Align with your day to reduce anxiety
Align with your day. It’s a neat little catchphrase, but what does it mean?
Aligning with your day is a tool for congruent living. It’s a method for engaging with life as it is, rather than life as we might wish it to be.
We live in a highly uncertain world. Coronavirus. Climate change. Political and economic meltdown. Relationship stresses. All of these create insecurity, which in turn may create anxiety.
Many, if not all, of these uncertainties are likely to be indefinite. And that means indefinite anxiety. This is why it helps to align with your day.
Big questions
The big questions in your life, whatever they are, most likely won’t resolve today.
It might be something date-specific, like exam results. Or anxiety may come from vague, unresolved situations without deadlines. It might be whether your job will survive the on-going economic turmoil. It might be that you’ve changed and your partner hasn’t, and you’re wondering whether the relationship is tenable.
As anxieties compound anxieties, you begin to question whether your life is tenable.
Align with your day
How do you deal with these anxieties? Align with your day.
If you can navigate today in a way that’s congruent with what today is about, you’ll have a feeling of safety, satisfaction and accomplishment.
If you can navigate today in a way that’s congruent with what today is about, you’ll have a feeling of safety, satisfaction and accomplishment.
You can only do what today allows you to do. Perhaps today is a day for rest, not for achievement. If you try too hard to ‘make something happen’ you may end up achieving the opposite. Nothing gets resolved.
Worse yet, your sense of your ability to resolve issues may be diminished. Anxiety increases. You can’t push the river.
Feel into the day
How do you align with your day?
You can align with your day at any point. It’s best to start first thing in the morning, but it doesn’t matter. You can do it anytime. You can course-correct. The more you do it, the more it becomes embedded as a habit, a go-to emotional tool that helps you navigate the day.
Align with your feelings, not your thoughts. Feel into the day.
Instead of thinking what you should try to do today, feel what you should do. Think with your heart. Sense what’s going on inside you. Listen closely. Do you feel an urge to do one thing rather than another? Perhaps what you most need is to go for a walk, rather than tackle some mentally pressing issue.
To-do list
Be aware of your to-do list for the day. Distinguish between what has to be done and what could be done. Is there an optimal sequence for these tasks? Is there some rescheduling required—one task pushed back, another brought forward?
The more aligned you are when you tackle a task, the more easily and quickly you’ll complete it, and the better the quality of the finished work. The more you complete tasks from a place of struggle, disinterest and disempowerment, the longer it will take, the harder it will be, and the lower the output quality.
When I align with my day, I notice that tasks often get bumped until just before they’re needed. This is in alignment with the manufacturing practice called Just In Time (JIT). Nothing needs to be done until it needs to be done.
Animals align with their day every day. They sense the soil, the wind, and the light, then go about their business. Align with your day and go about yours.
Photo by Nicole Wilcox on Unsplash