Just a Dash of Fun
Just a dash of fun helps the tough stuff die down. Mary Poppins was on to something with that spoonful of sugar for sure. Lately, life has been tough. Pain, disability, medical issues, stress. It was starting to weigh me down.
It was time to do something different in order to keep my head above water and it came to me one morning when my carer turned up to get me out of bed. I was thinking "nooooo I don’t want to get up" as I have done every morning lately. Then something clicked…the "noooooo" turned into "yaaaaay" as it dawned on me that I was going to the movies and sushi train that day.
It was such a small thing and yet it made it worth getting up. It gave me something to stir up a little energy. It occurred to me that just a little bit of fun to look forward to had such a powerful effect on my mood.
It’s all about balance. The ratio of heaviness to happiness was all out of whack and just a little bit of excitement helped even up that see-saw. So as a bit of an experiment I decided to have something small to look forward to every day or two. Nothing big… just a movie here, a teeny bit of retail therapy there, an outing here, a cold can of coke zero there.
All of a sudden life looked a little brighter again. Every time something went wrong or felt bad, I thought of something to rebalance the see-saw and it made getting out of bed in the morning OK again.
For some reason, we are all so much more prone to harbouring the hard and remembering pain, while little moments of joy or laughter go by unnoticed. Over recent years there has been a lot of people making a concerted effort to hold on to the little things in their days that make them grateful or happy, and social media has given many a platform to share that.
Sometimes people roll their eyes at these posts but maybe we shouldn’t!
Maybe we should all be adopting these #grateful projects. I have a Facebook album called "The Little Things that Brighten my Days" in which I share those little moments that make me smile, and I find it is a powerful reminder for me to take notice!
The harder it is to do this, the more you need to do it!
I know that no matter how much fun I incorporate into my life it won’t actually make the difficulty disappear, and depression and anxiety are real conditions that need to be addressed. I am not afraid to admit that I see a psychologist regularly and take anti-depressants too. Without this help, I don’t know how I would cope. But I do know that for me, fun and laughter are also incredibly powerful.
Laughter is so powerful it should just about have its own Medicare item number!
You might have heard the saying "When life gets tough, the tough get going". I think that when life gets tough, do more fun stuff!
What is something small you can do today to brighten your day? Share it with us!