I always know I’ve hit the point of ‘peak overwhelm’ when I start voicing a desire for a ‘simpler life’ to anyone who will listen. And every time I do it, my husband responds with this:
“Kel, life is simple, it’s humans who make it complicated.”
As much as I hate to admit it, he’s right. When I find myself drowning in ‘all the things’, there’s always just one person to blame – me.
Now, it’s all well and good to know this, it’s quite another to take action and do something about it. And if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s taking action!
So here’s the audit I conduct every time I find myself ‘drowning, not waving’.
1. Am I spending time with people who make me feel good?
We all have challenging people in our lives don’t we? (They’re often described as toxic, but I don’t really like describing people as toxic so I’m going to stick with ‘challenging!’)
These are people who make us feel bad about ourselves, or for whom everything is a drama (and thus make our lives a drama). Or they’re simply just negative. There are also those people who like to make their emergencies our problems.
While it’s not always practical to ease these people from our lives completely, what we can do is choose to spend the bulk of our time with those who make us smile and feel good about ourselves … and who don’t bring unnecessary drama to the table.
2. Can I remove any choices?
Your alarm goes off and you debate whether to get up and exercise or stay in bed. Then you’re in the kitchen thinking ‘what should I have for breakfast?’ After jumping out of the shower you flick lacklusterly through your cupboard looking for something to wear. Before heading out the door you think ‘should I clean up the breakfast dishes now, or when I get home?’ Holy cow, you haven’t left home yet and already you’re mentally exhausted from all the internal questioning.
The choices we have in each day are abundant but every decision we make creates fatigue. It also means making good decisions at the end of the day becomes harder (that’s why we can make good food choices at breakfast but not 3 o’clock in the afternoon.)
So as you can imagine, you can make life a lot simpler by removing as many decisions as possible. Create a work ‘uniform’ for yourself, eat the same thing for breakfast, make exercise non-negotiable. You get the picture. You don’t need to do these specific things – you just need to do something.
3. Am I utilising the 1 minute rule?
This is along the lines of number 2 above. If something is going to take you less than 1 minute, don’t decide whether you’re going to do it now or not, just do it. So empty the overflowing bin. File that bill you just paid. Hang the wet towel up.
Now you don’t have to waste time and energy deciding whether to do it or not, you just do.
4. Am I feeling bad about myself because I’m cherry picking?
We’ve all done it. Looked at the picture of our friend relaxing by the pool in Bali. Seen another friend get retweeted by someone famous. Thought to ourselves “gee she’s looking skinny, I want to look skinny.” Seen someone win an award or finish a marathon.
And then we start to feel jealous, or bad about ourselves, or think “gee, I’m not kicking the goals I ‘should’ be kicking.”
The thing is, we’re cherry picking. We’re taking the very best bits of everyone’s lives, and assembling them to create the perfect life we want. Then we start doing silly things like over-committing ourselves in an effort to catch up to this fictional person with the ‘perfect’ life.
The good news is, stopping this behaviour is easy. If you catch yourself doing it, simply remind yourself that person with the perfect life doesn’t exist.
And if you still catch yourself coveting something a friend has, ask yourself if you want their whole life. Because if you want anything they have, you have to want everything that goes with their life.
Personally, I can’t think of another person’s life I want more than my own. Life sure gets simpler once I remember that.
5. Am I committing to stuff on the spot?
If you’re a dedicated helper and people pleaser, when someone asks you for something, you probably can’t say ‘yes’ fast enough. (Ohhhhh the trouble this has gotten me in over the years.)
You need to learn 6 magic words: “Let me come back to you.”
Game changer!
Suddenly, instead of finding myself horribly over-committed all the time and having to let people down (or having to let myself down because I was so busy doing stuff for other people I couldn’t do stuff for myself) suddenly there was a lot more time freed up for the stuff I wanted to say “hell yes” to.
6. Am I being consistent?
There’s a cafe near my house and whenever we go there sometimes I let my son have a smartie cookie and sometimes I don’t. The decision as to whether it’s a yes or no generally relies on my mood (and how much energy I have for digging my heels in if I say no and he gets upset).
This is just one of any number of things in my life where the decision comes down to my mood and energy levels. And when I get it wrong, I have a big, exhausting battle on my hands.
You know what makes things simpler? Creating rules and being utterly consistent with them. For example, you only get one smartie cookie a week on a Thursday … or only ever on weekends.
You’d be amazed how widely you can apply this principle!
7. Am I relying too much on willpower?
Willpower is a finite resource – the more we have to call on it, the quicker it runs out. And when it runs out, it leads to behaviour that makes us feel bad about ourselves. Feeling bad about ourselves is a complicated feeling for which there is an easy antidote – good habits.
For instance, I don’t want to have to find the willpower to stay off social media to get writing done. So I create a habit of waking up at 5am, heading straight to my computer, opening a Word document and writing a minimum of 300 words. I find once I’ve got those first 300 words out, the call of Facebook is less seductive and I am less likely to head there ‘for just one minute to see what everyone is up to.’
8. Have I got my morning and evening routines sorted?
Even before I had kids I had a morning and evening routine I adhered to. Reason being, the less I had to think about in the mornings and evenings (the times I was most tired), the simpler it was to execute my day.
Once I had kids, those routines became even more crucial. They allow my family to get out the door at 7.15 am on daycare days without any tears. They allow for cruisey walks to school on school days. They allow for fairly chilled out evenings.
When we depart from our usual routines for more than a day or two, the whole family gets frazzled and life is harder than it needs to be.
9. Am I trying to read minds?
There are two ways this gets us into trouble.
The first is when we take someone’s bad mood or throwaway comment and start creating an entire narrative around it – a narrative that is usually way off base and results in unnecessary tears (our own)!
The second is when we try to anticipate other peoples’ needs to the nth degree. I do this a lot in both my business and my home. I try to decide what a person needs before even they know they need it. If that sounds crazy to read that’s because it is.
You know what makes life simple? Just asking.
If we think someone’s upset with us, just ask. If we think someone needs something from us, just ask. If we’re not sure what someone’s thinking, just ask.
10. Eat the damn cake
Guilt – a horrible and pointless emotion that’s been making life complicated since the dawn of time. There are so many things we do each day that makes us feel guilty, not the least, when we ‘treat’ ourselves.
So you have two choices here: never treat yourself, or, when you do, just enjoy it. If you’re having a nice piece of chocolate cake, enjoy the damn cake instead of punctuating every mouthful with ‘oh, I shouldn’t’. If you’re taking three hours on the weekend to have a long overdue hair appointment, sit back and enjoy the head massage baby. Fretting about whether the kids are giving your husband grief is pointless.
And really, when you think about it, it’s more often than not the pointless stuff we fret about that makes life seem much more complicated than it is.
Why do you think your life feels more complicated than it is?