The choosing game

Yesterday I was thinking about some of my learned thinking and how it's not really helpful (for example, feeling like everything should be perfect in the lead up to a fun event, otherwise it's too hard to enjoy it). This morning I'm quite tired (I went out for a fun event last night (after a less than perfect lead up, and I still had a great night) and some more of those learned thoughts/conditioning were swirling around in my head (e.g. thinking people are all good or all bad and feeling confused when it turns out that's not true (every time)), and the thoughts were leading to anxiety, even though I knew they weren't true. Then I started thinking 'Oh I need to change all this conditioned thinking, there's so many things I need to change, I don't know how to do it' and I felt myself about to really spiral down into an anxiety pit...

I was making a cup of tea while these thoughts were swirling, and pouring in our beautiful milk straight from the dairy calmed me a little, and I came back to the moment, and was somehow able to shift perspective on my thoughts, and instead thought 'Wow, there's some conditioned thinking that it would be helpful to change, which will make things a bit easier' and then I felt great. I felt like I was making a choice, a positive choice to help improve my life, and I wasn't saying that things were bad, just that I'd found a way to make them better. My early thinking had been victim-like which can feel isolating and hopeless.

I feel so different in my body when I am thinking negative or victim thoughts - my shoulders hunch, I curl in on myself so my lungs end up squished and it's harder to breathe - and then I feel anxious because I'm short of breath, but my brain assumes that the shortness of great is because of anxiety, so it starts to worry more and try to figure out what I'm anxious about, and (as Sarah Wilson says in her wonderful book First We Make the Beast Beautiful) I 'get anxious about being anxious'. If anything goes slightly wrong or unexpectedly when I'm thinking like that, it adds to the anxiety and before long I can be feeling like nothing is ok and everything is a disaster. I don't seem to be able to stop and think, everything is so swirly in my brain there's no room for new information.

When I am thinking positive thoughts, staying in the moment, feeling in charge of my life, I stand straighter, I open my lungs up and breathing is calm and easy, I can stop for a moment if something goes wrong, think about a way to deal with it, and then move through it. I can feel really happy and content, even if things are going wrong around me - they don't impact my mood.

There's a couple of things that I can learn from this. One is that knowing that my thoughts impact on how I react to things - SOMETIMES when I start to move to anxiousness, I can tell myself that what I'm thinking is not necessarily true, it's not the only way to think. Sometimes I'm not able to change the way I'm thinking, but knowing that there are other possibilities can mean that I know that the anxiety won't last, it's only until something shifts, and that makes it more bearable (it used to feel like I'd be feeling that way forever, and that was scary). The other thing is that if I realise early enough that I'm moving to victim mode, I often CAN change my thoughts, just reframe it a little - sometimes that's enough to lift me right out of it (like this morning), other times it just calms me enough to be able to keep functioning and I can recover more quickly. It helps if I can do something nurturing or notice the great things around me and come back to the moment.

I also know that practice makes it easier. Every time I shift my thinking I get better at it, and I can continue to improve. I know it's not a fix-all and I'm not going to be able to do it every time - any time that I can do it though, improves my life and that of those around me. So I will celebrate those moments and remember that I do have options when I'm feeling low - even if I choose not to access those options every time, knowing that there are choices makes all the difference.

(This activity from Scott Noelle illustrates all the above - I've been doing it a bit lately, and this morning was the first time since I started that I truly remembered the advantage of knowing there is a choice https://www.dailygroove.com/choosing/)

Cinderella

On Monday we went to see Cinderella at the movies. Caitlin and I were very excited, Millie happy to go and LiAM not sure - he didn't enjoy it overly but the girls and I loved it. I was impressed with the detail and the direction, and thought Cate Blanchett was a captivatingly nasty step-mother, and Helena Bonham-Carter a delightfully eccentric fairy godmother.

Over the past year we have watched many movies based on the Cinderella story. We started with the original Disney animation, and then have borrowed many live action movie versions which tell the story in different ways. I'm amazed at the number of Cinderella based movies there are, and the more I watch, the more I become captivated by the story, and the more I realise it's not just a nice rags-to-riches story.

Two things in particular really stand out to me about the story - Cinderella is downtrodden and treated badly, and then she starts to stand up for herself and is able to break free of that - usually with the help of friends, but I guess it's the prince character noticing her and falling in love with her that boosts her self-esteem and gives her the courage to stand up to her stepmother and make some changes. I think I had always thought of her as just luckily meeting someone rich who takes her out of her undesirable situation, but it's more that she finally fights for better treatment and is able to break free that way. The prince is really just a nice bonus after that - her freedom is even more important. She also spends a lot of the story feeling like she's not worthy of the prince, and at the end is so much more confident and does believe in herself enough to believe that he could love her.

The other thing is the incredible romance of the prince being so determined to find this girl. He is willing to be ridiculed by his friends, advisors and his family, in order to track her down and be with her. I'd not realised before how brave that is, how much he goes against everything he's been taught so far. And it is SO romantic. He really loves her (or trusts that he will love her) and he prioritises that over everything else.

Both of those aspects to the story are so inspirational and I think could really make a difference to people who are struggling with their own self-esteem or being prevented from following their dreams. I feel movies can make a big difference and remind people that we can do things that are scary and it's sometimes worth giving it a go.

It's been great watching so many versions of the tale - we've had lots of discussions about what things are always the same in each version, and which bits are changed - and how those changes alter the story. I'm also really loving the fact that by exploring the story a bit further, my opinion on it has changed completely and I'm seeing it much more deeply than I ever did. I used to dismiss it a bit as a light, frothy, Disney tale, and now I love it and it's brought us so much joy and learning.

(Our favourite modern Cinderella adaptations are A Cinderella Story with Hillary Duff, and Another Cinderella Story with Selena Gomez)