Blue Monday

As I start to write this, the sun is shining brightly. A soft blue sky is gently brushed with fluffy white clouds; all is well. And yet, like most people who find themselves in this position, my mind keeps wandering off and poking at things that hurt.

It’s an interesting experience, to hold conflicting thoughts and feelings simultaneously. I am both utterly content with post-lunch satisfaction (homemade sticky ginger sponge cake FTW), and feel like an utter failure for not accomplishing more so far this year (a year which, you’ll note from the date of writing, is barely more than two weeks old).

As this New Year came into being, I was rather taken by David Spinks’ approach to an Annual Review - or, at least, the fourth component of it which he describes as “Frog January”;

“My uncle, Robin Spinks, who's a world-class project manager, once taught me the phrase, "swallow the frog".

It means that you should start the day by doing the most difficult task, or the task that you most want to avoid.

Once you finish that task, the rest of the day is gravy! But if you put off that task until the end of the day, when you've already used up all your energy and focus...

The same advice applies for your annual goals. It's best to get the hardest stuff done early. Then the rest of the year is gravy.”

At the moment, the boulder in the middle of my road forward is my dissertation; it is my frog of all frogs, a supersized amphibian that I can barely bring myself to think about, let alone swallow (one bite at a time, obvs).

Being aware that the next couple of months bring with them potentially difficult anniversaries, and not wanting to rely on Future Anya’s mental health in the run-up to the mid-April deadline for submission, I decided to make my Frog January all about writing a first draft.

Ah, dear reader. Can you guess how many words I’ve written so far?

Yes.

That’s right.

ZERO.

You see, I didn’t want to rely on Distant Future Anya’s ability to Get Shit Done. But I forgot to take into account that Present Day Anya is a small and exhausted little bunny who, rather than recharging her batteries over the festive season, had a Pretty Tough Emotional Time Indeed, wrestling with relationship complexities and not seeing a solitary human for two weeks over the whole damn period.

(Social isolation, albeit in the form of solitary confinement, that lasts more than 15 consecutive days is recognized by the United Nations and various human rights organizations as torture.)

Which takes me to the real Big Boss I hope to fight in 2023; my continued and pronounced social isolation.

I suspect that one of the things that’s adding to my lack of progress or motivation is my age-old adversary, good old loneliness. I was really lucky to spend an afternoon and evening with my partner (all masked up!) at the start of the New Year, and to spend a whole afternoon (again, masked) with a friend the weekend after. But it’s still biting at my heels, and it’s the thing I need to address most - right up there with completing my Masters and generating an income.

Because, as Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz of the Harvard Study of Adult Development point out, there’s a solitary (pun intended) factor that “stands out” when ensuring that people thrive and lead fulfilling lives; the quality of their relationships;

"We think the best hypothesis is that good relationships are important ways that we manage stress.

If something happens to me today and I get upset, I can feel my body rev up. My heart rate elevates, and I start to sweat and ruminate. That’s the body going into fight-or-flight mode, which we want to do to meet challenges. But when the threat is removed, we want the body to go back to baseline. What I find is that if I can go home and talk to my wife, I can feel my body calm down. 

One of the things the science suggests is that people who are isolated or have toxic relationships can’t do that. They don’t have a place they can go to recover from fight-or-flight mode. They then stay in a state of elevated stress hormones and slightly elevated inflammation throughout their body [and] we know that that breaks down body systems over time.”

While social isolation and loneliness are not the same thing - many people prefer to live on their own, and we’ve all had the experience of feeling lonely in a crowd - I know from personal experience how the two often overlap and cause tremendous suffering.

In fact, this is what I’m referring to in the trailer for my brand-new podcast, The A to Z of Happiness, which launched today;

If you’re feeling lonely, or are beating yourself up over how things look right now, I hope you’ll join me every Monday for the next 26 weeks [gulps], as my friend Mark Steadman and I unpack the science of happiness “one letter at a time” at A to Z of Happiness.

Let’s keep each other company as we walk each other home?

.
Photo by Daria Nekipelova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/rear-view-of-walking-woman-in-blue-coat-9811508/