Smell the flowers & blow out the candles
Next Step #08 - In this issue, I'd like to share how did I do the simplest strategy to control an unidentified overwhelming emotion.
Heya,
Can you believe it? 🎉It felt just like yesterday we were still wishing “Happy New Year” to everyone on social media and at work. It’s already the 3rd week of Jan and it’s been hectic in the office as everyone has already come back from a long year-end holiday.
🪜 I do have piles of stuff that need to be done, home stuff, birthday stuff, health stuff, and also….cos there will be a wedding next month.
👰🏻♀️That wedding is my wedding 😆 and there are a lot of things that are still un-done for that important day. It almost feels like nothing is moving in any area of my life at the moment but I was busy making the move to progress everything.
❓Do I need to re-shuffle my to-do list a thousand times? Yes ONLY IF I am not confident with the plan and no ONLY IF I know everything is in its own priority quadrant.
❓Do I need to sleep more? Hell yes, but my sleep schedule flipped opposite this week. I was wide awake every 9.00 pm till 4.00 am, it’s almost like I am all awake for the US timezone and had to drag myself to be awake for work from 9.00 am to 4.00 pm the next day for MY time!
🎯I have all the to-do lists ready.
I know I can’t sleep and had to make it work with whatever hours of sleep time that I have.
I am tired to do wedding stuff but too wide awake to have an actual sleep.
Even at work, I could feel I am sub-optimal level and my patience in dealing with others was declining at an increasing rate every minute. It was alarming! 🚨
By mid-week, my body ached as much as my head pulsing.
💤 I fell asleep at 6.00 pm on a Wednesday and woke up 5 hours later that night. I think ‘sleep pressure’ kicked in since I was awake too long and had less than 4 hours of sleep! So that 5 hours of sleep somehow helps to restore my energy to survive the second half of the week. Bummer!
❓Could it have been an anxiety attack? I don’t actually feel it. But looking at the amount of stuff that I have in my to-do lists and fewer hours of sleep I had, this seems to be evidently proven.
I was having dinner and came across this reminder from Zeke (a character in Manifest on Netflix that says,
Smell the flowers and blow out the candles
Such a simple strategy to control an overwhelming emotion. It’s essentially just a reminder to breathe. Just for 5 mins or more if you needed more time. But take a deep breath and exhale…
Often we are obsessed with being busy and keeping things moving at all time. We forget how our body can drain its energy and need a pause too.
If you starting to think of stuff that has been taken up space in your mind and energy this week, I hope this week’s note can be helpful for you.
Thanks for reading!
❤️ This week’s highlights and favorites
📺 Still on top of the list, I am watching Manifest on Netflix. I talked about this last week
📚 Read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker - The first sentence that I told myself after finished reading the book was, “If I don’t start sleeping now I will go crazy and die sooner!”. That’s how intense are the facts given in this book to help bring realization for me to change my sleep hygiene starting now. Grab a copy and read my book notes here
📚 I was reading Wildwood last week but I made a hard pause to it. I can’t help myself to be sucked in the stories and the magical woods that I really don’t want it to end fast. I already made an order to get the sequels and it’s on the way from a small town in the US. I don’t want to have to wait for book #2 when I finish the first one and again for #3 when #2 was finished. So yea, it’s on pause now. It is that good guys!
📚 Read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This book is in extremely high demand that all stores only offer pre-order for you to get the copy at the point I started to read this on Thursday. I already had to wait for my Wildwood sequels to arrive in 2-3 weeks’ time, so I decided to read the kindle version instead. It’s a story about a circus that no one has ever seen before. “A circus that no one has ever seen before!” - this got me hooked. Fell in love harder with the book when the circus proprietor described his vision of the circus, there won’t be any animals in the cage. Read my book notes and grab a copy for yourself too!
📚Current reads: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
🎧 Listened to Ali Abdaal’s new season’s podcast. A chat with a psychologist on the guide to a meaningful life. Dr. Julie said that content creators should “Focus on the value of the content that you are making, you will care less about what other people are saying and make fun of you!”. Needed this reminder to get me going to create content on my blog
🙁 Not-so-great this week
My disrupted sleep cycle! It’s a work in progress
Now that I came to think about it, nothing else was not so great though. Only my sleep. sleep. sleep. Urgh
👩🏻💻 Look What I Made This Week
Few things that are happening in the background and offline too. I set up a small dedicated space for me to read and drink tea (away from my work desk!). It’s like a small project that’s helping me to breathe the flower and blow the candles 😂
Made a super nice beef spaghetti as lunch meal prep this week. Took the recipe from Pinterest
Well, ending this note this week to remind you that even if the world seems to spin faster than your pace, just know that there’s always something you can control as simple as breathing and yes, “everything is workable!”.
See you next week!
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❤️ Love & x,
Wawa Hals