Recently I was wandering around a craft store, and being a sucker for colored paper of all kinds, I spotted on one of those little hanging racks on the end of an aisle a smallish pad of thick colored paper, maybe about 3 X 5.  It reminded me at the time of a prescription pad (is that still a thing?).  I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it but I was sure it was supposed to come home with me.

Later in the week I heard Gretchen Rubin on her Happier podcast talking about an Audio Apothecary – essentially a playlist to lift your mood.  That word “apothecary” really appealed to me.  Still later, the word “alchemy” popped up in two very different things I was reading.  Finally, when I was feeling a little overwhelmed from some work issues mostly out of my control and journaling to try to work through some stuff, it all kind of came together.  I needed to write a prescription for myself to lift me out of my stuck place  But, prescription sounded a bit too sterile and pharmaceutical, so I thought perhaps I needed an elixir.  Or maybe a spell?  I’m still deciding which I like better. Either way, the plan was to craft my own apothecary to give myself a boost of Demand the Shimmer magic.

I grabbed that colored paper pad and wrote myself a spell.  It included things to do, ways to breathe and move, songs to hear, things to consume, things to say.  Since then, I have made one for bravery (something I really needed to tap more into), sleep, energy, transitioning into vacation mode, and transitioning back to home. 

I talk a lot about ritual in these blogs, and this overlaps with ritual in some ways, but I think it’s a little different in that these are really quick to do, a bit silly, and have this tongue-in-cheek nod to magic and playfulness.  

I often find that my social-scientist brain and my joyful-goofball spirit to get into tussles with one another.  In fact, that was one of the reasons it took me a couple of years to create this blog and then five years to go from first publishing it to finally telling people about it.  A lot of this stuff I come up with when I’m wearing my Demand the Shimmer hat seems at first at odds with what I know about researching and testing happiness interventions as a scientist.  But are they really so disparate?

Maybe not. Here’s what I’m thinking:

• I really enjoyed reading Gretchen Rubin’s book Life in Five Senses last year, and have been working on ways of both noticing how I use all my senses each day and trying to purposefully use them more. She discusses several sources of research on these benefits. An older and gorgeously written book about the senses is Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses.  My elixirs utilize a multitude of senses.

• Even though I know I the particular combination of things I’m doing/hearing/consuming etc. is just something I made up, (a) the individual things range from harmless/enjoyable to evidence-based efficacious (e.g., breathing exercises), and (b) placebos can have real effects in some cases if you choose to believe they will work.

• There is a growing body of research on the many benefits of play for adults in a variety of disciplines, and several practical books on introducing more play into your life. A favorite of mine is an interactive workbook I received as a gift one year; it’s called Play: Ideas, Exercises, and Little Ways to Add More Fun to Everyday by M.H. Clark.  To me, making up magical spells absolutely fits the bill of playfulness.

• These spells are essentially a checklist; accomplishing an entire checklist is one mechanism for producing feelings of efficacy and accomplishment in many people, me included. It has been pointed out to me that my name is even List if you change one letter!

Okay, if that all sold you on this – would you like to create your own apothecary?  Or maybe just try one spell/elixir?  Here are some steps to get you started:

• First, think of a state you would like to create. Is it sleep, energy, joy, something else?

• Next, think about ways to use at least 3-4, but ideally all five, of your main senses in a way that typically helps with that state. For example, what sounds would be helpful?  What could you touch or feel or how could you move to make that more available to you?

• Add some element of whimsy.

• I have found I like to end it with saying something out loud – it sort of acts as an affirmation. Yes, people make fun of those, but check out Jon Acuff’s book Soundtracks for a hot take on affirmations. The speaking out loud also seems to make it more like a Hogwarts-esque spell.  No wand though. Yet.

Do you ever just have the feeling that there are things weighing on you, but you can’t quite pinpoint what they are? It’s like this little niggling poke now and then, but when you turn where the poke seemed to come from, the source doesn’t quite come into focus.  It’s not major anxiety, it’s just something underneath the current that keeps you from really fully being present where you are and feeling as energetic as you could.

After a slew of social events, a weekend was on the horizon with no plans. Not a one.  And I decided rather than to just catch up on errands or cleaning, or even try to do some extra reading or organizing projects – things that for me are soothing and self-caring – I would design a specific retreat day that would allow me to try to uncover all of the things in my life that were lurking in the shadows.  I realized that bringing these things into the light, and more importantly planning an action step around each of them, would make them far less scary. Consequently, I’d be less likely to be looking over my shoulder when I’m trying to fully live the life in front of me.

Here’s what I did.  This was a stay-at-home retreat (although different in focus and scope than my regular QTR retreat I’ve described before; you can find a link to my guide for Quarterly At-Home Retreats here if you are interested in that process). The most important thing with any stay-at-home retreat is to have the day to yourself without interruptions. I know that’s easier said than done for some.  I’d suggest at a minimum you do this somewhere you can be uninterrupted except for an emergency, and you keep any notifications off. 

Because you are going to need your bravery today to face uncomfortable tasks, conversations, changes, etc., arm yourself with intense comfort.  Plan ahead by thinking of what really brings you comfort using all your senses and gather whatever you think will be soothing.  I was in the coziest of clothes, not one thing itchy or tight.  I had warm lighting, delicious drinks and food all day (but nothing requiring any fuss or distraction), and classical music in the background. 

Although I normally don’t combine work retreats and nonwork retreats into one – I hold fast to my strong boundaries between these realms – in this case I decided I needed to examine aspects of my whole life to understand fully where my blindspots were.  I created a OneNote project for this; I am as a rule more of a paper journal person, but the speed at which I could type out insights appealed to me for this, before I lost the glimpse of whatever started coming up.  I started with a freewrite just to get the juices flowing.  Then, I wrote down various categories of home and life and asked myself “what am I pretending isn’t a problem here?”  It was kind of like coaxing a cat out from under the bed; I just kept looking deeper until I saw it there looking back at me. 

I can’t pretend that I didn’t at all have an “ugh” feeling looking at this list when I finally herded all these cats, but it was accompanied by a feeling of pride and bravery for taking my head out of the sand.  It also felt like a really good start, and starting is almost always the hardest part. Once that first stage was completed, I did celebrate that accomplishment, but the process couldn’t end there. What I needed was the most concrete, doable action step I could come up with for each challenge. My rules were: (a) I had to be able to do it in the next 48 hours (and preferably some of them immediately doable), (b) the step would take no longer than 15 minutes to accomplish, and (c) it would be something I knew how to do and had the power to do without any additional resources.  I also planned out some fun little rewards for achieving each of these first steps and for planning the next several steps once the first ones were completed.

When looking back at the details of this day to write this blog, I’m happy to say that I discovered almost all of these issues have been completely resolved or have lost their power to rattle me.  Doing this one time of course hasn’t prevented me from burying things that I’m not sure how to approach and then letting inadvertently giving them the power to morph into monsters.  My head still goes into the sand sometimes, and I recognize it when that niggling starts again, or when I feel myself more distracted or lower energy than normal.  But now I know what to do, and you do too. ITL: Into the light.

If you are like most humans, you probably find yourself worrying about things in the middle of the night if you can’t sleep (and in particularly nasty cases of this human condition, the worry keeps you from ever getting back to sleep). I had a couple of Big Worries with a capital B.W. going on over the last year regarding the health of loved ones, and this affliction hit harder than normal.

I have tried the trick in the past to schedule your worry. As a champion planner and scheduler I was sure this was for me, and sometimes it did work. But, because I’m also a generally happy person in the light of day, the time would come up on my list when I was supposed to be worrying and I just wasn’t in the mood. But if I didn’t do it, I felt like I wasn’t completing my plan. So, this didn’t seem like a great long-term strategy for the middle of the night ruminations.

Then one night, as soon as the tickle to worry struck me, I made a new rule for myself right then and there: No worrying lying down. I could worry whenever I wanted, I told myself, but I had to be upright. Have I told you about my bed? It is c-o-m-f-y!!! As much as I wanted to worry, I was not leaving my cozy cocoon. And somehow, making the choice – because I did give myself a choice – to stay laying down rather to get up and worry somehow seemed to signal to my body that this problem must not really be that bad and it calmed me enough to help me rest.

More often than not when I wake up things seem a lot brighter, and even though I’m upright, worries just fly in and out with other more pleasant thoughts without sticking in the gears of my brain. In other cases, in the light of day I am better able to turn worry, which is essentially useless, into problem solving and sort out what I have the power to control and what I don’t. Then I can plan to take some action steps in the right direction.

Now I’m starting to think of what other kind of rules like that I can make – I know they are arbitrary and maybe somewhat silly, but if I state it with authority to myself I somehow am compelled to do it. Maybe someone who hates rules should make one that says worry as much as you possibly can right now – and then they won’t? One of you rule-breaker types will have to let me know how that goes.

Cheers,

Lisa