Hello loves,

Today I want to talk about how to manage the shoulds.  How many times a day do you think we tell ourselves we should do x, y, or z?!  I actually have no idea, which is probably for the best!

But first…. It’s been well over a year since my last episode.  How have you been?

The gap in the podcast came because again life threw me another, massive, health curveball.  This time, however, not my own.  My dad had not been well since autumn 2023, and then took a very bad turn in spring 2024, and ultimately was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer. 

I first drafted this episode last summer.  It was the 22^nd August, and at that time I wrote this sentence – he’s responding well to treatment, and touch wood it stays that way.  Then, the day after, he died.  In an instant, he was gone.  We’ve just gone through the first anniversary of his passing and I’m still trying to find the balance of being excited about all the amazing things that have been happening, and devastated that my most important person is missing from memories I know he watches over, but no longer in photos for.

And I lost Binx, my cat, a few days after dad.

Something had to give, and once again that was the podcast and, in truth, my business entirely.  When I was diagnosed with my illness years ago, my main focus was to keep my job so I could pay the mortgage and maintain my independence.  No matter what, the job was the priority.  What I have come to realise, is that I need to be my priority.  In whatever form that looks like.

Which points me nicely back to the original plan of this episode. During all of dad’s hospital visits, sometimes up to 3 a week, I had a lot of shoulds.  Since he died, hardly any.  Mainly I’ve just easily been saying no.  Any time our routine is thrown out the window, it’s very easy to keep saying to ourselves what we should be doing, instead of letting life flow.

It got me to thinking about when I got sick

I tried a few things to reduce the amount I was doing in an attempt to conserve my physical energy, and the time spent using my oh-so-foggy brain.  One of the most effective was to batch my days.  I carried little notepads around with me for making notes of what I needed to do, and then when I got home I’d add each one to the relevant pile for each different day.  For instance Monday became the money and admin day, and any tasks that related to that topic would wait for the Monday, unless urgent.

It also meant that I had a couple of days without anything to do at all.  I thought that I would feel relaxed and able to rest, without the obligation of anything to do.  I thought I’d then be super-productive and whizz through things on the days I had things to do, and that they’d likely be the more stressful days.  Turns out, nope.  I felt more in control on the days I had things to do, and slightly agitated on the days I had to rest.

On the batch days, I felt like I had achieved something.  On the rest days, I felt like I had wasted them.  I couldn’t quite get my head around resting is still doing.  I had no issue with rest and recovery days during training seasons for running, but I couldn’t switch to the same mindset for illness recovery.

Shoulds and expectations

The shoulds quickly added up on my rest days. Shoulds from expectations that led to guilt and steady agitation.  It’s the expectations that get us every time, and they’re usually someone else’s that we’ve taken on board.  We’re supposed to use our time well.  People live for the weekends.  And, if I put the time aside to rest, and I don’t feel rested at the end of the day, was it a waste of time? 

Somehow I needed to work out how to let go of expectations and believe that any rest I get is enough. That if something else comes up, and I don’t get as much rest, it doesn’t matter. That walking to the supermarket is also rest.  If I get some rest, it’s enough. Or, if on the planned batch days, I actually needed to rest I could move those tasks to a rest day, or some could just wait. 

When I worked in Oncology I learned that very few things outside a medical context are as much of a crisis as it feels like they are and that just about anything can be postponed without disaster. If you do just a little bit of anything on most days, that little bit adds up. Illness recovery has to happen at its own pace. It doesn’t respond well, at all, to time pressure, and neither do I.  You probably don’t either.

Perception vs perspective

Knowing and doing are two different things.  Telling ourselves to let go of expectations is dangerously close to yet another should.  It’s about perception vs perspective.  When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.  It’s natural for our perception, especially when it’s connected to fear, to think of the most unrealistic outcome – our perception – the zebras.  When, if we actually take a moment to think about what we know is more likely to be true – perspective – we’d know it’s more than likely horses.  Binx was a semi-long hair cat, and he’d leave tumbleweeds of fur around.  If I discovered one on the carpet in his room at night, my perception will tell me it’s one of those massive spiders, whereas my perspective will tell me it’s a tumbleweed.  Fearful response first, logical second, and it’s the logical perspective we have to work on finding.  The fearful perception comes in all on its own.

Shoulds can be dealt with through flexibility. 

My day-job building is nearly 40 storeys tall.  It has built-in flexibility so that when the wind blows it can move and doesn’t crack.  Sitting on the 22^nd floor I can tell you that it creaks, which is kinda creepy during a winter storm, but it’s reassuring because I know the building is responding as it should.

So when my mind kicks off, I step back and let it.  I can’t stop it reacting that way, it’s doing what its meant to for keeping me safe, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to it.  I can respond with asking it “what is a better question?”.

And so here I am, trying to cultivate flexibility.

Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard please subscribe and share the podcast, so that we can get this out to others who are also wanting to take back the life a chronic illness stole from them.

And remember, you are worth it, and you get to choose.  Have a lovely day.