Reviving your parenting mojo, from Andrew Fuller

Restful sleep

The world has changed but we haven’t really kept up with the changes. The past few years saw many people with disrupted sleep. While this has largely passed, there are many people who still wake up feeling just as tired as when they went to bed.

The remedy for this will be gradual, but you can begin to readjust by:

• Have a wind-down evening time where we settle after the busyness of life.
• Make a to-do list for the next day before getting into bed.
• Trying to re-establish a sleep routine by going to bed and waking up at the same times more days.
• Eating breakfast outdoors in the sunlight.

Focus and concentration

It is important to reconstruct our ability to concentrate. Read a book and gradually increase the number of pages you read every day.

Concentration is a skill that can be developed using the process of AIER:

Awareness- what am I doing?

Intention- what is my goal?

Evaluation- what should I be doing?

Reset

Anxiety

Since the pandemic years, anxiety levels have skyrocketed, creating levels of distress and avoidance we simply haven’t seen before.

While anxiety expressed as worry still occurs, what predominates more frequently is immobilisation and avoidance. In the past few years, people have generally experienced their anxiety as digestive issues, pain sensitivity and sheer exhaustion. This threatens the ‘have-a-go’ mindset that broadens success.

There are three main levels of anxiety, and each one needs different strategies:

Freeze and fatigue – rest, then move, reset and step in rather than zone out or avoid.

Fight and flight – exercise, dance, sing, hum, move.

Synch and link – talk, problem solve, link and act with others in the community.

Friendships and social networks

Time to dust off the social list and see who you really want to reconnect with. There may be some people you wish to consign to history, but you are not designed to be a hermit. Whether you are an introvert or extrovert, it is important to reconnect with the right number of people who you feel supported by.

Reduce your use of misery machines

Taking charge of your online life is tricky. The internet is like a clever fishing device that entices using lures and bait. In this analogy, you are a hapless, innocent fish.

Twitter or X is a sewer of vitriol and contempt.

Instagram robs us of happiness by increasing envy and comparison.

Facebook or Meta is filled with ads and fake news.

TikTok makes it appear that everyone else is incredibly marvellous and leaves us feeling like lonely losers.

These are time-soaking, misery machines that, unless controlled well, absorb enormous amounts of time while contributing to our sense of misery.

Motivation

Most of us feel like our get up and go has got up and gone.

If we don’t transform pain, we transmit it. We risk passing it on to future generations to carry as a burden.

Reclaim your life

Mapping over 500,000 lives for my book, Your Best Life at Any Age provided some useful lessons about how people transform the setbacks and even devastations they experience.

One lesson was that many people experience a period of pronounced growth after a setback. The forms of setback ranged from grief, heartbreak, loss, and major disasters.

Of course, not everyone experiences this. It would be irresponsible and unethical to claim that we can overcome every experience that life throws at us.

Our setbacks and hurts alter us. Like a shock to the soul, our spirit is shaken. People are so wired to perceive and remember danger that the experience becomes incorporated within us and shifts our view of the world.

Past hurts do not just vanish into thin air. They reverberate within us and return to our awareness at specific times (such as anniversaries) to remind us of their lessons.

Transformation occurs not through forgetting or growing beyond the pain but by living through the pain.

It is easy to get stuck at this point. It would be understandable. Nevertheless, there are things we can all do to adapt and adjust after tough times and personal pain. It is in our own interest to do as much as we can, and it is also to the benefit of future generations.

So, based on 500,000 life maps, let’s start to consider what makes a time of recovery and growth possible after a tough or even devastating time:

Connect

Protect

Respect

Applying CPR to your own life
This is not about becoming some kind of tough, thick-skinned, gritty person who is imperious to the slings and arrows of life.

It is also not about waiting for a major challenge, disaster, loss, or setback to give you an opportunity to prove your resilience.

We all get enough opportunities most days. Resilience is a practice we can refine as we deal with the relatively minor challenges we face every day.