Reminder to self: get a flu jab next winter
Another reminder to self: some things on the to-do list can wait (or learning how to rest better)
The start of 2024 did not go according to plan.
After spending a wonderful week over Christmas with my husband’s family in New England, upon returning home I caught the flu. It completely floored me. I mean it threw me up in the air, spun me around and then slammed me down hard on the mats like I was at Wrestle Mania.
It felt like it could not have come at a worse time - I had GRAND plans! I had hoped to start the new year with a sense of purpose and just generally be/feel productive.
But my body had other ideas.
And so for the first week of January, I was on bed-rest where I watched a lot of TV, and when I wasn’t doing that I was staring at the walls.
At first, it turned out that the enforced bed rest, as well as the TV and wall-staring were not going to prevent brief bursts of productivity and hinder my need to be/feel productive. About four days in while lying on the sofa under a duvet feeling sorry for myself, I began looking through a to-do list that I had created prior to the trip to see my husband’s family.
I won’t bore you (or me) by providing too many examples from the list here, but what I realised as I went through it was this: much of this stuff could wait.
Given that I lost my voice and hearing in one ear, wasn’t it prudent to wait to call up that company about the position I was interested in? Or as my brain felt like cotton-wool and I couldn’t hold a thought (let alone string a sentence) together, wasn’t it ok to miss a few days journalling? The world certainly wasn’t going to end if I postponed some of the updates that I wanted to make to this newsletter. And trying to get back into my fitness post-Christmas? Don’t even think about it.
Even in my fluey-state, I wondered - why was I still putting this pressure on myself to be productive? Just rest dammit!
But then I have never been very good at resting for rests sake. I believe that it’s partly a personality thing, partly conditioning from my previous job as a teacher, and probably partly related to being a woman - there is always something that you could be doing.
So when I am sick, I often feel the need to soldier on.
And even now, my mindset about the need to be productive has not completely faded despite not currently working and recovering from the flu. If anything, the fact that I am not working has skewed my thinking as I still feel the need to be productive in some capacity as if to prove something to myself!
But then another thought crossed my mind as I lay about on the sofa last week: was I really helping myself in my recovery if I was also spending hours (and using precious brain power and energy) in ticking off things from the to-do list?
In the same article, Gannon also refers to ‘resting better’. This is the idea that rest doesn’t have to be sleep specifically (although I do love a nap!), but it can include going for a walk, spending time with loved ones, reading a book, and doing things that can help nourish our bodies and minds. And while ticking things off a to-do list can feel somewhat rewarding, I rarely feel nourished or rested from doing it.
So, as I slowly come back to life, I am going to try to hold onto the idea of resting better. This includes actually resting when I am genuinely sick with a cold or the flu whether I am working or not, but also during healthier periods, of which I hope that there will be more of as the year progresses. Similarly, I am going to pay more attention to the voice encouraging me to be productive, it’s not a wholly bad voice, but it needs keeping in check at times.
But there is one item for my to-do list, I will be marking in a date next winter for my flu jab.
I hope that the flu or a nasty cold didn’t hamper your holidays if indeed, you were on holiday over December. Perhaps you have some examples of how you have incorporated better rest into your life? If so, I’d love to know what you are doing. Please share your thoughts in the comments.
And if you are a new reader or already a subscriber, the updates that I mentioned to this newsletter will be rolled out next week, along with a gentle reintroduction to The Best of Intentions.
Happy New Year!
Sarah xx
I even had maddening irrational thoughts of ‘would my colleagues hate me?’ by calling in sick and putting more work on their plates. Turns out that this thought is not that irrational when a teacher loses their one and only free period for the day to cover someone else.
I recognise myself in what you wrote regarding the need to be productive even when not working now. That was a lesson I had to learn throughout 2023. It still is a lesson for me to learn but I think after a whole year of shaming and pushing myself to work (write job applications) using different strategies to get some outcome and feeling exhausted and burnt out, even if I was not doing paid work, I managed to bring all that awareness training I got from 3 months of meditation practice to "know" how to rest. I think it's a learning journey for many of us to discover how to rest. We aren't taught that.
I was quite sick two weeks before Christmas. What I noticed was the more I thought about work while lying in bed feeling cold even until the thick duvet, the more I felt pain and discomfort in my body. The moment I relaxed my mental grip/focus on "I am sick and this is so annoying that I can't do anything else", I noticed that there was an easing of mental weight on my forehead and immediate sense of my mind relaxing. It was a moment's bliss. And I was back to thinking, noticing and giving up/relaxing my mental grip again and again. I was challenged to practise beginning again.
Sorry to hear you've not been well, Sarah and I really hope you're on the mend soon.
Reading your words about calling in sick to school and how you feel about it are exactly the same for me. My husband often comments that it's more stress to call in sick for teachers than to just go in and work whilst feeling ill. It's true! I've had times where I've dragged myself out of bed at 6am feeling terrible, but needing to call in before the deadline and then spent an hour or more setting suitable work for my classes and also worrying about the extra strain placed on my colleagues having to cover my lessons.
Now that I am 'just' a teacher on my 3 days, I get put on quite a lot of cover (and I only have 3/18 lessons 'free' for prep time across those days). When I see a cover email in my inbox, my heart sinks and I know that the time will be lost to an hour of babysitting. I've also covered too many lessons in the last term where there was either minimal work set or even nothing at all. Not great when you've got 25 rowdy 15 year olds in front of you and they don't know who you are... "Are you new, Miss?" they snigger.