The Something Plan

“Something is always better than nothing”

Here are the rules of the Something Plan:

1. Just do Something.

2. Something is always better than Nothing.

3. Somethings always add up to Something More than you can imagine

I need a reboot of the Something Plan. I have written about it before, but like any good learning, it needs to be repeated. I have come off of a long fall of work and travel and have found that most of my healthy routines are a bit frayed around the edges. How do I get back on track—and do my work—and get ready for the holidays? It all seems like too big of a goal.

Like all good plans, the Something Plan was born in desperation after many years of failing at a more ambitious and noble plans. The kind of plans that are in self-help books and on the Internet. The kind of plans that seemed to work for everyone else who appeared to have more discipline and willpower than I did.  The something plan was initially created for exercise. I was a rower in college and a few years beyond and by the end I was training 6-8 hours a day. My warm up for a two-hour practice was a five mile run. My young athlete self was unaware of the precedent she was setting.

Flash forward 20 years or so and you find me working long hours, out of shape, and trying to fit in time to exercise. I only have maybe 20-30 minutes a day to exercise but since my old ‘warm up’ was five miles I continually decide that there’s ‘no point’ to only going 2 or 3. It should be noted that this is all in my head. With a wild animal chasing me I would be lucky to run even 2 or 3, but the comparisons in my head make it so that I stop bothering to do anything at all. Years go by. Not doing anything wasn’t helping me.

Enter the Something Plan.

Tired of feeling tired, and tired of never getting past “Day One” on any plan to get fit or healthy, I institute the Something Plan. The only rule is you have to do Something. And you have to do Something every day. Instead of complicated charts, the plan looks the same every day: Do Something.

Five minute walk. Something. 20 min walk/jog. Something. Stretching. Something. 30 minute bike ride. Something. Raking leaves. Something. Parking at the end of the parking lot and walking in. Something. As long as I did Something, I succeeded at my plan.

And as I did Something I repeated the Something Plan mantra: Something is always better than nothing. The mantra is the antidote to the ‘why bother’ voice. The mantra keeps you doing Something. The mantra keeps you from giving up because you aren’t doing ‘enough.’ The amazing thing about Somethings is they add up. And the more I did Something, the easier it was to keep doing Something. The Something plan for exercise has helped me back to doing a 5K and a mini-triathlon—and I am hoping it will again. And so whenever I fall off the exercise wagon, like I have recently,  I reinstitute the Something Plan.

The Something Plan is especially good for healing and recovery and anytime stress levels are high. Under stress or when we feel bad we often shift to hibernation mode. We avoid the activities that would actually help us feel better. And to make matters worse we usually beat ourselves up for not doing anything, or for not being able to do what we usually can do on our better days. This is especially true when we have put off our healthier behaviors for a few days or weeks. There’s some weird mental math that makes us think that we have to ‘catch up.’ That we have to do all the miles, or sit-ups or classes that we missed. And that’s too big, so we do nothing. Instead of Something.

This is when you need the Something Plan. Any time a task feels too big or you find yourself not getting started and you just keep saying “I should really do this…” Engage the Something Plan. I find the Something Plan really great for traveling, or times when commitments to other things make time scarce—like now at holiday time. Is there something that you are not doing because you can’t seem to do it ‘right’ or ‘enough?’ Exercise? Organization? Self-care? Eating more vegetables? Meeting new people? Writing? Give the Something Plan a try. Let me know how it goes.

© 2014 Gretchen L Schmelzer, PhD

Slow Days for Healing

GLS, 2004

I’m sitting at home on my couch nursing a cold with a mug of tea and I have had to concede that today is just going to be a slow day. I am grateful that it can be; I have woken up with a similar fevery-cold on days when I had to be very much ‘on’ –in front of a large group of people for three days in a row, and so I am especially grateful that I don’t have to rally today. I can take it easy, stay in jammies, and let myself get better.

Physical ailments make it obvious when you need to slow down. Yes, there are times that you have to push through, but we mostly feel okay acknowledging when we are physically ill and need to take a break: even if it is only for the sake of others—so we don’t make them sick. And I know that when I am able to slow down, I get better faster—and the cold doesn’t turn into a sinus infection.

Healing from trauma or any psychological wound is much trickier. It is so much harder to see when you need to take a slow day. You are so used to struggling with it because the emotional ‘fever’ can feel so chronic that its hard to know what constitutes enough ‘need’ to stop, take a break, slow down.

There’s no manual for this. No emotional thermometer that can read your ‘temperature’ from the outside. You can create a 1-10 scale—where 1 is miserable, need to stay in bed and 10 is outstanding I feel great! Let’s go! But you need to understand, actually everybody needs to understand, that that scale only applies to you. Only you know when you start sinking below 5, or approaching it. Only you know what is too much. No one else can know that for you and it doesn’t matter whether your 5 is the same as anyone else’s. This is the big trap everyone gets in to with healing: I shouldn’t need the help, I can make it through, No one else needs this…

I confess that there were days that I told people I was sick when I needed a slow day, a healing from trauma day.  If we lived in a culture where people understood the need for such days, I might have been more forthcoming, but we don’t. So I told them my need for a slow day in a language they would understand—I have the flu, I have a fever, I threw up. These are understandable problems for which you are allowed space. And that is the most important part. A slow day gives you the space to heal. It gives you rest in any way that you need it: sleep, rest, old movies, walks in the woods, books, whatever. Rest. Mend. Repair.

I am talking days here. A day here. A day there. Maybe a few strung together. Truthfully, as a society, we are still lousy at slow days for physical illness and there is still a Rambo culture of never calling in sick. But there is an even more desperate need for slow days for psychological healing. They serve such an important purpose, they allow the healing to happen faster and allow you to replenish your resources. Slow days give you a break from having to perform when you are really not up for it—they respect other’s ability to carry on without us. We all need to pay attention to when we need slow days, and we can all do a better job of supporting others to take them. Remember…healing is brave, healing is badass. So, slow days are badass. So there. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014

A Mindful and Joyful Thanksgiving

“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”

— Maya Angelou

Thanksgiving is a whirlwind of activity: cleaning, shopping, cooking, cleaning, driving, making beds, doing laundry, raking leaves, cooking, baking, cleaning. Thanksgiving is a holiday whose sole purpose is appreciation and gratitude and yet with all of this activity—the purpose more often feels like getting to the other side of it. You want it go well, you want it to go smoothly, you want it to be done.

Thanksgiving is a holiday I have shared with a lot of families and friends over the years—and though the basic outline of the celebration was the same (people, turkey, gathering) –what made each Thanksgiving sparkle so differently was the areas of joy that each host had—whether it was the traditional drinks or appetizers of that family, the walk in the woods, the way they set their tables, the work in the kitchen, the love of football, the traditional thanksgiving movie, stories at the table. There was always something that was so dear to their hearts that they were able to share a heart-full of appreciation and gratitude in whatever that was for them. So many years later I don’t remember whether the day went without a hitch, or whether everything was ‘perfect’—I remember the joy of whatever they really wanted to share. Those moments of joy have stayed with me, and every Thanksgiving I think of those moments, and the people who so generously shared them with me.

So, how do you slow down enough in the midst of all this busyness? How do you experience the joy of the day and share that joy with the people around you? The answer is always mindfulness. Mindfulness is the practice of being in the present moment and the research on mindfulness tells us that even moments of mindfulness are enough to shift our mood to a more positive place and supports our health and well-being. Just moments. This is really the practice of being where your feet are, as my therapist so often reminds me. In fact—a simple practice to be where your feet are is simply to wiggle your toes. Feel your feet. If you are standing, feel the ground beneath your feet.

Amidst all of the busyness of the day—can you remind yourself to take a breath and be where you are? Look around and smile, even as you know that your kitchen is a disaster of flour and gravy? Even as you know that everything is not going to be done when you planned? In fact---can you even be so radical as to enjoy the chaos for a moment? Look at it, laugh and see the big picture?

One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories was in fact one of my biggest Thanksgiving mistakes. I had gotten up early to get two large turkeys in the oven. My mother-in-law had left me a big bowl of onions and celery and instructions that dried sage was hanging in their walk-in entry. I made the stuffing, found the sage, stuffed the turkeys and everyone came down to breakfast. My mother-in-law went in to the entry and asked why I hadn't used the sage. I said I had and pointed to it. Only it wasn't the sage. I had used Artemesia Silverking--a dried perennial that looks somewhat like sage. There were a few moments of panic as we read whether Artemesia was poisonous. And then lots of laughter after we found it out it wasn't poisonous, in fact it was used as an herbal remedy: it was an aphrodisiac. 

People don’t remember perfection and neither will you. It’s like going to a concert or an opera – you don’t remember all the words of the songs you hear—but somehow you take refrains of the melodies with you. You remember the colors and the music. So slow down enough to listen to the melodies. Slow down enough to dance with the people who are around you. Slow down enough to hum your joy of the day, and share your song with others. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014

It's way bigger than Ferguson

“If its interest in truth is linked only to amnesty and compensation, then it will have chosen not truth, but justice. If it sees truth as the widest possible compilation of people’s perceptions, stories, myths, and experiences, it will have chosen to restore memory and foster a new humanity, and perhaps that is justice in its deepest sense. ”

— Antje Krog, Country of My Skull

Healing repeated or long term trauma requires repetition. Lots and lots and lots of repetition. It takes repetition because it takes a long time to get the story out. It takes repetition because it takes a long time to dismantle the defenses, the protections from the trauma enough to even get to the story. It takes repetition because after all of that you still have the work of rebuilding, of experiencing and living in the new space without the trauma. It takes a lot of repetition.

No one likes to hear this. Our culture has always liked an approach where we are ‘done’ with that. Where it is ‘over.’ And instead, healing from long term trauma means that we cycle back around at different intervals through the same material, through the same discussions, through the same lessons, to integrate it once more, to feel it once more, to learn it again and again. Our brains are made of massive interconnections—not a series of on and off switches. The neural pathways of survival that trauma triggers do not untangle easily.

Today as the country wrestles with Ferguson, I see how our belief that trauma is ‘done’ impacts not only individual trauma survivors, but our nation as a whole. The long term, intergenerational trauma of slavery and racism is not ‘done.’ The civil rights movement wasn’t the end of healing. It might have been the beginning of it, except that white America saw that as the moment that we were ‘done’ with the conversation—instead of the moment that we began the conversation.

This is not about the specifics of the Ferguson story—about Darren Wilson or Michael Brown. While I am not denying the importance of the specifics to the individuals involved, the story is much bigger than the specifics.  When we let our arguments over specifics distract us, then we never have to get to the bigger story of intergenerational trauma. No one has to own the story of wrong doing and no one has to mourn the losses that wrong doing engendered.

When people argue specifics they think they are going after truth. When I worked with children who changed their stories of abuse—when they couldn’t remember whether they were hit on Tuesday or Saturday, at home or at the park—the specifics mattered only for legal purposes of what we call truth—but there was always the bigger truth that the child was living in fear— that we were dealing with trauma, regardless of the specifics. And the specifics of any one case involving race and violence aside, we have to be able to acknowledge the bigger truth that our racial history in America is a trauma history.

When the three young women from Ohio who were kidnapped by Ariel Castro were found after 9 years in captivity—there was the constant refrain of whether they could ever be whole and healthy again after so much time in such horrible conditions. No one imagined they would ever be ‘over it.’ They had spent a third of their lives that way. Yet, for more than ¾ of our nation’s history Blacks lived in either outright captivity or in a state where their full rights as citizens were denied. Why does everyone think this is supposed to go away so quickly? It’s because we wish it would. It’s hard to have conversations that are awkward and messy. It’s hard to not know. It’s hard to sit in conversations of sadness and anger and not be able to ‘fix it’ because it’s not about the specifics but about the bigger story.

The main avenue of communication—the media --is never going to help our country with this problem. Indeed the need to fill a 24 hour news cycle with opinion and not news is fueling the problem. No, we all have to be the ones to change the conversation. To acknowledge the long history of trauma that our country has endured and perpetrated. And we have to be willing to have this conversation over and over.

It’s not the answer anyone wants: that it’s going to take a long time, that it’s going to take a lot of repetition, that it’s going to be messy. But at least if we start, if we risk the conversation, if we acknowledge the trauma and the losses, we have a chance at something real and something whole. 

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2014