I routinely enter into what I like to call my Rain Cloud Cycle. What, you might be wondering, is a Rain Cloud Cycle? Well, allow me to explain. The formation of a rain cloud goes a little something like this: I absorb a negative thought, word or feeling, it condenses into a terrible, gray cloud and then I let all the negativity out in one form or another: tears, journaling, ranting to my mom, playing Just Dance and just dancing my stress away, etc. And then the cycle repeats.
However, I decided about a week ago that I was going to try throwing a little sunshine into my Rain Cloud Cycle and see what happened. As I mentioned in my list, I do enjoy journaling. I did not start journaling seriously until the end of my senior year of high school, but once I did, there was no stopping me. My journal is like a boyfriend who just sits and listens to how my day was and what my thoughts are, but my journal also happens to be the strong, silent type, so there’s never any reply.
As I was reading through a few of my latest entries, I realized I had been doing a lot of “raining” more frequently. Even though getting the negativity out of my head and onto paper is a step in the right direction, it really didn’t do much in the way of solving the root of the problem; going to bed with negative thoughts gnawing in the recesses of my brain was making sleeping difficult. That’s when I decided to try the age-old trick of focusing on positive aspects of my day right before I went to sleep. I was skeptical at first and I felt a little silly titling a page, “Good Things That Happened Today,” but as it turns out, there is power in thinking positive.
I’m not going to say that it solved all of my problems—I have more problems to solve than a calculus textbook— but taking a minute to look for the sunny spots in my day helped my brain to wind down for the night. I always list at least three or more “good things”, even if they are very small; number three on my first list is, in all honesty, “My laptop portable desk thingy arrived from Amazon today”. It may not be like a life changing, beautiful moment, but it was
something I had looked forward to getting and it had arrived, so that was a little bit of sunshine in what can be a pretty dense rain cloud at times.
I know keeping a positive outlook isn’t always possible. Expelling negativity is a good start but if there is no positivity to replace it, it leaves room for more negative thoughts to form. It’s time to see the sunshine after the rain.
HCXO,
Samantha