Historically, I do not do well in winters. Perhaps you don’t either. A couple of years ago I started taking my mood disorder seriously, and this past summer was when I figured I ought to start taking winter, specifically, seriously as well. I decided to, and I quote, “take the fight to winter.”
This was part bravado (I think I was trying to psyche myself into a positive frame of mind for the months ahead) and part strategy, all driven by genuine fear – because I’d say since about 2011 or so, I haven’t gotten through a single February without everything becoming awful, and usually staying awful till about mid-April. (2013 was the exception that proved the rule – because holy shit, I was depressed – except for when I was in New Zealand, or driving around in cars with you-know-who.)
Well, I’ve done pretty well with the aforementioned let’s-take-the-mood-disorder-seriously thing, if I do say so myself; I figured I could apply the same rigour to winter itself.
I overindexed on planning, I admit. I charted out October thru March with things I was looking forward to, in a calendar grid in my journal. I pre-ordered things, bought tickets for stuff, seeding those deliveries and events strategically through the next six months – “Past Matt” giving “Future Matt” a little pick-me-up. I laid away creative projects – shot two movies I didn’t even attempt to edit, figuring I’d have something to do when it started snowing. I set aside a couple thousand bucks in case I just needed to go to the DR in the last week of January and soak up the sun like Superman.
The real success, though, was simply this: I found my box, and stuck to it.
Yes: success. It’s the last week of February and I can say pretty unequivocally I’ve never felt better in wintertime. In my whole life. Achievement unlocked, etc.
I don’t know why I call it my box. It’s not square. It’s not composed of four things. It’s not even a thing. It’s my internal word for about half a dozen baseline lifestyle changes which I tried to authoritatively stick to almost without exception, every day of the season. Boxes denote squares, which connote structure, stability, good foundations. Upon this rock, I built my church.
I downloaded 2 apps. One was ThinkFull, which some kids at Telus created as a pilot project a couple years ago to track moods. I used this because it doesn’t just track moods; it graphs moods. It let me keep an eye on the curve.
The other was Way Of Life, a behaviour forming app. This became the daily checklist of the behaviours in the Box. This let me make sure I was hitting those bases almost without exception every single day of the week.
And if I was feeling ambitious, I could even chart the two reports against one another and see if they correlated. I blame my former employers for all this data fascination, by the way; but they were right. It is fascinating. But more to the point, whatever gets measured gets done.
My box was simple. It was tailored to me. It was easy mindfulness stuff like keeping up with my yoga practice three times a week, or mindfulness daily. It was cutting down on meat and drink. Losing the afternoon coffee. Doing the morning solar lamp. Also doing what I call “Sahar’s mantra,” which deserves a blog post of its own.
All this reminds me of what Tony Robbins said about mastery, or maybe what Morpheus said about the difference between knowing the path and walking the path. The latter, only because I pretty much took this whole process on faith – it’s not like I felt fucking perfect day one, or even day sixty (and remember November? Criiiiiipes). It’s just that I gave myself these last few months to see if this worked, on the assumption that it probably wasn’t going to end up worse than last winter, or the winter before, or the one before that.
And yeah, I’m not blind to the fact that a shit ton of good stuff happened to me in and around this mastery path taking hold. Except – in another topic best saved for another post – I suspect cause and effect are reversed on that one. The box is the foundation. Everything else built from there.
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