enough.
One of the greatest days of my life was the day I got a colonoscopy. The physician who performed the procedure sent me home with explicit instructions to lounge on the couch the entire rest of the day, not try to lift anything heavy physically ***or*** mentally/emotionally. And I did. I lounged on the couch with a stack of print books and also my Amazon Fire tablet just reading to my heart's content, then shifting later in the day to watching a movie with my spouse. It was amazing beyond amazing. I felt like a different person on that day ***and*** on the day following. I'm crying a little right here, right now remembering this one, precious day from my adult life when I felt I had permission to rest and actually rested. One day.
What you've written here aligns with the values I now, as an adult, hold (i.e. the values I hold now, after having left the punitive, world-rejecting authoritarian cult I grew up in). What you've written helps me see with greater clarity how being kind to myself would be logically consistent with valuing kindness, even if difficult due to how I am not used to extending kindness toward myself.
Thank you for your sensitivity, your brilliance with insight, and your compassion. I appreciate what you write and get a *lot* out of it.
Yes! Yesterday I chose to lay on the couch and watched New Girl while my kids napped. We had house guests for a full week and I was exhausted. I turned away from the endless list of things I could do/needed to do and toward my own well-being