It seems that about every 4-5 weeks, I experience a total motivation meltdown. I can’t stick to my eating plan (which I prefer to ‘diet’). I don’t feel like exercising – or, when I do, my workouts are frustrating at best and injury-ridden at worst. It would be tremendously convenient to blame this on hormones – four weeks being a normal cycle and all – but that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it. I just get in a bad mood spiral, and just keep going down and down and down no matter what I do to try to improve it. This is one of those weeks.
Like this morning: I got up early with the intention of eating breakfast, preparing and packing our lunches, making coffee, and doing my hair before catching the bus at 7:36. I accomplished all of those things EXCEPT eating my breakfast, which may have been the triggering event for the rest of the morning. I hastily stuffed my lunch, coffee, mail, headphones, iPod, organizer, and wallet in my bag as I ran (unnecessarily, as it turned out) to catch the bus, resulting in a jumbled bag, messed up hair, and unnecessary sweatiness. I tried to stop at a favorite breakfast spot to get takeout, but they didn’t open for another 15 minutes, and I didn’t want to wait 15 minutes to place an order that would take another 10. I spilled coffee on myself while walking to another breakfast option, where I picked up a decidedly lackluster omelet that took 15 minutes to prepare. I missed a call from Shane, who I had been texting throughout my frustrating commute and breakfast quest. I realized that my top was really too low cut to wear without another shirt underneath. I arrived at work 15 minutes late and a total mess, tear-stained from a 3 minute crying jag in the bathroom, overly warm from unplanned walking, overly hungry from delayed breakfast, and utterly unable to resist the breakroom Oreos.
It’s like a series of dominos: one small thing triggers another small thing, which then feels like a bigger thing than it really is simply because it has the weight of multiple small things behind it. Nothing bad happened this morning – or last night, for that matter, when my mood was just as stormy – so there’s nothing to fix, per se. It’s just that for every frustrating thing that happens, it takes at least one happy, spontaneous, or encouraging thing to lift me back up. Like this whimsical desktop wallpaper. Or the awesome lunch that I have waiting for me in a couple of hours. Or ten minutes spent writing an email to a friend I haven’t heard from in forever. Or a diet soda and a walk to the post office.
Let’s hope the rest of the week brings more positives than negatives – and that the bad mood that’s been going around moves on for good.
