Unless you are a complete loner, at some point, your life is going to be hijacked. It may come gradually, like when you learn you are going to be a parent. It may come with great celebration, like when your daughter gets engaged and you become enmeshed in wedding planning. It may come suddenly, like when someone you love has a medical emergency.

I am submerged in the third of the above-mentioned scenarios.  My boyfriend fell playing tennis last week and broke his wrist in “several” places.  He will have surgery later this week, after which he will be in a cast for three months, maybe more.  For the foreseeable future, he will need me to drive him to his appointments, tie his shoes, and yes, cut his meat.

And that means, of course, that the things I was going to do in my own life are going to get at least postponed and more often erased.  It also means that when his needs veer in an unanticipated direction, what  I’ve committed to for myself gets cancelled on short notice.  It really does feel like a hijacking.

I was raised in a family that values helping.  I do like to make a positive difference in others’ lives.  But I will not pretend I’m delighted with this turn of events.  I’ve been riding shotgun on his cancer detour for the last two years.  Before that, there were other situations where he needed my help  because of health challenges.  Just how often am I supposed to let this guy’s problems take over my life?  Am I enabling a “drama queen” with all this helping?

He was not looking for this kind of attention, I am certain of that.  He does all he can on his own and tries to help with chores even with one arm wrapped in fiberglass.  So no, I don’t think this is a situation that demands the tough love of walking away.  It’s life–at it’s most maddening.  My life.  And his life.  Intertwined as they should be when you are blessed to have in your life people you care about and spend a lot of time with.

When things happen to me more than once, I see them as lessons I didn’t learn well the first time.  This is one of those situations.  Maybe you can learn for me.  So what’s to learn (and do/no do) when your life gets hijacked?

• Forego the martyr routine.  It’s highly over-rated.  Sure, you can’t do what you had wanted to do with your time.  But you still need to take care of yourself along with meeting the other person’s needs.  If you literally have no time for yourself, you can maintain your posture and make an effort to breath deeply.  Maybe a 5-minute meditation or a 20-minute nap is feasible.  I do laps around the hospital when I end up waiting there.  Find the things you can do for yourself and do them.  You are the only person who can totally deny yourself what you need.  Don’t do that.
• Expect whoever has stolen your life to do as much as he/she can for themselves. That gives them as much dignity and sense of worth as possible and you a breather.  It’s tempting to scurry around trying to make everything right for that person, but that doesn’t serve either of you as well.  Even with children, this is the case.  A newborn is helpless and pretty demanding.  But babies who have alone time (in an infant-safe place, of course) learn faster than those whose parents haul them around and entertain them every waking minute.
• Find the balance points.  If you are doing all the giving in this context, look for receiving in other contexts.  Maybe you get to watch the TV show you want together instead of letting him have his preference.  Maybe what you have for dinner is your preference instead of his (or hers).  This feels “wrong” because so much of the focus is on the “sick person” but trying to balance things where you can does a lot to forestall resentment and burnout.

When a loved one hijacks your life, respect your own feelings about that.  Yes, you want to give the care that’s needed.  No, it’s not automatically what you want to do at a specific moment.  When it isn’t, feeling frustrated or just plain angry is normal.  Find safe ways to channel that away.  (I yell in the shower but also find moving dirt helps.)

And see it for the gift it is. Yes, your life has been hijacked.  That means someone trusts you enough to ask your help.  You are a good person.  But please, be good to yourself, too.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

At the moment I am on the road–with a guy who prides himself on not planning. I am a planner. A very good planner.  When I take charge of something, it gets done–right, on time, under budget…all that.

So far, I have not gone into catatonic shock in this effort to not plan, but I am starting to ask myself some important questions. As in “How much of this trip should I really be doing his way?  Am I denying who I am in an effort to “get along?”  And the really scary one–”What do I gain by not getting it my way when I don’t?”

Maybe they are questions we all need to ask ourselves every once in a while.

I decided to try “his way” on this trip just to see if I could learn to be more relaxed about how I travel.  But this version is a whole lot less relaxing for me.  It’s the same issue we have with laundry.  He thinks it’s easier to do it when he runs out of clean clothes.  I do mine so that I always have clean clothes–which makes life simpler for me.  I don’t discover I need a certain pair of jeans washed twenty minutes before I want to put them on.

On a trip, when he doesn’t plan and I don’t plan, we end up checking into a dumpy motel at the end of the day exhausted by what we ended up having to do to get that far.   We pay way too much for the lousy lodging.  We miss things along the way that we might have liked to see because we didn’t know they were there.  We didn’t tag up with friends and family living nearby because we didn’t bring their contact information along.  But we do have total flexibility and plenty of room for spontaneity.  So it really is a matter of trade offs.

So I guess that’s what I’ve learned this time.  It’s an either/or, both are fine thing.  But this “not planning” is harder, more expensive, and seems to me to net us less interesting days.  I’m not in favor of planning every second in advance–or even every day.  But thinking more about what might be part of where we are going and checking information about what that would add or subtract just makes for a more refined product–vacation.  But that’s me.  He’s just in favor of hitting the open road and seeing what happens.

So why am I doing it all his way?

Well…I said I would, and that’s a biggie for me.  I agreed to do this trip with minimal planning.  But there’s more.  I have spent two weeks making my own life more stressed for the sake of him having everything go the way he likes it–every day.  What’s with that?  Why am I not admitting what I need and asking for it???

It is with horror that I have to admit that I am still running the old tapes that I got from my mom…You know, the ones about the high priority of pleasing your man.

Argh!!!!!  That is not what I want to do.  Even worse, this is not what he wants to do.  But to get what I want, I have to be honest with myself and then have the guts to speak up.  Some lessons you keep learning all life long.  For me, this is one of them.

Hope this resonates for some of you.  I’d hate to be the only one flunking “me-ness.”

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

Are you playing fair with your To Do list? I’ve been abusing mine for about a decade now and didn’t even know it.

I tell myself that I’m not a slave to it–I did finally see the light about the lunacy of “getting it all done at all costs” a while back.  But I’ve just discovered I’m stilling approaching that To Do list the wrong way.

I’ve been using it as a daily confirmation that I have worth as a person—salvation via getting a lot done.  And the painful truth is that this is just another perfectionist strategy—a way to avoid the pain of being deemed not good enough in someone else’s eyes by completing task after task after task, day after day after day.

To let go of perfectionism, you have to stop worrying about what other people will think.  I thought I had accomplished that–and in many ways I have.  But I still worship at the altar of “getting things done.” The wrongheadedness of this finally became clear to me courtesy of Brene’ Brown’s THE GIFTS OF IMPERFECTION: LET GO OF WHO YOU THINK YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE AND EMBRACE WHO YOU ARE.  The gifts she discusses aren’t consolation prizes.  Imperfection is actually a whole lot better way to live than all the perfectionist striving I’ve been guilty of over the years, including my worth-through-productivity mania.

Brown knows my game.  She too was devastated when she learned that a stiff dose of work ethic wasn’t a particularly evolved approach to life.  She refers to herself as “a recovering perfectionist and aspiring good-enoughist.”  She’s also a social scientist who’s been doing qualitative research on shame for much of her career.  That’s right—perfectionism is a facet of shame.  I’ve been driving 90 miles an hour down that dead end for decades!

The news was a shock, but also a big relief.  I’ve been frustrated for months about how little I get accomplished these days compared to three or four years ago.  I used to write a long list of chores for the next day every night, and then, bright and early the next day, I would get going on those things—roaring through them like I was on a mission to save the world.  Much of the time, nobody but me had decided they needed to be done.  In the vast majority of cases, if I didn’t get them done, nothing bad was going to happen.  But getting through that list made me feel like a superstar.  I was effective.

Recently, it’s gotten more and more difficult to make myself work on the list each day.  More and more often, I don’t even write one out the night before.  I’ve been worried that this meant I was losing my grip on my life. I can’t even get a simple to-do list done?

After reading what Brene’ Brown had to say, the dawn came.  A while back I asked the Universe for help to get wiser about doing what really needs to be done.  I thought that it was a case of rededicating myself to that daily list.  Until I read about her experience, I didn’t even realize the resistance to my To Do list mania was the answer to my earlier prayer.

Who says I have to get anything done?!  Who’s keeping count?  I’ve been in an ever-accelerating role as Simon Legree, meanly enslaving myself. That’s no better than subjugating someone else.

A few days ago, I turned over a new leaf.  Instead of that long To Do list, I jot down what I really do need to remember to do.  Then I remind myself that my day is mine to do with as I choose.  Yes, I need to honor my commitments, but usually, it doesn’t all have to get done “today.”  And it’s okay to change my mind as the day progresses.
Work is a good piece of life; it’s not work that needs to be eliminated here.

What I—and maybe you, too–need to stop doing is the frenzied rush through an arbitrary list of tasks that has become the default proof that I (we) deserve to be alive today.  I need to erase the notion that work—even meaningless work that doesn’t need to be done at all—trumps the less socially acceptable stuff like play and taking a nap.

“To Do” lists are great for remembering what needs to get done.  You do want them in your toolkit.  But they aren’t inflexible marching orders, and there is no correlation between the length of your list (with everything crossed off) and your value as a person. To be really wise, you need to use a strategy that includes knowing when to ignore them.

This article originally appeared in the March 2013 edition of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold.
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of SUPERCHARGED RETIREMENT: DITCH THE ROCKING CHAIR, TRASH THE REMOTE, AND DO WHAT YOU LOVE.  For more, see her website.

All of us get stressed–just not the same way or at the same things. And the way we react to that stress is unique to each of us as well.  But when I read about one key aspect of all these differences, an insight formed that has helped reduce the anxiety my sweetheart and I were feeling about a particularly stressful situation considerably.

Much as I mention this in the context of a primary relationship, being aware of this difference can help you get through tough situations with kids, coworkers, parents, or friends–anyone with whom you’re trying to get something difficult done.

The key distinction?  Whether we over-rev or pull back when things get tense.

Brene’ Brown marked this difference in her 2010 book The Gifts of Imperfection.  The book is about other things. (Its subtitle is  Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are).  However, she makes the observation that there are two ways to deal with stress in terms of taking action:  Some of us kick it into an extra gear, working to get far more done than is reasonable.  Some of us pull back and attempt far less because of the emotional onslaught.

Let’s make something clear here.  Neither way is better.  They are just both ways people deal with a situation that feels out of control.

The situation that my sweetheart and I found ourselves in was a practical one.  We weren’t worrying about the deep issues of coupledom.  We were (are) trying to get a house ready to put it up for sale.  Anyone who’s sold real estate knows this process is a bit like a negative version of the parable of The Loaves and the Fishes.  For every task you get done, two more pop up that must be done to make the place look presentable.

I usually “rise” to such occasions by revving at a faster and faster rate to get it all done.  I don’t do other things that also need attention.  I short myself on sleep.  I drive myself past the point of physical exhaustion.

My guy goes in the other direction.  He pulls back–to think, analyze, regroup, or just plain rest.  He takes longer breaks, has long talks with the neighbors, and runs trivial errands.  Until I realized this is part of our differences in coping style, it was the source of a substantial amount of frustration.  I was in the the fast lane, moving toward outright resentment at well above the legal speed limit.  Why was I working so hard if he was going to take a break and watch TV?

I was working that hard because that’s how I have always chosen to deal with this kind of stress.  He was watching TV because that was how he best deals with this kind of stress.  Let me reiterate.  Neither way is better.  They are just very different.

Knowing that, we were able to begin talking about what each of us was doing–and able to laugh a bit about how odd it must look to each other.  From there we could start to move toward a more common approach–mostly because a lot of the stress went away once we saw how much each other’s coping style was affecting the process.

Is this difference entering into something you’re trying to get done?  (I now realize one of my kids is like this as well–and over the years we butted heads more than a few times because of it.)  The best way to deal with stress is to get rid of it.  And sometimes, just recognizing that the person you’re in it with is not like you in how they are dealing with it is a great start.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

No…not that word. When it comes to “F words,” the socially naughty one really doesn’t pack much punch. It’s a rude, lazy way of letting off steam and not much more. You say it in exasperation. You voice it with explosive frustration. You yell it when you feel powerless. And when you’re done, nothing much has changed. It’s just a meaningless jumble of letters with a bad reputation.

But there’s another “F word” that can make a mind-blowing difference. That word is “fear.” As a word, we don’t pay much attention to it. But as a way of life, it is devastating.

Most of us assume fear is an emotion that’s automatic and unavoidable. In some ways, that’s true. If a strange pit bull is standing guard over your mailbox and snarling, it’s probably a good idea to be afraid—and maybe even to postpone seeing what the mail carrier left for you that day. A dangerous situation rightly engenders fear. The genuine feeling makes us focus on making a decision to act—to decide whether to put up a fight or run.

But what if you spend your whole life being afraid of all dogs? That’s nowhere near as helpful as a cue. I had that fear and there were good reasons for it initially. (I had some scary experiences with dogs as a young child.) But hanging onto that into my 40’s? That’s something different than bonafide fear.

Fear that comes from danger in the immediate environment is essential to personal safety. Fear of what’s going to happen tomorrow? That’s a different thing. It’s this pervasive, ongoing state of fear that can make a mess of your life.

That fear doesn’t even come from the same place. It’s not a reaction to cues from your surroundings. It is your mind trying to convince you that there’s danger simply to enjoy the drama of it. This is “ego fear” rather than useful fear. Ego fear is built on the idea that you should be able to keep yourself safe at all times. That you can and must avoid all bad things. Sorry, but that’s just silly. Life happens. You deal with it.

Trying to keep life from happening just impoverishes your experience of it.

Ego fear steals the future—no matter what you’re afraid of. Fear of the unknown makes you unwilling to venture into it. Fear of not getting it all right makes you not try anything new. Fear of being rejected denies you the opportunity to feel accepted. This kind of fear is not your friend.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous quote “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is actually part of a longer statement that reads “So let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.

Yes. Unjustified. There is no sabre tooth tiger ready to pounce. The danger is manufactured in your mind out everyday life on the planet. It’s a personally created bad dream—no more real than the monsters under the bed when you were a kid.

This fear is a choice–a really bad choice.

This kind of fear drains the fun out of life. It makes every waking moment one of vigilance, whether the fear you’ve manufactured is of germs, success, or economic Armageddon. Being afraid of whatever is going to happen next takes the delight out of whatever really is on the horizon.

Fear creates stress, so it’s hard on your heart, your immune system, and your overall health. Buying in on unnecessary fear is irresponsible. Yep. It’s no better for you than smoking or a diet of Coke and Doritos.

Saddest of all, fear keeps us from evolving as human beings. We don’t become the happy, satisfied people we’re meant to be because we’re too worried about what might go wrong to get on with living.

The great Roman philosopher Seneca put it well: “Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination that in reality.”

We don’t need to suffer. We need to stop worrying and really live what each day brings. Some days might include a pit bull or two, but not always.

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 edition of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold.
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more, see her website.

Mom was right. But sometimes it takes a good physical therapist to get you to heed what you were taught when you were six.  Case in point”  SIT UP STRAIGHT.  And for that matter, stand up straight, too.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been working with an amazing physical therapist to get rid of pain I’ve had in my hip for years.  I thought it was arthritis.  I thought it was hip degeneration.  I thought is was a total hip replacement in my not-too-distant future.  All I actually needed was a refresher course in what I got from mom before I went off to first grade: Slouching is not acceptable.

For Mom, it may have been the need to raise a kid who looked half way interested in what was going on.  For my physical therapist, it’s a simple solution to avoid surgery, cortisone shots, and other expensive medical procedures.

I’m living in a 66-year old body.  Things are going to hurt every once in a while.  I’m going to do dumb stuff like clobbering myself with a shovel handle or treating my finger like part of the shish kabob.  You just assume it will get better after you do that kind of thing–and it does.  Except that’s not how it works with my back.  That is not just a “wait and it will be fine” situation.  It happens a little at a time and when it starts to hurt, it’s usually not in my back.  Confusing, right?

Not if you are paying attention to what’s really going on.

The truth of the matter is that most back problems come from poor posture.  I assume that I am standing straight when I’m not, believe I’m sitting up square when I’m twisted into the curve of a too cushy chair, and that I do my work looking straight at it when at least half the time, I’m torqued around so I can do two things–or more–at once.

Believe me, being good to yourself by maintaining good posture sounds simple but is not.  It takes ongoing effort and commitment.  It doesn’t even feel natural for me to stand with my feet equally weighted because I have a very long-standing habit of weighting my left leg more.  (Thus, the pain in my right hip….)

You might not be blessed with the same luck as I had in terms of ending up with a great physical therapist.  But you might not have to if you remember this one thing:  If you are having pain on a recurring basis, check your posture.

This is one of those “easy fixes” that we don’t hear about often enough.  Back surgery is invasive and not always successful.  It’s a whole lot harder to deal with than reteaching yourself how to sit on the couch when you watch TV, how to sit at your computer, how to stand correctly.

I am living proof of how much of a difference this can make.  The first time this physical therapist coached me, my life had degenerated into long days of laying on the bed the most of the time because my leg hurt so much.  I could not walk a block.  (Yes, this is the hiker who considers anything under five miles “just a walk.”)  I was firmly convinced that it was my leg that was the problem–and I do have a genetic peculiarity that I could blame it on.  It was severe enough that I fully expected that surgery or cortisone were the only options.

But this physcial therapist would have none of that and just went to work seeing how to make the hurt move around.  Once she did that, we knew what exercise I needed to do to get the pain to go away entirely.  And it did–in a matter of a few weeks.

This second round I did the same wrong thing again–assumed the pain was not in my back.  This time, we moved a lot faster because I didn’t wait so long to get help and was ready to get to work when she said we could fix it.  Hopefully, there will be no next time since as part of this most recent work, she taught me how to localize and then centralize the pain myself.  This stuff works so well it seems like magic to me.

It is way too easy to buy in on the invasive, expensive solutions to common healthcare problems.  Before you do that for leg, back, or hip pain, see what improving your posture will do. (Others have found this also to be true for shoulders and neck.) You might be as pleasantly amazed as I am.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

What words do you want to define your life in 2013? The right ones might make a difference in how things unfold for the next 12 months.

In the last 24 hours, I’ve come upon two different sets of “words to live by.” Both were offered as a way to improve the quality of our time here on earth.

The first set belongs to spiritual author Eckhart Tolle.  His three words are ACCEPTANCE, ENJOYMENT, ENTHUSIASM.  I like those words, even though there’s no catchy acronym for using them.  (“AEE”  sounds like a mouse is loose in the house.)

“Acceptance” is the first step in making life sizzle.  You won’t have a dime’s worth of success–or fun–if what you think you are doing doesn’t mesh with reality.

“Enjoyment” belongs on everyone’s plate, but too often, we assume someone else is supposed to dish it up for us.  What am I going to do to be sure I ENJOY my life?

And “enthusiasm”?  Well, it’s one of my favorite words, trumped only by it’s first cousin, EXUBERANCE.  Let’s hear it for being–and staying–exited!

Accept, enjoy and stay excited.  Sounds like a pretty compact recipe for a good life.  I gotta try that one.  (Again.  This set came from notes I took several years ago. How can I forget such important things so easily!)

The second set of words is from book marketing guru Brian Jud in his December newsletter.  His set has four words.  He offered them in the context of writing and selling books, but they are actually as generic as Tolle’s.  Jud’s set:  DISCOVER, ADAPT, RESPECT, EMPOWER.  (The first letters from his turn cleverly into the word:  DARE.)

He offered the words, but I’m adding my take as I present them here.  (So if you hate what I’m writing here, don’t blame Brian.)  For me, ”discover” means you need to explore what excites you and use that to keep yourself motivated.  Doing what you love is the fastest way to success no matter what you are trying to do.

“Adapt” adds the fact that you need to work within reality  Life is a lot easier if you’re working at coming up with effective ways of dealing with what’s actually going on around you instead of trying to solve what you thought was going on last year–or the year before that.

Third is “respect.”  You need to respect yourself first–and that’s Jud’s point.  But take in farther than that–do what you can to respect everyone and everything.   Respect requires equal parts  of tolerance,  humility and wisdom.  Much as it looks weak, it has great power.  Respecting others builds bridges, spans chasms, and links worlds.

With his last word, “empower”, Jud also points inward, as in “empower yourself.” That is good advice, for sure, but you can gain even more from it by taking this one farther, too.  When you empower others, your effort comes back to create even more energy for yourself.

It really doesn’t make a lot of difference if you use the nouns (ACCEPTANCE, ENJOYMENT, ENTHUSIASM) or the verbs (DISCOVER, ADAPT, RESPECT, EMPOWER).  The real key is in using something.

Much of the time, we rush around just trying to get everything done.  But when you put the daily manic effort in the context of prioritizing that comes from word maps like the two I’ve just described, life can take a calming turn.  They don’t have to be these sets of words.  Maybe those you need are ones you mine on your own.

What are you trying to do with 2013?  Bubble?  Meander?  Forge?  What words energize you when they come to mind?   Giving?  Rest?  Forgiveness?

Instead of New Years Resolutions, maybe it’s time to try a word map.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

Some of us just don’t do Christmas all that well. I am one of those people. It’s not that I can’t relate to “the reason for the season.” I grew up Catholic, went to parochial school grades 1 through 12 and was an ardent believer until things started to unravel in my first marriage. It’s just that I can’t get in a joyful groove about the whole scene now.

I am relieved whenever I discover there’s someone else out there like me. So this is for those of you who may need that same kind of moral support right now.

The reasons for not being able to get with the hype are all over the map. Maybe you’ve lost a loved one recently and can’t bear the idea of living this time of year without him or her. Maybe you aren’t Christian, don’t like Christians, and wish everybody would just go back to work and shut up. Maybe you don’t believe in God in any form and feel left out when we get to this point in the year. Or maybe you’re like me. You just can’t find the spark that will make for a bright six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

Usually, I’m pretty good at creating a spark. My busiest days are my happiest days because I’m doing things I want to do. But every year, after I’ve put the turkey roasting pan back in storage and finished off the pumpkin pie, I start to slide down a sad, scary slope of “why bother?”

I really don’t have a uniquely “Christmasy” answer for that question. I remain committed to faking it in the presence of my grandkids, who are both not yet in school. I can smile sweetly and mingle in good cheer at holiday functions and look pretty convincing. But that horrid question echoes in my head the whole time.

I guess I don’t really need an answer to the question so much as a commitment to ignoring it and getting on with things anyway. Sometimes, life is not set up for what you enjoy most. This is just one of those times for me–and maybe for you.

The thing I want to do differently this year is the guilt trip about what I should be feeling. I am feeling what I’m feeling and that’s that. I don’t have to let it show or make a big deal out of this seasonal depression. I just need to get through this time of year gracefully.  “This too shall pass” (much to the chagrin of the kids and forever-kids).

Doing that might be easier if I found at least one “seasonal” thing that I am actually enjoying every day. So I’m going to see what I can do with that this year.  I can already list a few. I do love the cards and letters from friends I would otherwise have lost track of long ago.

And I love the smell of fresh evergreens, whether it’s a tree, a wreath, or snippets in a table decoration.

The look on little ones’ faces when they see Santa or all the presents under the sparkling tree is definitely a high. And, for some reason, I always choke up if I’m part of a church-full of people singing Silent Night.

Yes, there are warm, happy things about Christmas. I need to focus on those instead of the extra work I take on for myself. (Handmade gifts for all six of my siblings? Oh sure, I can do that! Hosting a holiday party for a group I’m peripherally involved in? Why of course.)

For me, maybe this Christmas depresssion isn’t so much about the holidays that define it on the calendar as the extra work I take on for many not-so-smart reasons.

So…in addition to my resolution to be grateful for things I do enjoy about it, I will do one other thing. Relax and enjoy it and stop assuming it’s all about extra tasks that would probably be better left undone.

This may not be the answer for you, but for me, it’s another shot at the Ho! Ho! Ho! part of “the holidays.” So how about you?  Maybe you could just sit down.  With  a cup of eggnog (with brandy?) even.  There are probably some things you can do to make your own version happier–even if you are already the Grand Poobah of Holiday Cheer.
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more, see her website.

Perfect is for amateurs. Happy people don’t worry about perfection–in themselves, in those they love, in what they experience, in what they acquire. I have spent way too much of my life being this kind of beginner though.  And you probably are doing more of it than you realize.

The expectation that things have to be perfect before we can just enjoy them has deep roots in the way a lot of us were raised.  It may have started as an overly critical parent, but more likely, it came from people who clearly telegraphed that they were on your side–and just trying to help you become the best person you could be.  It’s important to strive for improvement.  That’s an essential piece of living a good life.  But using feedback to do even better than what you did the last time is different than deciding you’re inadequate because what you did the first time wasn’t 100% perfect.

A lot of what we learn growing up becomes outdated or was just plain wrong to begin with.  Our ideas about being perfect are in that category.  My entire family (of nine) considered Mom the font of all knowledge when it came to facts.  We would bring the interesting rocks we found in the wild places to her for identification.  In particular, I relied on her for the names of flowers or weeds. All I needed was to remember what she’d said and I’d be right.

Not really.  I’ve had the chance to dig into gardening on my own for decades now and one of the most important lessons I’ve learned was “Mom was not always right.”

I wish I’d learned that before she died though.  Our mutual dance of expecting ourselves–and each other–to be perfect ruined a lot of good times we could have had together.  Instead of savoring the strong women we were, we kept poking at our own and each other’s imperfections.  This particular dance didn’t even involve a lot of words about the situation.  The expectation of perfection was a given.

Being perfect is a bad trip.  It’s like flying to Hawaii and then sitting in the closet of the condo the whole time you’re there, dwelling on how dark it is.  Expecting other people to be perfect is not good for them, to be sure, but it’s even harder on your own good time.  Yes, sometimes a person uses the argument “I can never do anything right in your eyes” to mask controlling behavior of his/her own that sabotages a relationship.  But if you are expecting perfection from that person (and most likely yourself in the bargain), there’s some painful truth in the lament.

Seeking perfection ruins your enjoyment of what’s already there.  Expecting it in others sends a message that they are not good enough unless they improve.  Every time you find them less than what you think they should be, the chance to enjoy each other’s company erodes.  That’s a highway to loneliness over the long haul.

When you do it with your kids, you set them up for the same dissatisfied life.  If you insist that every detail of what they’ve done be perfect, you teach them that as adults, they must take that same “high road.”  And thus, this most negative of all behaviors gets passed on, often with few words and even less scrutiny.

Perfection is not possible.  Many of us can accept this truth rationally.  Some of us embrace it spiritually.  But a lot of us add, “but I’m going to doing everything I can to be perfect anyway.”  That caveat bleeds into how you see other people’s efforts.  It sets everything you experience up as “not good enough.”  Because you’ve decided you’ve been specially annointed to be perfect, everyone you interact must be perfect as well.

You’re telling yourself you don’t do that, right?  You may want to take a deeper look.  Most of the judgements we pass are attempts to make our own world perfect.  When you take issue with what someone said, did you do it because the comment was really that unbearable?  Or did you decide that the person ”should” be treating you in a more perfect way?

Let go of perfect.  In yourself.  In those you love.  None of us are going to get it all right.  And we certainly aren’t going to get it all right all the time.  Letting go of that expectation can be a massive stress reducer.  It is also one of the best ways you’ll find to get closer to those you love emotionally.

There will be differences that still need to be addressed.  That’s part of living with imperfection.  But your decision about whether to ask for a change in someone else or not needs to be based on whether the current situation is good enough, not on whether it’s “perfect.”

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

Someday someone you love is going to get sick–sick enough to need care.  If you’re the one to take on that role, be ready for an unexpectedly contorted ride.

It’s not just the 24/7 nature of the effort that makes it such demanding work.  Caregiving transports you into an entirely different world.  That carefree, do-what-I-want-when-I-want lifestyle you had weeks before evaporates as you provide needed attention.  Your priorities change.  Your sleep patterns change.  Your means of keeping yourself on an even keel change.  Pretty much everything changes.

In particular, the person you love and for whom you’ve taken on the burden of caregiving changes a lot.  Your wholesome bride of 60 years may start swearing like a sailor as she descends into dementia.  Your big strong hunk of a husband may whine like a four-year old about everything in his life that isn’t fair.  Perhaps the someone who was “always there” for you is barely there at all now.  As you get farther and farther into the commitment, you feel less and less like you are living your own life.

And yet, caregiving can provide some of the most tender moments and incredibly rich love. Holding a hand or fetching a glass of water can be strong statements of a bond that can’t be expressed in words anymore.
But caregiving is also the quickest path to exhaustion you will ever find.  It’s hard to keep your own needs in the picture, but it’s also imperative.

Get Help.  Caregiver burnout is real.  A week of looking after someone else may be doable.  But a month?  A year?  A decade?  It’s wise to get help for anything more than a few weeks and for some of us, more than a few days.
This may be a matter of getting other family members to come in on a regular basis so you can have some time to rediscover yourself.  It may mean taking your loved one to an adult day care facility on a regular basis.  It may mean searching for local resources that provide breaks to long-term caregivers.  Whatever it takes, find a way to get some time for yourself.  And then take it.  Regularly.  (Please note:  A single getaway may leave you feeling more disconnected to yourself than before.)

Some patients are very good about encouraging this.  Some have become so unaware of the needs of others that they will berate you for wanting it.  It doesn’t make any difference.  Find a way to take some time for yourself.
If you can’t take significant time for yourself very often, go on “three minute vacations” several times a day.  Transport yourself mentally and emotionally to a place that’s soothing for you and let yourself experience that place for a few minutes.  Beach… mountains… the mall–imagining yourself somewhere you love really can reduce your stress level.

Watch your health.  Caregiver’s needs fall by the wayside very quickly and that can be catastrophic.  You do not get bonus points for doing the martyr routine—you just get worn out.  And then you get sick or have some sort of accident.

Respect your level of motivation.  You may not want to give up any time at all of what you have left with the patient if you are deeply in love.  But if you ended up as caregiver simply because there was no one else to do it, you’re going to need more frequent breaks and more extensive help.

Know when to quit.  Seek good counsel on when it’s time to admit that you can’t do what needs to be done anymore.  Search your heart for permission to stop carrying the whole load if your health—mental or physical–is deteriorating.  Accepting this fact is extremely difficult.  Setting some benchmarks early on so you know when you’ve come to that bend in the road might help.

It’s just as difficult to know when to stop if your patient is well enough to start caring for him/herself again.  That might involve some resistance.  When you’ve been getting all the attention, it can be hard to move on.  A caregiver may need to become unavailable so the person who’s resisting that step into complete recovery has to do it him or herself.  Or it may mean turning a deaf ear to whining about minor aches and pains.  Sometimes it requires a blunt conversation.

Eventually, you will get your own life back.  When you do, it will be richer.  A stint in the surreal land of caregiving leaves you with a stronger appreciation of your personal freedom, but also with the satisfaction of having handled some hard but important work.

This article initially appeared in the October 2012 issue of  Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold.
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more, see her website.