Last week, my husband and I took a real vacation. No kids. Nothing tacked onto a business event or a family thing or someone’s wedding. No work. Unplugged from distractions.

I feel really lucky to do work that I absolutely love and that I would do even if it wasn’t connected to contributing financially to our family. 

But, that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to take a full stop break from it every now and again to water the parts of my identity that aren’t connected to my career.

Since Mike came back to run the company with me last August, pausing on our business relationship and fertilizing our romantic partnership for a week felt not only necessary, but downright medicinal.

(Good news: These last 11 months have been some of the most beautiful in our marriage. A relationship doesn’t need to be on life support in order for it to be a good idea to pour some extra TLC on it.)

We dropped our kids off with Mike’s parents in Indiana (bless you forever, Mimi!) and headed off to Jackson, WY (with a quick stop in Kansas City for Taylor Swift!) just us.

But what happened next surprised and disturbed me.

The first 48 hours of our trip were dreamy.

Then one day I woke up from one of my gagillion vacation naps and felt cranky AF.

The worst part was, my dark cloud was largely directed towards my husband and my marriage, fully clad in layers of critical, disapproving thoughts.

It felt awful. Like my mind was torturing me.

Here I was in the most luxurious hotel I’d ever been to, in one of the most beautiful places in the world, with zero things on my to do list, no kids around asking me for anything and an incredible man by my side…and my mind was in a very bad neighborhood.

I’ve been around long enough and logged enough hours in therapy to know I can’t always believe my thoughts. (My wise therapist/coach Anne Davin taught me about Thinking Errors and you can learn about them in the Pressure Relief Kit linked above and below.)

I knew the state I was in wasn’t based on truth (no matter how real it felt) and I knew if I was going to actually enjoy this potentially blissful time I was gonna have to shake the snow globe of my psyche and let the glitter resettle in a truer, more beautiful way. 

(Ideally, one not so based on the distortions of my cranky inner child 😅.)

Per the parenthetical, here’s the truth:

When we step away from the distractions of our lives (constant requests from kids, social media, work emails, deadlines, the news cycle, etc.) we rarely touch into relaxing bliss right away.

Instead, as the activity dissipates, all the feelings that we haven’t had time (or the willingness) to feel lately (or for the past several decades) tend to come up.

Basically, we come nose to nose with all our “stuff” and, if we’re paying attention, we realize that at least some of our busyness hasn’t been dictated exclusively by what’s required to reach our goals.

Some of our busyness is, in fact, a numbing device so we don’t need to go into the deeper recesses of our psyche that don’t feel so awesome to visit.

That’s why rest doesn’t always feel that good and vacation can be downright painful.

So there I was in the most gorgeous tub on Earth, eye gazing at the aspens through the window, feeling tortured by the negativity bubbling up in the freshly quiet interiors of my mind.

After buying into my little mind gremlins stories for a while, I came to for long enough to realize that there was another option.

I sat on the bathroom floor and I prayed. I asked for help from the place that’s always available and never runs out of steam or willingness to be of assistance:

Source.

I asked to be shown a new way of seeing what was going on. I asked how I might see things if I were looking through the eyes of love.

What came through could be an entire chapter in the new book I’m writing (or perhaps it’s the foundation of the whole book) but the email digest version was this:

I was having trouble receiving the love, ease, abundance, rest, and pleasure that was available for me in a greater amount than I’d experienced before.

The temperature of goodness in my life had exceeded my thermostat setting for good and my unconscious was doing what it does best: bringing my level of experience back down to a level that felt familiar and comfortable, and therefore, safe.

This is a psychological and physiological knapsack we could unpack together for a while (and we will in forthcoming emails, podcast episodes, social media posts and this book that’s knocking at me from the inside.)

But for now, here’s what you can put in your breast pocket close to that gorgeous heart of yours for the next time you feel tortured by your thoughts:

We each have a thermostat for how good our bodies/psyches will allow us to feel.

Our thermostat setting is based largely on what it felt like in the environment we grew up in.

The thermostat setting is where our bodies/psyches feel safe because it’s familiar.

What we long for (more bliss, joy, abundance, ease, connection, relaxation) is unfamiliar to us because we haven’t experienced it before.

We unconsciously “sabotage” ourselves from feeling those expanded levels of goodness because there are very real parts of us that feel unsafe feeling what we haven’t felt before, even if it’s “good.”

So we start obsessively disapproving of our adorable, loving, wonderful husbands in our heads. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

Or we pick a fight or eat too much sugar or have too many margaritas or do something else that’s gonna bring our experience of life back down to what feels familiar, aka safe.

But we can change our thermostat settings

This Do Less Dispatch is already long enough and I’m typing this as my cousin’s adorable 2-year-old smears yogurt all over himself and the dining room table while the 3 older kids watch a movie.

So I’m gonna tell you how to change your thermostat setting next week! Keep an eye out for the Dispatch on Wednesday.

For now, know this:

Life can get more and more expansive. But, when we stick with our default programming, we’ll keep xeroxing our past experience, which is usually sub-optimal.

Next week I’ll get into how to get your hands on that thermostat dial and crank ‘er up.

In the meantime, just knowing that you have an internal thermostat is enough to chew on.

I love you. We’ve got this.

Here’s to expansion.

Xoxo

Kate