Ep #184: What to Do When You Feel Meh

Welcome to The Not Your Average Runner Podcast. If you’re a woman who has never felt athletic, but you still dream about becoming a runner, you are in the right place. I’m Jill Angie, a certified running and life coach and I teach women how to start running, feel confident, and change their lives, and now I want to help you.

Hey Rebels. Can we talk this week about feeling kind of meh about running and life in general? Of course we can, it’s my podcast. But seriously, I know a lot of you are having a hard time with this right now, so we’re going to go there today.

But first, I have to share something super fun. Somebody called me the Oprah Winfrey of running podcasts the other day, and I swear to god, it made my day. It made my whole damn day. I’m like, yes, because my intention for this show is not to provide you with episode after episode of running advice.

Because you can get that from lots of other running shows. My mission here is to uplift you and inspire you and help you feel more confident about your running and about everything, to help you love yourself while you’re running and while you’re not running, and to just live your best life.

So to be compared to Oprah just gave me the happiest feeling ever. So if you have been impacted by this show in any way, I would love it, I would love it so much if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and let people know how it has helped you and why you love it. Because the more reviews this show has, the more likely that iTunes is to suggest it to new people, and the more people I can help to start running.

Okay Rebels, let’s get into today’s topic. It’s a little deeper than we usually go. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. I’ll let you decide. So anyway, I asked my Run Your Best Life coaching clients yesterday, the day before I’m recording this what they were struggling with right now. I said I haven’t recorded the podcast yet for next week, what are you struggling with?

And a lot of them said like, they’re just not feeling like running. They’re just not feeling it. And whether it’s winter or a lack of races or COVID quarantining, they’re just not feeling great. They’re feeling kind of meh about running and everything.

And this really got me thinking about some experiences that I’ve had and that I know some of you have had. And you know what, I’m kind of feeling sort of meh right now as well, especially today. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re like, “Jill, you’re just so positive all the time, I can’t imagine you would ever feel uninterested in running. You probably just wake up in the morning and jump into your running clothes or your Peloton clothes and get at it.”

But you know what, I am just like you. I have days where I wake up and ugh, just feels like a dark rain cloud came in overnight and I just do not want to get out of bed. And I like to call it the mystery blues because I feel blue and it’s a mystery as to why. And it almost always happens after I’ve been feeling particularly great about myself for a few days in a row.

Like I’ll just wake up one morning and my brain is like, okay, today we’re doing an opposites thing where you’re going to feel terrible all day. And I know, I talk a lot on this podcast about how to motivate yourself. So hey, if we wake up and we have the mystery blues, we should just motivate ourselves and get going, right?

Motivation, it’s a feeling that comes from your thoughts and you can create it any time you want. But the mystery blues, they’re kind of different. They’re different than just that thought of I’m too tired or I just don’t feel like it. I know you know what I mean. There’s your brain throwing a temper tantrum and then there’s this dark cloud feeling and they’re different.

And it can feel overwhelming when that happens. It’s like, I’ll be lucky to take a shower today, let alone go for a fucking run, right? And I think we all go through emotional ups and downs, and there are some days when you wake up and you’re feeling awesome, you’re ready to slay the world, and other days it’s the complete opposite.

And sometimes you can track back your thoughts. Sometimes maybe something happened the day before and you wake up and your brain is still processing it and you’re feeling kind of sad or upset about it. Sometimes you just don’t know and that’s why I call this the mystery blues.

And it’s so tempting when that happens, especially if it happens after you’ve been feeling really good about yourself, it’s so tempting to feel like something is wrong. Something has just gone horribly amiss, you’re not supposed to be feeling like this because you’re a runner, god damn it, where are those fucking endorphins everyone is always talking about?

But my lovely Rebel, waking up feeling blue is actually not the problem. You think it is. You think, “Oh my god, I’ve lost my motivation, I’m broken again, I don’t know how to fix it.” And then when you think those thoughts, you actually start to feel worse. You might start to feel like is this ever going to go away, is this how I’m going to be stuck for the rest of my life?

I know I’ve thought it, I know you’ve thought it. But here is the thing; the blues are just part of the human experience. Our lives are 50:50. And I think maybe some people have more of a crazy ass thriller roller coaster kind of high highs and low lows. Some people have more of a kiddy ride where the peaks and valleys are a little more gentle.

But for everyone, we have those fluctuations. So when those mystery blues happen to me, I just want to hide from the world. And I probably get it, I would say maybe a couple times a month. It just sort of comes out of nowhere. I don’t really keep track of it. It used to definitely happen more frequently when I was younger, but as I’ve aged, it has definitely mellowed a lot.

And I used to make it mean that something had gone wrong. Something was wrong with me. Okay, I’ll be honest. Sometimes I still do that because I’m human. I would make it mean I don’t have my shit together because this shouldn’t be happening, and then I would judge myself for waking up feeling blue. And guess what? Judging yourself makes it worse. It makes it so much worse.

The harder you judge yourself, the harder it is to get moving. And on those days, I often still find myself in my pajamas at noon eating frozen pizza and cupcakes and watching reruns of shows that I’ve already seen 20 times because I wake up, I feel blue, I think what’s wrong with me, and it just traps me. It blocks me from doing anything but wallowing.

And I’ll tell you what, wallowing, again, I’m not going to judge myself for wallowing because it’s a normal human reaction, but it does feel kind of awful. And so that judgment that you heap on yourself for waking up with this kind of not so great emotion, it doesn’t make you more motivated to get out there to do what you planned.

It makes you less motivated. You can’t sit there and yell at yourself saying, “What’s wrong with you? Get your ass up, get out there.” If you imagine somebody standing over your bed yelling at you like that, you’d be like, I’m going to call 911 and get you evicted from my house, this is not okay.

But we seem to think it’s okay to yell at ourselves like that. So notice, there you are with the mystery blues and you’re mad because you think you shouldn’t be feeling that way. And then you get this whole stew of emotions and it drags you off track for days.

So waking up one day with this blue feeling turns into days of just beating yourself up over and over again thinking, “Oh my god, I always do this. I missed so much time, I’m losing so much ground, and oh my god, what is wrong with me?” And you start cataloguing all the ways that you need to be fixed and how everyone else seems to have it figured out and you’re just a broken mess who will never reach her goals.

Especially if you look at Instagram, have you noticed everyone’s life on Instagram appears to be perfect? Who are all these perfect people? I would like to meet them in person because I bet they’re not perfect when you meet them face to face.

So I know that you’ve gone through this, I’ve definitely gone through this, and it can just feel like what am I supposed to do? How can I fix this? So my rebellious friend, I want you to take a deep breath with me right now. In and out. And I actually do have something that can help you.

I cannot prevent you from waking up feeling this way. You actually can’t prevent yourself from waking up feeling this way because you’re a human and you have a 50:50 mix of emotions in your life. But what we can do is not make it worse.

So the first thing I want you to do when you wake up with the mystery blues is to say, okay, I feel blue today, and that’s normal. It’s part of the human experience. I am not broken. I do not need to be fixed. Nothing has gone wrong in my life, nothing is wrong with me, I am not broken, and I do not need to be fixed.

I suggest that you say it out loud actually, and I’m not joking about this. Saying it out loud means you’re going to hear it and not just think it. Because this is something I know for sure. You do not need to be fixed. Feeling blue is part of being human.

Everyone experiences it. Everyone. Even the perfect people. And so that means there’s nothing wrong with you. Your brain is operating exactly as it was designed. 50:50 negative and positive, that’s how it works. We want to be happy all the time, we think I should be happy all the time, but honestly, that would be pretty dull.

It means that nobody in your life can ever die, none of your relationships can ever break up, you get every promotion at work that you ever applied for, it means everything goes your way all the time if you’re going to be happy all the time. And that would be pretty dull and it’s not going to happen.

Well, maybe it could happen if you have some sort of extreme chemical intervention I guess. But then you’re not living in reality anyway, so I don’t know. So you’re going to feel that 50:50 one way or another.

So after you remind yourself that when you wake up feeling blue it’s just part of the 50:50, it does not mean anything has gone wrong because you’re not meant to be a ray of fucking sunshine all the time, after you remind yourself of that a few times, I want you to ask yourself a question.

What is the most loving thing I can do for myself when I feel this way? Ask and really listen for that answer. And you know what, it might be staying in bed and scrolling through TikTok to make yourself laugh. It might be going for a run, it might be screaming your head off, it might be crying it out in bed with your kitty, it might be sitting in front of a sunlamp reading a book, whatever it is.

What would feel like love right now? What would feel like taking the best possible care of myself when I’m in a fragile state? How can I honor and accept this emotion in myself? And I get that you might not be able to lay in bed all day and ponder. I totally understand that.

You probably have to get up and shower and go to work and so forth. But how can you love yourself through all of those things? I’ll tell you one way. You can remember that even when you’re sad, you’re still lovable. You’re still worthy of love.

In fact, it’s really important for you to love yourself more when you’re feeling sad and blue. Because the mystery blues, they always pass. They always do. You can make it easier by loving yourself through it instead of thinking thoughts about it that make you feel guilty or broken.

So the blues are there, that’s our circumstance. Woke up feeling blue. When you think thoughts, “I’m broken, something’s wrong with me, this always happens to me just when I start making progress, I never stick with anything,” when you start having those thoughts, then you start feeling guilty and frustrated and discouraged on top of the blues.

So you take what’s kind of just a feeling that happens and then you just pile shit on top of it. And then that makes it harder for the blues to go away. So I want you to notice those thoughts, the what is wrong with me, the I need to be fixed, all of that stuff, notice those thoughts, let go. Just let them go.

They don’t help, they keep you stuck in the mud. And I know you might say to me, “It’s really hard to let go of those thoughts when I believe them.” I get it. You may have to practice. You may have to – this is what I like to do. When I hear myself saying shit like that to myself, which I do, I still say that stuff, I just don’t jump on and say yes, I’m all in with you, crappy thought.

I say, oops, I’m confused. Just confused. Let’s remember that that’s not the way I want to think about myself. Because again, you are not broken. There is nothing wrong with you if you wake up with the mystery blues. There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re feeling meh about running right now.

You’re allowed to feel whatever emotion comes up for you. You’re allowed to have feelings. You’re allowed to not be happy all the time. You’re allowed to not be a ray of fucking sunshine. You do not need to be fixed. I want you to love yourself hard while you’re feeling the blues and remind yourself that it is normal.

Especially – at least if you’re in the Northern hemisphere, we have a lot less sunlight going on right now. Most of us are kind of – our lifestyles have changed a bit. We’re quarantining, we’re social distancing, we’re not doing as much as we used to do. And hey, all of that can weigh on you and it might be hard to constantly be adjusting your thinking so that you’re like, oh yeah, pandemic, no problem, I got this.

It’s normal for you to get a little overwhelmed once in a while by it. So there’s nothing wrong with you. I’m going to repeat that over and over again in this podcast. You are not broken, there’s nothing wrong with you, you do not need to be fixed. It is normal to feel blue. It’s normal.

And so if you work on shifting those thoughts to it’s normal, this is part of being human, you’re going to get through it a lot faster. If you resist it, if you keep thinking I got to feel better soon so I can get on with my life, you’re going to struggle. It’s going to feel worse.

And I know you’re tempted to do that. You’re like, I don’t have time to feel sad, I got shit to do. I want you to let yourself be blue without judgment. You can get shit done while you’re feeling sad. In fact, there’s this really great movie with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves and the name is escaping me right now and I should have done this research before I recorded, but I’m sure somebody’s going to write in and tell me what the name of the movie is.

But anyway, Diane Keaton is a playwright. She falls for Jack Nicholson, he breaks her heart, and she starts crying. And she just does not stop. There’s a five-minute scene in this movie where all she does is cry and wail. And at the beginning of it, she’s just in bed sobbing, but then she starts working and she’s a writer, she starts working and writing, and she’s still crying the whole time.

She doesn’t resist the crying. She doesn’t resist the emotion at all. She lets the tears flow and she literally goes on about her business while she’s sobbing. And then when the tears finally stop, she’s actually created this amazing play and ends up having this lovely affair with Keanu Reeves. And I like to think about the mystery blues like that.

You can coexist with it. You can live your life and not make feeling blue mean that something has gone wrong. You can just be like, oh, this is just how I feel right now, I’m going to keep going and doing my thing.

So don’t resist it. Let it come and love yourself through it. Do what you need to do to love on yourself like a boss instead of punishing yourself because it’s going to pass. You’re going to get through it, I promise.

Please don’t make it mean that you’ve lost your motivation. Your motivation is actually still there. It’s just being crowded out, covered up a little bit by something else at the moment, but it’s going to come back. And you will be back.

Okay my rebellious friends, that is it for today. I want to know what you do when you feel the mystery blues. Hit me up on Instagram @notyouraveragerunner and let me know. Meanwhile, I love you, stay safe, get your ass out there and run, and I will talk to you next week.

Oh, and one last thing. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you have to check out the Rebel Runner Roadmap. It’s a 30-day online program that will teach you exactly how to start running, stick with it, and become the runner you’ve always wanted to be. Head on over to rebelrunnerroadmap.com to join. I’d love to be a part of your journey.