Jumpy Legs on a Sunday Night

The kids are watching a film tonight, which means nobody actually needs me for the next hour or so. And somehow I've ended up back at my laptop anyway, creating a resource for someone, at a time I told myself I wasn't going to be working. Why?

It wasn't even a hard job. It was easy, if anything, and it felt good to be useful for a minute. But it wasn't really about the task at all.

What's actually going on is that I had permission to do nothing, and I couldn't quite work out how to take it.

Some of my work, the contracts and the quieter parts of the business, has kept going through the summer. But the bigger pieces, the programmes where I'm the one leading, standing in front of people, are about to start up again. And until they do, my brain won't leave it alone.

What if I can't do it. What if it's too much. Did I make the right choices for the year ahead.

None of those are really questions I can answer yet, because none of the work has actually started. So the worry just sits there, and I end up with jumpy legs and can't sit still, pacing round the kitchen for no reason at all.

I thought going back into these particular roles, a year in now, would feel easier than when I started them. Turns out the opposite is true. When it was new, I had an excuse. Now, if something goes wrong, I don't get to say I didn't know what I was doing.

Which is a bit rich, given I've just spent the summer leading workshops on managing energy and confidence, telling people that doubts and dodgy days are normal, especially right before something starts. (Apparently I don't take my own advice as well as I hand it out!)

But there is a reason for this, and it isn't that I lack willpower or the ability to use the tools I know will help me. It's the basis of a real approach in CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy): some therapists encourage clients to sort their worries into two kinds.

The real, solvable ones get worked like an actual problem, name it, weigh the options, pick one, do it. The hypothetical ones, the ones that haven't happened yet, don't get solved the same way. There's nothing there yet to act on, so the move isn't to plan your way to certainty that doesn't exist, it's to ask a different, answerable question instead of the unanswerable one. A trial testing this approach found people were still doing significantly better a year on, not just straight after.

This suggests that, if we can work out which kind of worry we're actually having (actual or hypothetical), we've got somewhere to put it. So take me, worrying about whether I've made the right calls for the year ahead. Trying to tell myself the odds are fine, that I've done this before, that it'll probably be okay, doesn't actually touch it. Because the worry was never really about odds. Nothing's actually happened yet for me to judge, it's the hypothetical kind, so there's no real answer to reach for.

So instead I need to ask a different question. Not "have I made the right calls," but "what's the next actual decision in front of me, and what do I know that can inform it." That one's real. That one I can act on. And once I've acted on it, there's nothing left to circle around.

If any of this sounds familiar, here's what I'm trying instead of the spiral (over the next few days):

The Dread Question → The Actual Question

"What if I can't do it?" → What do I actually need in place before this starts, and is that done yet?

"Have I made the right calls for the year ahead?" → What's the next decision in front of me, and what do I actually know that can inform it?

"What if something goes wrong and I don't have the excuse of being new?" → What's actually true about how I've handled things going wrong before?

Dread doesn't have an answer. It just has volume. Find the actual question underneath it, and that restless energy has finally got somewhere to go.

And if you're still pacing the kitchen, that's fine too. It just means the feeling needs an outlet before the thinking can catch up.

I think naming the actual worry, instead of just feeling it, is why I sat down and wrote this, rather than finishing another easy job for someone else. I didn't sit down to write a blog post about jumpy legs on a Sunday. I sat down because I didn't know what I was pacing about, not really, and writing it down made me actually say it. "What if I can't do it." "Have I made the right calls." Once it's an actual sentence on a page, rather than just a feeling in my legs, I can look at it and ask whether it's even a real question.

I don't know yet if I'll do anything differently next time the jumpy legs show up. But at least now I know what I'm actually arguing with myself about.