Whenever somebody says they love every aspect of being a dad, or being a mom, my eyebrows raise and my bs-meter goes off.
One of the things that is probably the biggest time suck as a parent is extracurricular activities – taking your kids to and from gymnastics, martial arts, or in this case, swimming.
I’ve resolved not to be like the other dads there – glued to their phones, mindlessly distracting themselves with social media. For me, journaling has been one of the most powerful self-care practices I’ve adopted in the last few years. (I used to only focus on exercise – my views on health have evolved quite a bit.)
I actually can feel myself getting slightly anxious leading up to swim practice, because my body knows that I’m going to actually check in with all of those feelings I’ve putting off throughout the day.
So when I do find myself in a position where I’m sitting in a chair, unable to much else, I journal. Sometimes it’s a targeted prompt (I recently used an LLM to create a series of journaling prompts that targets my mental wellness, based on a few questions that identify my areas of opportunity in life), and sometimes it’s free flow.
Very often, my go-to method for journaling is just listing out the things that have been stressing me out lately. The things that haven’t resolved yet, and I find myself ruminating on.
The point of listing them all out isn’t to fix them – no, the point is to acknowledge them and check in with the feelings they cause, so I can move through them.
So after listing them out, I close my eyes, and I focus on them as if that’s the solution; that by giving my entire focus to how that stress is showing up in my body, whether it’s my chest, my head, neck, or my shoulders, that that’s the solution. Not solving it. Not fixing it. But being okay with not changing it at all, and letting me body accept it.
It can be pretty intense the first few times you do this – and you’ll have to remind yourself to get out of your head and into your body. But when you can do it enough, you’ll start to realize maybe you didn’t actually need to solve the problem right then and there – you just needed to process it in the body.
This doesn’t mean that those problems don’t still exist – paying your mortgage, managing relationships, being stressed about work – those are all still realities. But when you check in with your body and actually FEEL the weight of that stress, you remove the emotional baggage that’s holding you back from making good decisions about those situations, and dealing with them objectively.
So next time you find yourself in a situation where you’re just sitting, feeling kind of stuck – check in with the body. It’ll do you some good.
PS – Now I think there’s a balance of actually watching your child participate in the activity while you’re there, with you doing whatever you need to get done, but the reality is that there’s not always something to watch. (And I don’t know if I want my children getting used to me watching them the entire time they’re doing something, anyways.)
