Rhythms, not Rigidity

Have you ever felt like the only way your life would be in order is if you made a time-blocked agenda for the week, scheduling your time down to the minute and slotting in every task you can think of to meet every goal you can think of for yourself?

There's a word for that, my friends: hypervigilance.

And I say it with authority because I know it intimately.

You've probably also experienced the yo-yo that comes with it: you make this agenda on a Sunday, wake up on Monday with fresh energy, dig in to your agenda, and then ... the school nurse calls and you need to pick your kid up. There goes the 10 to 11 a.m. email catchup. Or you get all the way to the end of your workday, get home and start to make dinner, and realize you didn't defrost the ground beef. So much for taco night.

When this happens I bet you feel all that motivating energy drain away, and you just want to throw your hands up and the towel in. So much for the rest of the week! What's the point of even trying?

I've been there so many times that if I stacked up all my past well-intentioned agendas, I could fill at least a good-sized swimming pool. Real talk.

As high achievers, we feel a roaring drive to perform. This drive, combined with any number of additional dynamics we might also experience—perfectionism, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, unhealed or unrealized trauma, anxiety—can make our inner performer into a monster of hypervigilance. But this rigid watch-keeping doesn't get us the bulletproof bubble of protection we think it will; in fact it keeps us stressed and unsafe, overproducing and nervous, and exhausted. Add high sensitivity to that and it's enough to make a person just grind to a halt as a quivering mess.

I love to organize and design productivity systems, but before I was aware of the role hypervigilance played in my life, I found myself creating super-detailed systems that quickly overwhelmed me once I tried to keep them up. A twenty-item to-do list. A daily deep clean. Three multi-ingredient, perfectly-nutritious meals a day. Immaculate makeup and hair. Birthdays cards always sent on time. All this managed through elaborate systems and rigid planning, with a smile on my face, trying to hold life in a Hulk-like grip. But inside, I was that quivering mess I mentioned earlier.

Ugh. It was terrible.

Any chance you've found yourself there too?

In the environment I've learned to create now, I chucked all those expectations. I've embraced life as messy. Figured out how to make cooking less work. Lowered my work expectations (a little, let's be honest). Worried less if I didn't express myself perfectly. It's not perfect, and that's kinda the point. It's hella uncomfortable sometimes, sure, but I figure that's part of the process of letting go a little bit.

What helped me shift from rigidity to more relaxation was first, a lot of good therapy, and second, a continuing practice of creating and embracing rhythms.

While routine can lock you into a rigid structure with no freedom, rhythms are fluid, in tune with nature, and spiritually connected. Rhythms are dynamic, allowing for shifts and pauses, accelerations and slowdowns. NO ONE can predict what each day or week will bring. As many of us know too well, life can deliver a sharp uppercut or a five-course feast, with no warning preceding either.

Instead of a rigid agenda with time stamps, I like to have daily and weekly rhythms. I like to have a glass of water while I'm getting ready for the day and I like to end the day with a quick house-tidy. I write this blog on Monday evenings, usually; I often play trivia on Tuesdays; I typically hold meetings on midweek afternoons; and I like to meal-prep on Sundays. I'm sure you noticed I've got modifiers for each one of these: usually, often, typically, like to. I can't always keep the same rhythm every day or week. Sometimes I'm on vacation (yay!), sometimes I'm sick (boo). And we all have different rhythms and energy cycles.

If you find yourself drawn to micro-organizing your agenda or your calendar or your life, I'd suggest just pausing for a moment and asking, what's the end goal here? Are you just figuring out when to get a reasonable list of things done? Great, carry on, my friend, as long as you feel chill about it. Or are you planning for every possible contingency and creating a NASA-mission-level protocol for your week? Hang on there, Speed Racer: you might be over-planning. Relaxing into a rhythm might mean you have to let a few things go, or lower your standards for what "done" means. See if you can try to lean into more rhythms and less routine. I promise you will be happier for it.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay