Hi worklifers,
My inspiration today is to start by quoting Glennon Doyle. I hadn't read much of her previous work, but Untamed is a book that spoke to me at all levels. In it, Glennon Doyle writes,
“Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right. You will never change the fact that being human is hard, so you must change your idea that it was ever supposed to be easy.”
In this post, I want to talk about workday evenings, explain this powerful phenomenon of "humaning", and give you the tools to understand whether you are doing it right.
Let’s look at a what a typical thought download (dumping your thoughts on a piece of paper) looks like after a workday evening
T: Oh, it's been a tough day.
T: The kids will be back soon; I should start to get dinner ready.
T: I still have that presentation to send for review to the leadership team.
T: I don't know why they are resisting us on that proposal at work.
T: I could have conveyed that point in a better way.
T: I can get them excited about the value of the proposal with a few tweaks.
T: We need to really talk about taking a family vacation.
T: I don't know if we can do it as our kiddo is not yet vaccinated.
T: We should at least get the ski passes done.
T: I miss dad so much.
T: I hope mom is going to get the dental surgery done on time.
T: The dog needs to be brushed.
T: The fish need to be fed.
T: The plants need to be watered.
T: The garbage cans need to go back.
Workday evening: Doing it wrong (buffering)
Now, I want to be clear that there is absolutely nothing wrong about having all these thoughts at the end of a workday. In fact, they are perfectly normal. The challenge lies in the desire to avoid the stress and anxiety that arise as a result of some of these thoughts.
Our immediate reaction when we experience stressful thoughts is to want to feel happy, because we convince ourselves that it has been a tough day. We seek to dampen the negative emotions that creep up. This supersedes every other thought and drives us to make choices that result in buffering. Buffering is a coping mechanism. It could take the form of overeating, overdrinking, or overwatching content. It is akin to putting a big old band-aid over your anxiety and stress.
Now the problem with buffering is not that we don't complete the tasks we ought to do, such as preparing a meal for the kids or taking care of the pets and the house. The problem is that when we put that band-aid on our stress and anxiety, we often fail to acknowledge all the tasks we’ve successfully done. Overindulging denies us the ability to give ourselves love and grace, because it tends to overshadow all of our other accomplishments. In my case, this took the form of beating myself up the next day for doing everything right, but still overeating or overdrinking. My buffering mechanisms were casting a shadow over my successes.
The choices I was making weren’t adding up. The net effect of feeling happy in the moment always resulted in feeling bad the next day. It felt like a zero-sum game: Even when I “won” (used buffering to feel happy in the moment), I felt like I had lost the next morning, when the momentary pleasure had ended. I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what the problem was with wanting to feel happy. After all, doesn’t everyone deserve to feel happy after a tough day?
But the reality is that there are days you don't want to feel happy; you just want to feel what you are experiencing, even if it’s unpleasant. Processing my stress and anxiety taught me that many situations can cause negative thoughts and feelings. There are days when workplace bias or exclusion are particularly strong, a report of yours is struggling, or you are pulling maximum weight against a hard deadline. Maybe there’s stakeholder misalignment or directional product decisions that will have team- and organization-wide impact. This extends beyond the workplace: Close personal loss and grief has really brought about a different perspective in me.
When you lose someone, there are days when feeling happy is simply not the choice you can make. You are experiencing the loss, and it is hitting you from all directions, whether you try to be happy or not. Similarly, when you hear about someone who has met with an accident, faced and survived abuse, or been subjected to racism, happy is not an option. When you experience tragedy, it is just not the flavor you want to pick.
For a long time, I was stuck on this idea that workday evenings were easy for others but not for me, whether because of the way I was wired or because of my situation. I focused a lot on actions, trying to figure out what other people might have been doing differently. I asked around about how others chose to handle their evenings, especially after a tough day. What were their evening routines? What did they do that made them feel good the next day, not just in the moment?
But these were the wrong questions to ask. I was focusing on other people's actions instead of asking them, "What do you think at the end of a day"? You cannot change your behavior or copy someone's else's action plan and make it stick while your mindset is holding you back. If you admire someone, the trick is to ask them what they think rather than asking them what they do. The key was to start with the way I addressed my own thoughts and emotions.
Workday evening: Doing it right (humaning)
To quote Glennon Doyle again, “Being human is not about feeling happy. It is about feeling everything”. All feelings are made to be felt. If you look at your thoughts, especially at the end of a hard day, they create a suite of feelings that range from anxiety, stress, overwhelm, exhaustion, and frustration to excitement and accomplishment. Giving them all space within yourself can seem like a challenge. The immediate question becomes, how does one learn to feel everything?
The good news is that there is a method, and it is structured enough for us to practice. Initially it may seem contrived, but the more you do it the more easily it comes.
1. Start by bringing awareness to how feelings function. Feelings are vibrations that start in our brain, whereas sensations start in the body. Unlike a sensation, such as headache or a backache, feelings don't physically hurt. They cannot cause you harm or kill you. I often think of the Kelly Clarkson lyric, “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” "Because our feelings aren't a threat to our lives or our physical well-being, this gives us space to address them, even if they are unpleasant.
Running away from your feelings simply delays your ability to process them. Your thoughts, and the emotions they cause, don't just go away. In order to feel better, you have to get comfortable feeling worse first. A lot of people I know and admire leverage meditation or deep breathing techniques to bring awareness to what’s happening in their minds and their bodies. Similarly to how Andy puts it with Headspace, the trick is to notice your thoughts and feelings without being carried away by them, like watching cars passing by on the road. Simply becoming aware of your thoughts is a great start.
Another option for building awareness is to keep a journal, or do a thought download like the one you see above. I like to do this for 10 minutes each evening. Others like to take a short walk to observe their thoughts and clear their minds. A lot of worklifers complain that their commutes back home were their chance to unwind, and that with remote work, this no longer exists. But instead of feeling stuck as a result of our situation, we can instead view this as an opportunity to take a step back and explore new ways to observe our thoughts.
2. Learn how to label the feelings around each of your thoughts. Different thoughts generate different feelings. Labeling feelings has the effect of getting rid of cognitive overload. It allows you to use language with more meaning than simply saying, "It’s been a tough day". By instead saying, "I am anxious about how to turn in that presentation on time" you’re using specific language to label the thought that is causing anxiety. By defining your anxiety based on where it resides rather than attaching everything to, "It's been a tough day," you can avoid the sorts of thought errors that can lead you to give in to your urges.
3. Create a protocol. A protocol is a set of actions you plan to substitute in place of your urge to buffer. It is an intelligent choice that you make ahead of time using your prefrontal cortex. If you tend to buffer by consuming too much of something, your protocol tells you ahead of time what to do when that urge arises. The idea is to allow the urge but not give into it. This is akin to doing a mental pushup. It should feel like getting into a plank position, using your hands to lower all the way down, almost to the floor, and then pulling yourself back up instead of giving in to the pull of gravity.
When learning to do a pushup, you start on your knees and progress to doing a full one as you get better. The magical thing is that, as you continue to use your protocol, the urges tend to not last as long. However, the biggest advantage is a delayed reward that you give yourself. This delayed reward is your well-being, improved health, and a sharper mind. It is your awareness and ability to look at your accomplishments big and small and appreciate them better, and do the same for others around you. Protocols can start out easy, such as making a better choice of food, or reducing the quantity of what you drink. As you get better, you can start to level up and substitute these for even better choices, such as taking a walk, reading a book, or nurturing your creativity.
Just like you still go to the gym on days when you are tired, you can still lean into your mental practice in the evening, even when you’ve had a bad day. A good first goal is to do 100 of these mental pushups, allowing an urge 100 times without giving into it. Remember not to beat yourself up when you fail. Simply pick up and continue. There is no reset button here. The idea is to get to 100, then 200, and keep going… until you find yourself doing it without even thinking about it.
Re-thinking worklifebalance to worklifeunstuck
Two years back, after having been a worklifer for fifteen years, I finally freed myself by re-thinking the idea of work-life balance and committing to make it stick. I must confess, it was one of the boldest decisions I’ve ever made in my life.
The idea was to learn let go of my need to achieve work-life balance, and instead practicing worklifeunstuck. This was incredibly empowering to me, and when an idea or belief is empowering, it tends to become a part of your identity. My new belief system centered around the idea that, during any given day, I could end up in a situation at work or in life when I felt “stuck” due to my thoughts and feelings. This is inevitable, because I was born human. Being human means thinking some 60,000 thoughts in a single day. There is a very high chance that at least one of them, if not more, will be unpleasant or cause me distress.
The good news is that, as humans, we are also built with the capacity to feel everything. All feelings are made to be felt. So in fact, there is no shame in being stuck at the end of the day. You just need to believe in your ability to be an observer of your thoughts. You need to believe in your ability to use language to label feelings. You need to believe that you can develop protocols ahead of time to take empowering actions when urges arise. Instead of tripping on the thought errors like, “It’s been a tough day”, you can qualify what that looks like, take a more introspective stance, and view your situation in a way that brings awareness. From that awareness you can find your path to getting unstuck.
The time this process takes can vary, but it is totally in your control. It all depends on your capacity and willingness to feel, to give yourself permission to experience what you experience without judgement and without buffering. Worklifeunstuck acknowledges that you are born human, and that you will sometimes find yourself stuck. However, it is also about taking back control and agency while building self-confidence. This allows you to reach within yourself and cultivate your ability to get unstuck when the need arises.
Being human is hard. Realizing this led me to change my preconception that it was ever supposed to be easy. This is what humaning is all about. Doing it right is having the willingness to feel everything, even when it’s unpleasant. It is saying to yourself, “We can do hard things”.
Maithili Vijay Dandige
My perspective on feelings vs thoughts:
A thought is where we apply brain, process some signals from sensory organs or from memory in brain and draw conclusions. Thinking is a very active process.
A feeling is a very passive process. We just perceive something. For example, when I touch ice, I feel it to be cold. We do not think it to be cold. When we see some traffic incident on road, say an accident, we feel pity/sorry. We do not think about being sorry. Similarly, we feel monsoon freshness, candy's sweetness, fear during an exam, etc.
None of these feelings are manifestation of the brain, but they are perceived based on the environment and our response/reflection to the environment.
What causes these reflections/responses in ourselves, they are the impressions that a human being carries. These impressions are the ones that colour our perception of the world, like wearing green glasses editor show the entire world as green. Similarly when our environment is altered (e.g. after a heated argument with your spouse or a friend), someone talking anything good about them feels as if like that person is trying to insult you. When you are in a good mood, the same comment you would be cherishing and getting grateful to have a person as your friend.
Feelings are typically pure and perceived as they are. But the impressions we carry in our heads colour these perceptions and convert good feelings into bad feelings or vice versa.
What are these impressions and how do we get rid of these impressions? To understand this, I will take a positive and a negative one. When I am passing by a garden and I see a rose, on the first day, I appreciate its beauty. On second day, I go near and experience is fragrance. On third day, seeing it again, I would end up plucking it and taking it home, even though it is in some one else's garden. The impression has slowly grown towards acquisition.
Another example, when I had an argument with someone, slowly I will not talk to that person. On next encounter, I will start avoiding that person. After a few such encounters, I would be angry with all the acts that person and it can further grow into a stage where I would not hesitate to cause harm to that person. This is how the impressions get deeper. Now, I would have a bad feelings in that person's presence all the time.
All our feelings about some thing whether good or bad have to be clear of all these impressions for us to perceive the world as it is. And this is where meditations help to clear off all the impressions (specifically the rejuvenation method in Heartfulness practices is highly effective for this) and start feeling/perceiving the world as it is, and be courageous to withstand any hard challenges.