I had thought I was going to write about something entirely different this month–how to not be militant and prescriptive when it comes to habits and routines. I may save that for a future post, but for now, I’m realizing that the more pertinent question for me–one that I keep coming back to is:
“How do you sustain the feeling of having changed for the better, even after that immediate feeling of ‘betterness’ has thinned out?”
Last year felt like a breakthrough year for me in many ways, and I wrote about many of the reasons it felt this way here. For instance, I decided to stop drinking, and immediately felt the physical and mental benefits of that habit change. Even with just a glass of wine or a beer, I used to end up feeling hazy and unclear mentally the following day. While it helped ease social anxiety, it wasn’t really worth the the fogginess it left me with, especially when that fogginess ended up disrupting my regular morning habits. It would be especially hard to focus on journaling and enjoying my morning coffee when my mind felt covered with the after effects of an evening drink.
After deciding not to drink, I ended up staring antidepressants. Like many people, I didn’t feel a strong effect at first, and it took a few months before the change really set in. I began feeling happy in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The fear, anxiety, and obsessiveness I used to bring to many spaces in my life had seemed to evaporate. What I had thought were just fixtures of my mind turned out to be more malleable and less permanent than I had made them out to be.
Having more space to live in without fear was probably one of the key experiences of last year for me. It opened up joy for new habits, new and reimagined love for music, but especially visual art. I became interested in color, line, shadow, light, and form in ways I hadn’t had room for before.
The newfound feelings of joy and openness that I felt were magnified by the fact that the pandemic was subsiding–for a moment. I’m talking about last summer, the time when vaccines had been distributed and cases dropped low enough to start to travel again. This was the first time in over a year when I saw many of my closest friends and family. And with the benefits I had gotten from being on an antidepressant, I was able to experience these social gatherings without the social anxiety that used to be with me.
And I wouldn’t expect that sort of magical feeling to be sustainable–it was a unique confluence of changes and events that led to the situation I found myself in–and yet, I’m still struggling with the feeling that that kind of joy has subsided for now. A piece of it has to do with deciding to pause antidepressants after some of the side effects became too hard to manage. But another piece, I think, is learning how to sustain joy even in times when there is not some massive change in my life that brings happiness.
I don’t have an answer for how to do this. I just have the practices I try to engage with: journaling, working as a scientist, creating art, reaching out to loved ones when I’m struggling, being still and meditating, moving my body, walking outside, and seeking wonder out in a deliberate way. Trying to sustain these habits in a world that feels increasingly hard to live in feels both challenging and absolutely vital.
I do wonder if, maybe, these practices are crucial pieces of my larger question about sustaining change.
Many of these practices I had been engaged in before I felt a deep shift last year, and I’ve continued them into this less life-altering year. Engaging with something like journaling every day has helped me to get to the place where I acknowledged that I don’t feel as happy at this time this year compared to last year. Writing that out lets me both acknowledge the feeling and recognize that I’ve entered into a kind of comparison trap within myself. Instead, I can try to come back to this moment, which, yes, may not feel as happy as ones a year ago, but what does it feel like if I just sit with it a little longer without comparison? That will be a question I keep asking myself as I try to sustain a new kind of steadiness in my life.
The Lazy PhD 