WHAT\u2019S
FOR DINNER?<\/p>\n
A\u00a0friend of mine was complaining that she couldn’t sleep. She kept her bedroom\u00a0dark and quiet, she paid attention to her breath and deliberately slowed it\u00a0down, she did exercises to relax her muscles, but none of it worked and she was\u00a0tired all the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do\u00a0you usually have for dinner?\u201d I asked her. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI eat\u00a0healthy,\u201d she said. \u201cProtein and vegetables. No sugar or coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u00a0thought a moment. \u201cBut what are you feeding yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI just\u00a0told you,\u201d she answered.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not\u00a0talking about feeding your body. I\u2019m talking about feeding your mind. What do\u00a0you do right before you turn out the lights?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u00a0watch the 11:00 news.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019d cracked\u00a0the case. Her diet for her body was good, but the things that she fed her mind\u00a0were giving her severe indigestion and insomnia. Grace Slick from the sixties\u00a0rock group “Jefferson Airplane,” wrote a song called White Rabbit. It ended with a powerful lyric:<\/p>\n
When logic and proportion have fallen\u00a0sloppy dead,
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “Off with her head!”
Remember what the dormouse said:
Feed your head. Feed your head.<\/p>\n
What are you feeding your head? Has obsession\u00a0replaced logic? Are you constantly listening to the talking heads who might as\u00a0well be talking backwards about death and destruction? Is that the last thing\u00a0your brain consumes before you try to go to sleep?<\/p>\n
I used to be a news junkie. I was riveted to MSNBC\u00a0and CNN. I wanted to be informed but it turned into a fixation. Whatever I was
doing, the news was always droning in the background and there was nothing\u00a0comforting about it. I was anxious a lot of the time and I didn’t know why. One\u00a0day, when I stopped to listen to a particularly bad piece of news for the\u00a0fourth time in a half hour, I got it. TV anchors don’t report good news. They\u00a0focus on train wrecks, they show devastating images over and over, and for some\u00a0reason, we can’t tear ourselves away. How many times did you see the buildings explode\u00a0and crumble on 9\/11? How many times did you see George Floyd take his last\u00a0breath? How many times did you cringe at the lies and horrific rhetoric of money\u00a0grabbing racist politicians?<\/p>\n
So why do we keep watching disasters? I think it\u2019s\u00a0become a bad habit and pretty soon, we\u2019re anxiously waiting for the next one. I\u2019m
not suggesting that we ignore the news. It’s important to keep our eyes open when\u00a0bad things are happening, but in my opinion, we need to monitor ourselves. We\u00a0need to take stock of what we\u2019re doing and decide how much our nervous systems can\u00a0tolerate without making us sick. We need to decide what to watch and when. It\u2019s\u00a0like eating junk food all day long and by the time we push away from the table,\u00a0we\u2019re surprised that we have a stomach ache. We just can’t digest all that\u00a0sugar. We need to take it in small doses to preserve our mental health.<\/p>\n
Mental health has become a widespread topic these\u00a0days and some beloved athletes like Olympic gold medal winners, Michael Phelps
and Simone Biles, are bringing it to the forefront. Athletes pride themselves on\u00a0being strong and able to withstand anything, so publicly admitting to mental\u00a0health problems is a courageous and vulnerable thing for them to do. They have\u00a0to stand tall to overcome the stigma, but when they take that step, it has a\u00a0far reaching effect. They inspire us regular people to stop hiding in shame and\u00a0start speaking the truth about how we really feel.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m one of those people. I can’t tolerate a great\u00a0deal of bad news. I still read the headlines in the newspaper every morning. I\u00a0want to know what\u2019s going on. But at night, figure skaters, gymnasts and Alpine\u00a0skiers flying down snow-covered mountains at 80 miles an hour are the last\u00a0images I feed my head before I turn out the lights. Granted, there are dangerous\u00a0people and places in the world, terrible things happen, but there are good\u00a0people too, safe places to be and inspiring acts of kindness if we make an\u00a0effort to find them.<\/p>\n
We each have our own way to quiet the noise and\u00a0block out the negativity I know a \u201cfoodie\u201d who watches the food channel at\u00a0night. Cooking is her preferred creative outlet and she gets satisfaction from\u00a0planning her meals for the next day. I know a couple who watch Seinfeld reruns\u00a0right before they go to bed so they can go to sleep laughing. It\u2019s all about\u00a0where you place your attention. If we can stop projecting and ruminating, we\u00a0can find a relatively safe place to rest our minds and reset our thoughts.<\/p>\n
However you find your peace, your mind has a simple
message for you:<\/p>\n
Fill your life with stress and fear, you\u2019ll feel
anxious and depressed.<\/p>\n
Fill your life with beauty and hope, you\u2019ll feel
beautiful and hopeful.<\/p>\n
What do you do right before you go to sleep?<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WHAT\u2019SFOR DINNER? A\u00a0friend of mine was complaining that she couldn’t sleep. She kept her bedroom\u00a0dark and quiet, she paid attention to her breath and deliberately slowed it\u00a0down, she did exercises to relax her muscles, but none of it worked and she was\u00a0tired all the time. \u201cWhat do\u00a0you usually have for dinner?\u201d I asked her. \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2098,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2100,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2099\/revisions\/2100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}