October is recalibration month!
September just ended and I am exhausted. I know many of my fellow ramblers have school or college age children, and many work on the academic calendar cycle. And… bless you, some of you fall into both categories. (I literally don’t know how you do it). Let’s just say it out loud, September is a HOT MESS. I cannot wait to have a day with nothing on the calendar on October 11th when America recognizes and celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ day.
On the surface, it’s obvious why September, the re-entry month, is such a busy and overwhelming time. To varying degrees, people experience life a little differently during the summer: kids are off from school, people tend to take more personal or vacation time, in New York City there is ‘Summer Fridays (yup – it’s a real thing) and generally (when possible and safe) we are outside enjoying beaches, parks and cook-outs. In other words, we might slow our pace of things down a little and prioritize activities that make the most of the long days and warm weather. It’s awesome. So then, when new routines are being established and all of your usual routines return at the same time, AND add COVID concerns into the mix, the entire month feels like a long run uphill. Oh, and did we factor in the days getting shorter?
In my little world, this September was particularly daunting. I got off the plane from a 3-week trip visiting my family in the U.K. on the evening of Thursday September 10th. I always experience an emotional re-entry after those precious visits and flying internationally, with all of the testing requirements was super stressful. Yet, by 8 am the following morning, I got my jet-lagged self to the COVID testing center at Berklee School of Music so I could teach my first day as Assistant Professor of Voice. I welcomed into my studio 10 young adults from all over the world who are navigating a transition which is enormous in any life journey, let alone during a global pandemic. They require a lot of my energy. On the Sunday, I resumed my church choir job which had been on hiatus for 18 months. I’ve been playing catch up from my trip, I’ve been reconnecting with existing clients and meeting with new ones, AND with every interaction with people, with public transportation, with a place, there is the extra effort of managing a myriad of COVID expectations, regulations and behaviors.
It certainly isn’t surprising that adjusting to new routines and re-engaging with activities that I haven’t done for a while has left me physically and emotionally tired, but what is actually happening that contributes to the overall sense of decreased energy, lost sleep and increased stress levels? Well, our brains are literally re-wiring. Here’s my favorite analogy – when you move house inevitably the kitchen is laid out differently in your new house. For the first week or so, you’ll continue to go to the draw to the right of the stove to get silverware only to find aluminum foil and clingwrap. Eventually, your brain re-wires to the changed location of the silverware and finding it becomes automatic. This is part of the reason moving is so exhausting, nothing is where it used to be and re-wiring the brain and body to habitually find things in new places demands a lot of energy. September gifts us an unusual amount of simultaneous re-wiring at once and therefore, in the most serious cases, we can find ourselves on a pathway towards burnout.
When stress is frequent, the more frequent activation of the neural pathways to the lower, stress-reactive brain results in their strengthening from enhanced wiring These pathways can become so strong that they become your brain's fast route to its lower, reactive control centers. The stressful, burned-out state when the lower, reactive brain is in charge overcomes the calm, reflective, and productive higher neural processing in the (PFC) – the preferred brain locale for control of behavior and emotional self-management.
As your efforts to achieve unreasonable goals are thwarted or increasing demands recur, and the lower brain dominates more frequently, you lose touch with your reflective brain. With less management coming from your reflective PFC, it becomes harder and harder to logically see these challenges in a realistic perspective or to solve problems creatively. (Dr. Judy Willis - Board-certified neurologist)
If there was a live chat right now, there’d be a lot of ‘Amens’. So, what can we do October to recover after a month when our systems have drifted off course? We need to navigate ourselves to a familiar, safe and/or fresh point of reference, we need to re-calibrate – to hit refresh.
Every person has a different way of recalibrating. I just need time in my house to change out my summer clothes to fall. I need time for just me and my partner, and I need time for just me. I need to watch Daniel Craig in his final 007 movie. I need to catch up on sleep. For the rest of October, I am intentionally blocking off time in my calendar for recalibration. We are hiking the skyline trail in the Blue Hills (Neponset land) on Indigenous Peoples’ day to see the early foliage and then a quiet dinner just the two of us. It’s a good start.
How are you planning on recalibrating this long holiday weekend?