When I first moved to Boston from the Philly area, I spent several hours per day complaining about the inability to find a decent hip hop station or quality slice of pizza. Privileged, I know.
Everything was expensive. I had to walk everywhere. It was noisy, it was gritty, it was…a year later, home. And a decade later, when it was time to return to rural life in Pennsylvania – because of 20 degrees below zero windchills with a circulation disorder and a failed marriage – time, I cried my eyes out.
Change is hard.
Oh, tell you something new?
Well, change is hard because our brains become hardwired to crave the familiar before we crave the healthy. I could do with less hip hop and more classical music for my blood pressure. I could do with fewer sodium saturated carbs for my blood vessels, and it was time I started moving more rather than driving every quarter-mile distance.
All of those changes had benefits.
But my first year on Boston, my brain lacked dopamine rushes of familiar and lack of access to superhighway auto-pilot familiar bummed my mojo.
Bummed mojo seems to be my daughter’s dilemma with puppy life.
Super bummed mojo is her parents’ witness to her initial reaction to puppy life.
My daughter has echoed the words, “I regret wanting a puppy.”
She’s an HSP, highly sensitive person as are her parents. We are wired to be extra attuned to energy shifts and what feels as a stimuli of a degree 3 out of 10 for some, feels like an 9 out of 10 to my kid. But we didn’t jump into this, it wasn’t a whim. My girl’s been around many dogs, many days at a time and she spent years begging for a canine. I thought we knew what we were getting into. But…
We underestimated the level of change from our only child, daughter’s perspective.
“I miss your undivided attention…you love the dog more…she’s always jumping on me and into my business…and the greatest tragedy is that I can no longer eat dinner on the couch. Mom, that is the greatest tragedy of all time.”
Tragic.
This is not only a kick to the floor for a parent who probably wouldn’t have entered such an added responsibility, but this is also after a deliberate period of, “Mom, I have been begging since I was three and I am now super old at seven and I may die tomorrow and you will have to live with never getting me a puppy” mentality.
We caved slowly, methodically.
And now, my spouse and I are bearing witness to our daughter’s avoidance of all things dog.
I’ve been thinking—and more precisely, ruminating—during lost sleep as I wonder, How did we get here?
I remembered that no matter the anticipation: new city, new job, marriage, newborn, pet arrival, or change in housing – there is a common concept of what I will coin as the DOG days of change.
I’ll walk you through this D.O.G. acronym, hoping that you too, like my daughter, will come out the other side of change and what was once new, will eventually become your favorite second skin.
D.O.G. stands for Deliberate, Ongoing, Gradual immersion into the change. If we are fortunate, we have that opportunity.
DELIBERATE: Bring awareness to the meaning and details of the change, balance between the big picture of why the change is happening and lean into the specifics for a realistic sense of what the change will entail.
ONGOING: Show up and show up again, with a good enough attitude to whatever change will be faced. Anxiety dissipates when we face the stressful stimuli on the regular, rather than other WHOOSH reactions to retreat or fight something away. The more we show up: 1, the more familiar something becomes (obviously); 2, the stress reaction in degree and intensity will lessen per typical re-engagement; and 3, techniques to optimize the joy and lessen the strain the stimuli brings will grow in mastery.
GRADUAL: Change benefits from gradual rather than too much, too quickly. This dynamic optimizes our chance for success. Imagine if I asked my kid to take the pup for a walk on her own, rather than with assistance and companionship. NOT gradual. Spending time, playing with the puppy together as a family and offering to take turns with feeding the puppy: pure gold possibility.
How might you apply the DOG days of change to your own life?
Leave a comment and let me know if it helps.
ANXIETY ANSWERS 