I feel it so it must be true… right?

Realisations from an exhausted kween

So I slept in my mum’s bed last night, crawled in at 12:30am like a 4 year old having a nightmare…

No I wasn’t having a nightmare, I was doing my Daughter of the Year™ award and driving mum to the airport for her gals holiday (have fun Jacqui!) but with a 5am leave the house time I figured I’d stay over to save myself a lil’ bit of driving.

Went to bed, in her spare room, at a very respectable 9:30pm… only to be woken up by the sultry, and very loud tones of her upstairs neighbour at 11:30pm.

OOOF

Well, obviously I waited it out, laid there mildly fuming but thinking, he must be off to bed soon and at 11:45pm, success, time to go back to sleep…

12:30am

📢📢📢📢📢

Okay bro, this phone call better be the best of your life because now I have t-minus 4 hours until wake up time and I have to decide,

Do I go crawl into bed with mum, or do I don a dressing gown and knock on his door with a face like thunder?! I chose to go with mum’s bed. Thank the lawd my dad just happened to be on nights.

So the alarm goes off at 4:30am and I am EXHAUSTED, and you know those days, when you wake up and your brain knows exactly what’s coming. A 2 hour drive each way in Manchester morning traffic on a broken night’s sleep…

Then surprisingly, the good ol’ SatNav took us on a route totally away from the motorway, we were hip hopping across the Peak District, and eventually came up this hella steep hill. Cue both mum and I both GASPING at the sunrise coming over the horizon.

I know right, gorgeous.

Then we get mum dropped off, I grab a coffee on my way home and sing to Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah until I’m genuinely in tears.

Now it’s 10:30am and I’m sitting here writing a blog, because, well the facts never changed.

I really did have a shit night’s sleep.

But the instructions my brain gave me as a result of that simply didn’t need to be followed.

How often do we take the data and immediately decide on the result?

Fact: I had a shit night’s sleep

But then my brain automatically adds:

So I’m exhausted

So today’s going to be hard

So I’m going to struggle

So I’m not going to get much done

So today’s basically a write off…

And somewhere along the line, this one thing that was true has become an entire story about a day that hasn’t even happened yet.

We predetermine the results without even realising way before we even begin our days.

Now, I’m still tired, yes I may still need to take it easy on myself today and I maybe even need a lil’ nap later on so I can parent when the small human finishes school.

But that shit night’s sleep doesn’t get to invalidate the beautiful morning I’ve had or the day I still have yet to come.

Let me just take a sec to just drive home that I am NOT saying that we should all think positive. Bork.

But I am saying that maybe it’s time to slow down and notice the data a bit more accurately.

So I suppose the experiment today comes down to this:

How often do I take something that is true about how I feel in this moment, and let it decide what’s possible next?

Because for me, I’ve learned today, that a bad night doesn’t necessarily know what kind of day I’m going to have.

It’s my job to investigate.

Catch you on the flip side scientists,

Lauren