The Power of Deciding Not To, For a While

In the final analysis, what we tell ourselves about life is at least as important – and often a lot more important – than what’s really going on. If we’re telling ourselves we’re doing something different than what we’re actually doing, what we’re secretly doing has a way of getting out of control.  I used to eat low-calorie frozen meals made by Healthy Choice for dinner and tell myself I was on a diet, then eat a bunch of food afterwards because I was still hungry.  Somehow I didn’t pay attention when I was eating that after-dinner food, and when I gained weight I didn’t notice that either. I was completely in denial about it all until I saw a picture of myself standing next to a woman I considered a rival.  She was thin, willowy, and beautiful, and I was fat. 

Now I write down what I eat and keep track of how many calories are in it.  Keeping track that way might seem like it would be restrictive or oppressive, but I find it’s actually relieving.   And in the same way, I keep track of what I do on any given day.  I tell myself what I’m going to do (when I plan my day), and then I do it and then afterwards I tell myself (I actually tell another person too, but we’ll talk about that in a future blog) that I’ve done it.  If I didn’t or couldn’t do something I planned – which happens all the time -- I pay attention to that too.  Doing all that keeps me present in my own life, gives me a positive, realistic sense of what I’ve accomplished, and is also enormously relieving.  Because, let’s face it, if we’re not telling ourselves anything, our fears tend to step in and do all the talking.

This morning, on the phone, my friend Paul helped me understand something else about what we tell ourselves. Paul is a writer, and this morning he said that he was thinking about taking a week off writing. He really wanted to take the week off, but he had doubts about whether he should.  He said he was worried he was just sabotaging his writing by taking time off and what did I think?

I said I thought he should decide one way or the other whether he was going to write and then stick to the decision.  That the worst thing he could do would be to sit around all week thinking he should be writing but not writing, feeling guilty about not writing.  Because then he’d associate writing with guilt and that would make him not want to write the next time.

I didn’t really think about it all that much before I said it, but afterwards I knew it was true.  And I knew that sometimes, the best thing we can do for ourselves is decide not to do something even if we feel like we should do it.  Decide not to do it for a particular period of time, like next week, or today, or this summer, because then we’re also deciding when we will do it again. Making the decision – declaring our intention to ourselves – is the important part.  Because if we leave it open, even though way down deep we know we’re probably not going to do it, we’ll be feeling the whole time on some level like we should be doing it (should be writing or painting or taking up yoga or whatever), and then we’ll have that negative guilty I-have-failed feeling.  We’ll associate that feeling with the thing itself (the writing, painting, yoga-ing, et cetera) and then we’ll want to do it even less.