Why is change so hard? (in which I disappeared for a month)

Why is making change so hard, and so confronting? How is it that I’ll have four really good days, make some progress, feel really good, and then have a terrible day. Then I want to go hide under a rock for three weeks to get over it. This is not the way one achieves goals.

I know that intellectually, but it’s the whole “getting my body to go ahead with what my mind wants” that’s hard. It’s all well and good to look at quotes like this, and feel inspired:

But what happens when you fear the new? What happens when you are afraid of the new because it’s an unknown entity? What happens when you think you really want the new, but maybe the old and familiar is actually easier, and better?

Also, building the new is hard work. This blog from Psychology Today outlines in a few simple bullet points why changing your behavior can be so difficult. It includes points I already knew like, “we try to eat the entire elephant at once,” (ie, do it all too much, too quickly) or “we’re motivated by negative emotions” (fear is never a good motivator for making long term change). But the one that really stuck with me was, “we underestimate the process.”

This behavioral change thing is not for the faint of heart. It’s hard work. For me, it is involving changes to how I interact with my child and husband – things around putting myself first, mostly. When I get upset, my natural go-to soothing response is sugar. But that’s led me to where I am, and I want to find healthier ways to care for myself. Like coloring, or taking a bath, or going for a walk.

But how do you do that when you have an upset kiddo (which is the cause of the stress in the first place)? Say, “okay child, I need you to just stop the temper tantrum and crying for half an hour while mommy soothes herself first? Mommy needs time to herself right now to calm herself down from the fact that you’re throwing a temper tantrum because you can’t find the yellow Lego piece you threw when it didn’t fit on perfectly. Let’s all calm down, and Mommy will take a soothing bubblebath listening to Ludovico Einaudi. Okay?”

I can totally see that happening… never. And yet, just sneaking into the kitchen and eating chocolate, while fast and easy, is not a good long term sustainable solution.

I need to learn new ways of coping with stressors, and new ways of interacting with my family, and those around me. And that is something that’s beyond willpower. You can’t just willpower your way through managing stress in an entirely new way. It takes fundamentally changing who you are. And that’s bloody hard.

But I’m here now, and I’m giving it another go, because not doing so would mean giving up and resigning myself to this. Which isn’t something I’m willing to do either. So I need to have some discussions with my family this week about ways in which I will be working self care into my life, and how that is not something that is up for discussion.

In order to fundamentally change who I am I need to change how I react to stress, how I care for myself, and how I see myself. I need to first start to see myself at the weight I want, and then live the life, and take the actions that that person would take.

Fake it until you make it, right?