Dealing with the Dog Days.

If you have been following us the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about the dog days of summer. The days when summer natural glimmer has simmered amongst the steaming temperatures, expensive flights, and crowded parks. When does what we have been looking for all this time, the long awaited season, become something that we no longer appreciate? I too have complained about 90 degree temperatures despite living in a City that is cold 70% of the time. If we do this with weather, I imagine that we also do this in other aspects of our lives. Jobs become stale, relationships become tolerated, we waffle between “I don’t care” and “I wish I hadn’t…”. How do we deal with that change?

Perhaps the first step is to truly identify where the idea of the mundane is truly coming from. Our brains like to move efficiently and sometimes that means that we broaden things in such as way that it seems impossible to address the source of our distress. Thus, we will look at the the two realms that tend to rule most of our life: the personal and the professional. 

Let’s start with those personal relationships. Relationally, I have learned that relationships become stale after long periods of time of one’s self being ignored. We make concessions for those that we love. Or, we avoid those flags by only focusing on the good times (we love those pool parties, right?). However,  over time those things that we overlooked become unignorable. As a spiritual person, I like to think of that as the Higher Power looking out for us. We are sensing something that goes beyond the words that we hear and the things that we see, which is often not the typical way that we are taught to view life. We are told to pay attention to a couple of things before it becomes tragic, but rarely are we taught how to listen to ourselves. Socially, we are told that perhaps we are making a bigger deal out of things. We are told to wait until those red flags have everyone running out of the pool, instead of noticing how aspects of the pool may impact and make proactive changes.I have found that being insanely human also means sometimes we don’t pay attention to things until they are trauma-worthy. So, perhaps the answer here is to consider the opposite-perhaps I take the time to acknowledge those things that don’t feel right for me. This is fully acknowledging that for someone else, this may feel fine. This does not mean that my own feelings should be disregarded. In fact, disregarding one’s own feelings over time not only leads us to not trusting our intuition, it also leads to us not trusting ourselves. When we don’t trust ourselves, it becomes even more difficult to trust each other and our progress towards life goals. Anxiety and depression often simmer in those conditions. Now here is where I get the inevitable comment, well, we can’t make a big deal out of everything right. I have found with clients and even myself that acknowledgement often makes that thing that feels so big in the moment actually more manageable. I think of all the time in the past if I had just told my friend what was bothering me in that moment, how much energy I could have saved and how less difficult some of our current challenges may have been. I think of the relationships with significant others that possibly could have become workable problems instead of an impasse. Not acknowledging the seemingly small thing actually makes them a whole lot bigger. Giving yourself acknowledgement is giving yourself respect.

Acknowledgement doesn’t just help us personally, it can also benefit our professional lives. I know for me, everyone often wants to hang out during the summer. My calendar becomes so full with appointments that it’s hard to just enjoy the sunshine because I am moving from dawn to dusk. So, I am practicing Kendrick Lamar’s saying, “I choose me”. If I need to take a day off, I take the day off. If I know I need a better paying job, I don’t ignore that become of feeling a sense of loyalty to my current job. I trust that my inner self ultimately knows what I need, both personally and professionally and I honor that part of myself by choosing myself, even when it seems like the unpopular thing to do. Now, I recognize that some of us do not feel that we have that luxury, bills need to be paid and mouths fed. In that case, even something seemingly small can send that message of choosing yourself. Can you give yourself five minutes each day to breathe? Giving yourself a break acknowledges your human nature, which helps us continue to be productive.  

The dog days of summer (or any other season) will happen. Give yourself a break and embrace the humanity of all the feels, even if they may be  unpopular. Choosing yourself at times allows you to choose others in the future. It also helps us notice those nuances while they are manageable. I hope that you are able to see what you need in the dog days, provide that for yourself, and move forward to those better days.