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On paper, everything looks OK and if you’re lucky, there are no particular dramas swirling around which can’t be easily handled.
But something is missing. And you can’t quite put your finger on it. Whilst entire high streets are insisting you to get excited and ‘Get ready for back to school!!’, you are feeling quite the opposite. In fact, after the summer lightness, there’s a decidedly dull feeling creeping in and no amount of new stationery can get you out of this funk. In fact, it’s starting to tip into a slight dread, feeling the jolt as you navigate from the summer break and its permission to take the foot of the pedal, back to regular work deadlines and the darkening months of autumn.
Your usual response, to crack on and just say ‘I’m okay, just need to get through this week’ doesn’t cut it any more and it just feels a bit cloudier now. You may be feeling confused, even annoyed that you’re in this mode. That you should be grateful to be in your position. But the reality is, you’re rocking between the borders of restlessness and boredom or even worse, busy-boredom. There’s just that overall feeling of ‘is this it?’.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) can hit during those back-to-school months, not just during the grey winter months, with 1 in 15 people impacted according to the NHS. Anxiety UK, a mental health charity, receives more calls to its helpline during this period, so if you’re experiencing this, the first thing to understand is that you’re not alone.
For me, during this season, this sense of restlessness and busy-boredom was coming on strong. I felt my own ‘down cloud’ coming in, and recognised the need to pause and figure out what was going on. This took effort, no doubt, but what really helped gather the strength was having a base understanding of ‘what to do next’ which I learnt over the years from an array of great holistic teachers, particularly those practicing yoga and meditation. And here’s the key: recognise the tough emotions; pause and identify how you are reacting to things whilst in this mood. By being open to this approach, you can build your personal way of articulating moods through language, therefore creating better emotional understanding to identify certain patterns. In short, it brings you closer to the ‘why’ of that emotion. And only then can you start to take action on how best to respond in a more considered and proportionate way.
But how do you even begin to pause and capture those moods in the first place?
