Skip to main content

Piercing angst - a thought or two on how to overcome short bursts of angst

Have you ever woken up with that odd tightness in your chest?  That feeling that gnaws at you, tugs at every fiber and strand of your day?

That happens to all of us - frankly.  It gives us a fantastic choice: how will we cope and how will we respond?

A few thoughts when that does come up:

1)  Wallow a bit, it's ok.  Those feelings are trying to tell you something, so why not listen?  It's okay to ruminate and wallow for a bit, so long as you're aware of being in those cycles.

2)  If you are not aware, then dust off the coping mechanisms.  It takes a bit of practice to know that you're in the spiral of emotions trying to take you down.  We have to be able to catch ourselves - the idea is to catch yourself as often as possible, but, of course, without judgment or attribution.  See the tension.  See the angst.  Go on - just feel it, see it, acknowledge it.  You may even feel a slight bit of relief just acknowledging that it's there (as opposed to trying to run).

3)   If you have to run, then run.  Not figuratively - literally.  Go outside.  Go do something physical.  Exert yourself for a solid hour, if you can.  You'll feel light years better.  You may even process through some of the emotional sludge that refuses to move in the midst of the angst-ridden day.  

4)  A reminder - not all days will be like this.  Tomorrow may, but the next day might not.  I assume you have some family or friends around and I compel you to fight for them.  Fight to be the best version of yourself that you can possibly be.

5)  Return to home base.  Your breath will literally save your life, time and time again.  Let it.  When you need to reset and recharge your system, it is your breath that does the work.  Do the breath work and let it fuel your recovery from this acute angst.

Popular posts from this blog

Fantasy Baseball: A few weeks in, how do we adjust and adapt?

We are several weeks into the season and, at this point, we can all agree that everything we knew going into the season was thrown out the window as soon as the games started.  That said, there is still a lot of baseball yet to play and for us, as fantasy nerds, a lot of in-season management to navigate.  As we move forward into summer, here are a few things I either have done or am thinking about doing. Use your FAAB to get the young pitchers and sell them, almost immediately, for impact bats. Put this one in the category of "shiny new toy."  Sure, I have preyed on our inattentiveness, but in re-draft settings, I see no issue with snagging these higher-end rookie pitchers and then flipping them.  In two different settings, I was able to flip Bibee for Miguel Vargas and then, separately, Mason Miller for Jordan Walker. Will these trades work out for me?  Probably not, but I have a lot more faith in Vargas and Walker, particularly, than I do in Bibee and Miller....

The More Good Days than Bad Days Principle

There are seven days in a week, about 30 days in a month, and 365 days in a year.   Not all of those can be good days.  No one has 7 perfectly good days.  Likewise, I've never gone through an entire year without a single bad day.   I have two reactions to that: The first reaction is the whole "control what you can control" thing.  You can control your effort and your attitude.  And that's absolutely true.  But sometimes a day is so bad that no amount of effort or attitude will fix it. The second reaction is that, in any given week, if you have 4 good days and 3 bad days, you're still winning.  Even if you have a few "meh" days, but the good ones are still outnumbering the rough ones, I think we're in a good place. The same goes for our practices with our little leaguers.  We've had some truly rough and awful practices.  The coach's didn't show up with patience, the kids didn't show up with their attention spans, a...

Fantasy Baseball: Mock Draft Reactions

It's December and, for the diehards, it's officially draft season for fantasy baseball.  Frankly, it's fair to ask whether the fantasy baseball season ever really ended.  While it's true that many of us began tending to our wounds in October, diagnosing the hits and the misses, a few of us never really stopped thinking, obsessively, about fantasy baseball.  For me, personally, I have been trying to stay permanently in "draft-season" meaning I want to be in some form of a draft between now and the end of March.  Recently, I was fortunate enough to join several industry experts, including Scott White, Frank Stampfl, and Chris Towers in a 12-team head-to-head points mock draft .  In this article, I will cover a few high-level observations (heck, even a few things that surprised me) and the lessons I learned. Lesson #1 :  Aaron Judge was not universally considered a first overall pick and that surprised me. This one surprised me.  As soon as I drafted Jud...