How to Get Through a Difficult Day

I’m going back to work and I know it will be hard. For weeks, I have dreaded facing the students who saw me in the hopeful last weeks of my pregnancy. I know that once I teach the first class to all 3 of my groups, I will be fine. It’s getting through that first encounter that scares me.

So here is this neat psychological trick I’m using to avoid obsessing about meeting the students tomorrow and feeling anxious and stressed about that: I’m making this day about something different. Tomorrow, I will try to fit in a visit to the gym between this first class and a session with my analyst.

I’m still not used to going to this gym. I haven’t fully figured out how to get there and back, which things I need to take, and how to coordinate this visit with the bus schedule. This visit to the gym consists of many different stages (changing room! fitness room! changing room again! shower! swimming pool! shower again! changing!) and many tasks that befuddle me (which bus should I take? when should I leave to be in time for the bus? what do I use to remove the makeup? which of the two towels should I take into the fitness room with me? do I need the goggles or do they just get in the way?).

As I try to figure out the logistics of the gym visit, I forget to worry about the class. It turns into a short interlude between the taxing effort to pack for the gym and the feat of actually getting to the gym and back.

The golden rule of getting through a difficult day is to make it even more difficult but to do so by adding a different kind of hardship to the one you are dreading. If an emotionally difficult moment awaits you, schedule something physically, intellectually, or, as in my case, logistically complex. And this is important: time-wise, the added hardship should be scheduled AFTER the painful moment you fear.

I’m now not even freaking out about tomorrow’s class, and this is a big victory already.