When 💩 hits the fan
We've all been there. There's a delightful abundance of sayings to capture it — when it rains it pours, things happen in threes, fubar, effed up, when sh*t hits the fan.
Something is bound to go wrong. It is one of the most reliable aspects of life. But even though we know these moments are coming, we never actually know when — it always takes us a bit by surprise, and the only thing more reliable than the fubars themselves is the work it takes to get back to neutral.
Through a series of planned and unplanned events, I recently had a particularly potent sh*t meets fan moment that involved about 1,700 miles of driving and only five out of fourteen nights of sleep in my own bed 🥵
We can't always anticipate the messes that hop into our lives, but what we can do is create tools that we can lean on to help us find our way back to a more aligned center.
Here are the tools and strategies I started with in my journey back to neutral.
Let 'neutral' be something different than it was before
The first mistake we often make is thinking we're going back to something. But the truth is, if a real whopper takes over your life, when it dissipates you'll be someone new. You'll have lived a new experience with new obstacles to understand and draw from.
So before you start trying to go anywhere... go forward, not back. The ease, neutrality, or 'normal' you may have known before might not be available to you anymore and that's ok. Because the next one you find will be a little more complex and take a little more into account. It will know you just a little bit better.
As you move toward whatever is ahead, focus on what feels better today than it did yesterday.
Get ferocious about delights
It's a popular inclination to dive right back into work after you feel you've lost momentum, and of course it makes perfect sense. The lost time and productivity can make us feel overly anxious to "get back on track" or work even harder than usual to close the gap. This is the second big mistake.
Of course we have responsibilities and obligations, but if you focus too heavily on clearing the backup and leave your moments of delight and ease for after, you're simply extending the duration of your sh*t-hits-fan experience.
The absolute hardest moment to take care of ourselves is this moment — when we feel like we're behind. But it's also the absolute most important moment to do so. Without it you'll create even more energetic deficits that will have a cascading effect on your happiness and quality of life, and we all know what we really mean when we say this — your health.
If you allow your self-health to wait until 'after,' the need for it will continue to grow, which will make it feel less and less accessible. Guard your recovery, your motion toward a new neutral, and your moments of delight and repair with as fiery of boundaries as you can comfortably muster.
Declare your agency
When a situation — or better yet several in a row — catches you by surprise the sense of agency and ownership can start to feel far away. I am least balanced when I feel that decisions are not my own — particularly decisions of how my time and energy will be used. But there are always going to be circumstances that are simply out of our control.
In these moments, I declare agency over something. It can be simple like taking an extra five minutes in a hot shower to decompress or postponing plans, or it can be big like cancelling a project or commitment altogether. It's the declaration that counts.
When much of your available resources are needed for something out of your control, use some of what remains to seize a moment for you. To exercise your agency and remind yourself that you are not powerless in this or any moment and that your ownership will return to you.
Take three deep breaths
Of course it's not the fanciest tool in the kit, but it doesn't to be fancy to work. It takes seconds to close your eyes and breathe deep.
To upgrade your deep breathing, try boxed breathing. Inhale for four counts and exhale for eight, or any combination when the exhale is longer than the inhale. A longer exhale helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for the functions of your body at rest. By cueing your parasympathetic system to turn on, you can play a little trick on your body coaxing it to believe it's safe and at rest, lighting up relaxation vibes and dimming anxious energy.
MONDAY MOMENT
Write down the tools you'll lean on the next time sh*t hits the fan.
Keep it somewhere you know you'll remember — bonus points for displaying it all the time. Then, remember to actual lean on them the next time you need to. Create the structure for safety and recovery before you need it, so it can do its job in the moments when you actually do.
