Do you know what to do in a trough?

(It will make all the difference if you do!)

Nov 27, 2024

Quick note before the main post…..Come join me tomorrow (Thursday 28th) on my last online support session of the year (I might do one before NY but not sure!). It’s the topic most asked for - Boundaries, Beliefs & Balance and I’ll help you manage your emotional weather regardless of the actually weather! Details below.

Get Troughing…

Do you know what your troughs look and feel like?

We're in the middle of another pandemic but no-one is handing out masks. It's the contagion of busy-ness. It feels that the word "rest" has been hijacked by some in the wellness industry as some sort of luxury retreat we get to do once or twice a year as long as we get all our ducks in a row. An earned respite, rather than a natural flow of life.

Our brains are designed for a steady flow with peaks and troughs of intensity; peaks of stress and troughs of calm, with stretches of ‘normal’ in between. But the modern scourge of constant busyness means we are often in what I call peak plateaus…. Long, sustained periods of time at peak stress.

That means we may occasionally reduce to what would be considered the steady state but rarely dip to meaningful troughs. Learning how to recognise, dive into and embrace the troughs is the new oxygen mask.

I have a client, let’s call her Amanda, who has been working to change the pace of her life but when she finds pockets of potential peace, she "feels guilty." She’s been working with me for a few months because her life was becoming intolerable. Born into busyness early, she had a chaotic childhood and developed a survival pattern of just keep going, keep helping, keep control of everything and everyone. By the time she came to me, juggling work, her family, her home, that heightened, controlling way was close to breaking her. In our early sessions, she often talked like she was running out of air.

We had spent time getting her off this survival mode, helping her find the freedom in being less controlling, and shifting her beliefs to support a life where she thrives too, alongside all the roles and responsibilities she has.

So when I saw her recently for a check in, her life was flowing better, she had much greater awareness of her patterns and even greater agency of how she behaved and prioritised. And then this:

“I’m suddenly finding pockets of peace. But then I feel really guilty and that makes me stressed and then I’m diving back into busyness.”

So I asked her to think about the feeling. Was it really guilt (her default feeling when she wasn’t busy?). Or was it perhaps the weirdness of unfamiliarity? She’d been in a heightened peak state for so long, she doesn’t actually recognise when she has a trough.

She realised that’s what it was. It was unfamiliarity. And here’s the danger. If you don’t get proactive about what to do and how to feel in a trough, you’ll revert to the familiar state of busyness. Amanda’s been on a heightened sense of busyness for decades, and now, she needs to decide what a trough looks and feels like and how to live in it, or else her default busyness will kick in and she'll end up cleaning out a kitchen cupboard! I see this all the time in my clients... an inability to know how to relax. I’ve had to learn myself how to be proactive in my troughs to enjoy them… be that a 5 minute trough, an hour, or a weekend. I know when I feel a five minute trough (or radical… take a five minute trough!) it’s just looking out into my garden, or playing with the cat, or having a cuppa and actually drinking it sitting down, perhaps messaging pals. I know how to fill an hour, and I make sure, even in the busiest of weekends, I build in troughs.

The more familiar they become, the more you enjoy them and - here’s the magic - the more you then actively strive for them.

Balance is knowing that life should be peaks and troughs, understanding when you peak you have an exit strategy, and when you dip into a trough, you know how to give it your all because you’ll head back up to steady pace soon enough.

So if you suffer from the Affliction of Perpetual Busyness I’d love you to ask yourself:

☀️ Do you have many troughs in your day? Can you see where there is one you’re not actually using? (Chatting to Amanda, I asked her to make a list of things she’s always dying to do when in a peak and I asked her when was the last time she took an hour’s lunch break at work? How about, in this trough, she went Christmas shopping for an hour at lunch. She had never, ever done that. So she added it to her trough list).

☀️And when you fall into one, do you know how to languish in it as long as possible? Can you make a list of thinks you might do (and doing nothing is one!) should you suddenly realise you’re not out of breath and have five minutes to just be?

What is our obsession with being busy?

It went from once being a state you got into with a wider perspective of getting out of it, to an almost perpetual state of being.

I used to think it was normal to be out of breath most of my day. That my value lay in how exhausted I was and how much I’d done.

☀️ I’m practising now the radical idea that my value comes from who I’m becoming as much as what I’m doing.

☀️ How I’m evolving as much as how much I’m achieving.

☀️ How I’m accessing all the parts of me - including curious, fun, contemplative, reflective, replenished - as much as being caring, kind, ambitious, proactive, and yes, busy.

“I’m at a busy stage of life / time of the week / phase of my year” is an awareness of the peaks and troughs of a “normal” life.

Being in a frenetic state of business with no awareness as to why, is a plague.

My daughter sometimes screams at me “‘I'm too busy!” when I ask her to do something for me, and I have to hold myself back (and sometimes I don’t) from raging back she has no concept of the word busy! The student who is certainly at a stage where she needs to manage her energy and time between college and job, has only herself to blame if she’s so hungover most of the time because she thinks she’s doing a degree in 'How to have a non-stop social life’ is not quite the same as a single mum to three teenagers, with an ill dad, a house to maintain and clean, a garden to manage, a home to run including 2385623857345i324 meals a week, and a business with a side lashing of being a writer!

And then I grow up because busyness is not a competition.

I realise it’s not a time issue; it’s an energy one. She has no time because her time is filled with energy-consuming activities - work, study, socialising.

I make time - for all that I have and all that is asked for me only because there are some times I invest in energy-replenishing. A walk in the woods. A 10 minute break to drink a cuppa and text friends that I’m thinking of them and how are they? A half hour to read while eating my lunch in the middle of a busy day.

I know my troughs, I fight for my troughs and I’m constantly learning how to use them. I’ve written here and here about the time in my life when I was Queen of Peak Plateau. It was a bruising crown to wear.

It is so hard for women.

As a mum, it’s really hard to say I’m TOO busy. You’re not supposed to be too busy for your kids. Or too busy for your partner. Or your parent. Or too busy to cook and clean and feed. Or too busy to

Yet everyone else can throw the word to us as we are the default busy-er.

Our kids. Our partners. Our ex-partners.

The people who have taken the most from me are the ones who get to say they’re too busy. Not because they’re bad but because their busy is about them, and most of my busy is about them, and that leaves little for me.

But peaks and troughs are how we are supposed to live. It’s not a luxury. It’s not to be earned. In his amazing book The Myth of Normal, Gabor Mate explains how what we have come to understand as “normal” is false - that this level of pressure and lack of attention to sense of self is not normal, yet we live as if it is.

Troughs are there as a contrast to the peaks…. We need them, guilt-free and necessary.

Please…. make your trough list and start living them daily.

And if you feel inspired by that, come join me tomorrow (Thursday 28th at 7pm) for my my webinar next week: Boundaries, Beliefs and Balance - there’ll be a recording but live is best as I’ll be there to answer questions and help anyone with specific boundaries, beliefs or balance issues. There’ll also be a Resource Guide so you can go away and work on your specific three B’s!

Boundaries - We'll be looking at:

Guilt v resentment
No v yes
Conflict v conversations

Beliefs - I’ll be covering:

Critic v champion
Self v situation
Limit v launch

Balance - You’ll learn about:

Challenge v capacity
Sanity v standards
Output v input

It’s only €55 and for my paid subscribers, if you email me at alana@alanakirk.com I’ll send you a 20% discount code. You can register here.

I absolutely love hearing from you, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)

Do you know what to do in a trough?

(It will make all the difference if you do!)

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