Those first stirrings in bed when you are roused from a relaxing sleep you quickly forget and find your mind searching for orientation. Except this mind searches for cues to decide how to feel this morning. Unfortunately the immediate cues it searches for tend to evoke a sinking feeling or reasons to feel panicky. This has been the case since I was 8 years old.
My next thoughts are usually dark: do I have to do this? Why am I here? Wouldn’t it be better to not wake up at all? Why me? All very negative and propagating a sense of doom. However, what if I just acknowledge I feel this way, I’ve felt this way before, and instead of lamenting the feeling think about the good times I have had despite waking this way?
In order to break the habit of looking for negative cues on waking and propagating negative thought processes, what if I accept the feelings are valid but stay in the present. Instead of worrying about the drive I will need to do in a few hours and all that could go wrong, this morning I questioned who this person was and what were they really worried about.
The answer is loneliness. The driving isn’t the issue, I have banked thousands of hours of it, it’s the being with myself that’s the issue. A big part of it is not trusting myself to look after me, as I haven’t always done a bang up job in this task and also scars caused by the unkindness I’ve showed myself in the past.
Huge revelations for being awake less than an hour and all because instead of boarding the train of thought to negativity, I stepped back, observed and questioned. I need to do that more often until that becomes a habit, not the almost 40 year old tendency to fall down the rabbit hole. It’s taken years to perfect the ways to make myself suffer, so it’s only logical it will take time to implement new habits to lift me up.
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