That big thing you keep not doing is probably not about laziness. It might be that your brain is running worst-case scenario movies on a loop.
I’ve now interviewed more than 200 women about midlife transformation, and the single best tip I’ve heard for this came from the amazing filmmaker Mandy Fabian, creator of Jess Plus None. She told me about it on episode 151 of the Uplifters, and I have thought about it countless times since. She calls it a therapeutic tantrum.
The tantrum
Next time you’re spiraling out (probably at 3 am) on all the reasons you can’t or shouldn’t do the thing you want to do, set a timer for five minutes. Write down everything that could go wrong, or if writing isn’t your thing, leave yourself or a friend a voicemail with permission to delete it later without ever even listening to it.
Catch all the wacky things your brain worries about: money runs out, time runs out, your family disowns you, Joe from sixth grade thinks you’re a loser. The more ridiculous and unhinged the worries get, the better, because that usually means you’ve gotten past the polite ones and down to the ones that have actually been driving.
University of Chicago researchers had students write out their worries before a big exam, and those students scored higher than the ones who didn’t, especially the most anxious ones. The theory is that worry hogs working memory, and writing it down gives that space back.
What I found when I tried it
I didn’t have Mandy’s great name for it back then, but I did something very similar when we moved to the beach. On one hand, it was a dream come true. On the other hand, the prospect of working through a million changes to our work, the kids’ schools and extracurriculars, and literally everything else felt completely overwhelming.
So I wrote it all down. Turned out that most of the things I worried about could go either way, helpful or unhelpful, depending on how things played out. Some really did need careful consideration. And a lot of them, once I saw them on the page, I didn’t actually care about at all.
The pile that had felt like one giant, unmovable thing turned out to be a bunch of smaller things in different sizes, and the specificity made it infinitely more manageable.
Your turn
Pick the one thing you’ve been circling. Set a timer tonight. Throw a tantrum.
Then hit reply or comment and tell me how you unscramble your worries. I read every one and learn so much from your ideas!
With so much love and a very full notebook,
Aransas