Mindful decontamination
September 30, 2022
It’s basically the holidays, y’all! Seriously, once summer is over and the kids go back to school – life moves at warp speed and doesn’t slow down until I’m drinking hot chocolate in front of my Christmas tree on my holiday off. I try to remember this whenever I’m trying to implement changes into my daily life. The end of the year is going to come, whether I like it or not. Do I still want to be smoking cigarettes and drinking? In 2023, will I still be skipping workouts because it’s easier to just not do them but still thinking about how I want to be working out? Do I want to be enjoying the new paint job in my kitchen or am I going to continue to be annoyed at the hundreds of dirty handprints from toddlers’ past? Sometimes, when we focus on the outcome or even the feeling the outcome will produce, we can muster up the energy to do the dang thang. Behavior change, then, must come from a combination of knowledge, practice, and also positive emotions associated with the new activity. Blame, shame, and punishment never kept me from eating that second cookie or putting down the wine glass. But imagining the calm (and then experiencing the joy) of new behaviors certainly made them stick.
After seeing what we’ve seen, it’s easy to get caught in a worry loop. PTSD rates in the responder community are through the roof and suicide are at an all time high. The life expectancy of our police officers is 57 years old. So I started journaling – at first, I had to do it a lot. I started by setting a timer on my phone a few times a day where I’d stop whatever I was doing and just wrote for one minute everything I was thinking or feeling. Sometimes it was about the delicious Pumpkin Spice coffee I was enjoying and sometimes it was about the terrible drunk who just drove into a family of three. I did this for a few months until I started looking forward to Mindful Decontamination time. After a while, when bad thoughts came up, I would tell myself - not now, Kat. You have time to dwell on this during Decon time.
Public Service Announcement – I still have negative thoughts. All humans do! What I do with them next is the key to positive change.
Now I’ve got a scheduled time every evening to “unload” my worries, sad feelings, and negative thoughts. I usually take about 5 minutes to purge onto the page anything and everything. Sometimes it’s really dark stuff I can’t say out loud and sometimes it’s the menu for my daughter's 11th birthday party. Either way, it feels really good to anticipate time to remove things from my brain on to a page.
In the Burnout Protocol, my mini-course for responders, I have a whole unit dedicated to taking control of our thoughts and changing them into useful emotions that propel you forward, instead of keeping you stuck.
This is also your last chance to sign up for Sober October, a 30-day challenge designed to interrupt your habits and help you make alcohol small and irrelevant in your life! There is no judgment or labels, only curiosity and discovery. It's 30 days, not forever - get your holidays started off right! Take a mindful 30-day break from alcohol and see how you feel. This experiment will challenge your thoughts and ideas about alcohol with science-based facts that address your thoughts, beliefs, and our cultural conditioning about alcohol. There is NO way to fail! There is no judgment and no failure, only learning. You will feel healthier, look amazing, and have all the information you need to make an informed decision about alcohol in your life! All proceeds are going to the Wounded Warrior Project.
