Tag: balance

The Sunday Scaries

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the Sunday scaries and wondering why they seem to hit me harder than they used to. It’s a strange phenomenon because nothing has actually happened yet. The work week hasn’t started. No difficult conversations have occurred. No crises have landed in my inbox. And yet, sometime on Sunday afternoon, I can feel my body begin preparing for battle.

My shoulders tighten first. Then comes the restlessness. I’ll find myself unable to fully enjoy whatever I’m doing because my mind has already left the weekend and started living in Monday. By Sunday evening, my thoughts are racing ahead through the entire week, trying to anticipate every possible problem that could arise. A difficult meeting becomes a catastrophe. A simple conversation becomes a confrontation. A challenge becomes a disaster before it has even had a chance to exist.

What fascinates me is how convincing these fears feel in the moment. As I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, every worry seems completely reasonable. My brain presents each one as an urgent issue that requires immediate attention. Surely if I think about it long enough, I can solve it before it happens. Surely if I prepare for every possible outcome, I can somehow protect myself from disappointment, stress, or conflict.

The problem is that by the time Monday arrives, I’ve often lived through the week once already. I’ve attended the meetings in my head. I’ve had the arguments. I’ve received the criticism. I’ve rehearsed the failures. My body responds as though these things have already happened, even though they exist only in the stories my mind has created.

I’ve often heard people say that anxiety is worrying about things that will probably never happen. While there is certainly truth in that, I’ve realized that explanation has never fully resonated with me. Part of what makes the Sunday scaries so difficult is that life has taught me that not every fear is irrational.

There have been moments in my life when the thing I was worried about actually happened. There have been phone calls I didn’t want to answer, conversations I dreaded having, and losses I desperately hoped I could somehow avoid. Some of the hardest chapters of my life arrived after periods of knowing they might be coming. When you’ve lived through enough heartbreak, enough uncertainty, and enough grief, your brain begins to believe that its job is to stay one step ahead of pain.

Looking back, I can see how that survival instinct developed. If I can anticipate every possible outcome, maybe I won’t be blindsided. If I can identify every risk, maybe I can prevent disaster. If I stay alert enough, perhaps I can keep the people I love safe and protect myself from being hurt again.

The problem is that a mind trained to watch for genuine threats doesn’t always know the difference between a life-changing crisis and an ordinary Monday morning. It responds to an upcoming meeting with the same vigilance it once reserved for truly difficult seasons. It treats uncertainty as danger. It mistakes worry for preparation and anxiety for control.

What I’ve started to understand is that my Sunday scaries aren’t really about the week ahead. They’re about my relationship with uncertainty. They are the result of a mind that desperately wants guarantees in a world that refuses to provide them.

The irony is that all those hours spent worrying never actually give me what I’m looking for. They don’t make me more prepared. They don’t eliminate risk. They don’t provide certainty. They simply rob me of the one thing I actually possess in that moment, which is the Sunday evening sitting right in front of me.

While anxiety constantly reminds me that difficult things are possible, experience has taught me something equally important. I’ve survived every difficult season that has come my way. I’ve survived grief. I’ve survived loss. I’ve survived disappointment, uncertainty, conflict, and change. Not because I successfully predicted every outcome, but because when life demanded something of me, I found a way through it.

Maybe that’s the lesson I’m slowly learning.

The goal isn’t to convince myself that nothing bad will ever happen. Life has already proven otherwise. The goal is to trust myself enough to know that whatever happens, I will deal with it when it arrives. I don’t need to carry the entire week before it begins. I don’t need to solve Wednesday’s problems on Sunday evening. I don’t need to sacrifice today’s peace in an attempt to purchase tomorrow’s safety.

The truth is that this moment deserves my attention just as much as whatever waits for me tomorrow. The conversation with my husband. The dog curled up nearby. The last few quiet hours of the weekend. The sunset outside the window. These things are real. The disasters my mind is rehearsing are, for the most part, only possibilities.

Monday will come whether I worry about it or not. The week will unfold in ways I can predict and in ways I can’t. What I can control is whether I spend Sunday evening living the life that is actually happening or preparing for one that may never arrive.

And if experience has taught me anything, it’s this: I am far stronger than my anxiety gives me credit for. The same strength that carried me through the hardest days of my life is still here. I don’t need to spend Sunday night rehearsing every possible disaster to be ready for whatever this week brings.

Blessings Y’all – Amy

The Pressure of Free Time…

There’s a very specific kind of giddiness that comes with a long weekend as an adult. It starts sometime around Thursday afternoon, when you realize there’s an extra day sitting out there waiting for you. By Friday, it feels full of possibility in a way regular weekends never quite do. One extra day somehow tricks your brain into believing you suddenly have time to become fully rested, productive, creative, organized, and caught up on life, friends, and family all at once.

The mental list starts building almost immediately. You’re going to sew. Clean out a closet. Take a nap. Water the plants. Sit outside with a glass of wine and actually relax for once. Maybe read. Maybe organize. Maybe do absolutely nothing for a little while and not feel guilty about it.

But somewhere between all the possibilities and all the pressure we quietly place on ourselves, the long weekend starts feeling less restful and more overwhelming.

At least it’s that way for me.

Because instead of simply enjoying the extra time, my brain starts trying to carefully distribute it. Even now it’s sitting here whirring trying to figure out what I’m going to jump off this chair and get done. If I spend the afternoon sewing, I probably should’ve been productive. If I spend the day cleaning and organizing, I’ll feel disappointed that I never actually rested. If I sit still too long, I start mentally calculating all the things I “should” be doing instead. If I worked a little Monday somehow my week next week won’t be so bad. And somehow having too many choices leaves me oddly stuck, drifting from one thing to another without ever fully settling into any of them.

Then suddenly it’s Monday evening. The weekend is over. The house still isn’t completely done. Half the projects remain untouched. The rest somehow didn’t feel restful enough. And despite having an extra day off, you’re still tired and somehow emotionally unprepared to go back to work.

I think part of the problem is that many of us have forgotten how to let free time simply exist without turning it into another thing to manage well. 🙋🏻‍♀️ We approach long weekends with such high expectations. Surely this is the weekend we’ll finally catch up, recharge, reset, organize life, and become the version of ourselves who has it all together.

But maybe that’s too much pressure to place on a few open days.

The older I get, the more I think the best weekends are rarely the ones where everything gets done. They’re usually the quieter ones. The ones where you laugh a little, rest a little, wander through a project because you want to instead of because you scheduled it, and maybe sit outside at the end of the day with a glass of wine realizing you didn’t maximize every minute… but you lived in some of them.

Maybe the goal of a long weekend was never to fix our exhaustion in the first place. Maybe it was simply meant to give us a little room to breathe.

Blessings Ya’ll – Amy

Balance or Boundaries?

This is a topic we have been exploring in counseling the last couple of visits and one I’ve taken my time with my thoughts before putting it here. Anyone who knows me I struggle with giving anything less than 1000% to everything – almost always at my own detriment. Work is a perfect example. When the counselor found out that I come home, after working all day, and the first thing I do is check my work email when I walk in the door it was a red flag. Same with being tied to the phone over the weekend and when on vacation. I have an unhealthy obsession with email. There. I said it. And coming to terms with that has taken more work than I ever thought it could.

“You can’t have balance without boundaries but you can have boundaries and still be out of balance.”

Let that just sit there for a minute and marinate. What is balance in today’s world? Where is the line between a healthy balance and the attitude of “not my job”? I’m old school – the “40 hours and that’s it” or “not my job” attitude that is so prevalent in most work places makes me slightly insane. Yet – do those people have it right as far as having a healthy work life balance? Is it either black and white or is there a lot of gray somewhere between?

I’ve recently changed my work schedule to allow Tim and I an extra 45 minutes before the alarm goes off. I’ve been at it for three weeks and it still feels like I’m doing something wrong. Like that 45 minutes is shorting work somewhere along the way. And being honest I’ve already slipped into not being as diligent with my end of day out time. But that guilt is still present.

Jumping off of work for a second – what about in relationships? Extracurricular activities? It’s interesting looking back on the kids’ childhood in that light. It came very easily to Fred and I to put boundaries on family time and not fall into the club sports/insane schedule lifestyle that rules so many families today. We felt strongly that (while there are a few exceptions) statistically the chance of a child’s’ post childhood success with any sport or extracurricular was slim while the investment in time with them as a family would have lifelong benefits. Why did that boundary come so easily and without a second thought but all other boundaries I feel like I’m letting someone (everyone) down? Relationship boundaries are very hard for me. Tim comments all the time on those that I keep close despite that offline that make me more than a little nutty – he doesn’t understand it. For him it’s black and white – if you are doing things that make him unhappy/hurt him you aren’t part of his world. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from my mother in law about navigating the world of adult children and their lives and invisible boundaries adult kids put down.

All this to say – where do you have balance in your life and is that because of conscious boundaries you’ve put into place? Where could you use more boundaries to achieve balance? Honestly want to hear thoughts!

Blessings y’all – Amy