Winding down the summer tends to be a little bit of a mixed bag, emotion-wise. Summer and all its attendant busy-ness is coming to an end, which can be a big letdown or a big relief (or both, honestly). If you or someone close to you is starting a new school year, there can be excitement or nervousness or anticipation. How do you feel about sweater weather? Pumpkin spice lattes? Add in whatever your feelings are about the current state of the pandemic, and you’ve got a complicated mix bubbling away.

As humans, we’re really not very good at predicting what’s going to make us happy (even though we’re all sure we have a few ideas about it!). We build something up in our minds, idealizing how good it’s going to be and giving ourselves an endorphin and neurotransmitter high that crashes us physically as well as mentally if or when things don’t turn out as expected. We create these expectations as a form of control over our environment, when really it turns out that the only thing we can control is our reactions – and not even that, as much as we might like.

“2020” is a period of time, a divider between what my son calls “The Before Times” and whatever stage we’re in right now; it’s a noun, a verb, and the punchline to endless jokes and memes. I suspect that quite a few of us thought that things would somehow feel different or get better as soon as the calendar flipped to 2021, and I know I’m not alone when I say that I thought we’d collectively be a little closer to normal by now. Sometimes this year feels like a marathon in which the finish line keeps moving – we could all just get through it okay if we knew when it would be done, but we can’t figure out how to pace ourselves or take water breaks. 

So how do you start the season of gratitude and abundance when it feels so much is out of our control?

1. Appreciate yourself, you awesome person! Any mental health professional can attest that trauma doesn’t go away just because you’re ignoring it. Literally every person is the world is experiencing some kind of upheaval, and pretending that you can have your non-pandemic levels of energy, focus, productivity, and so on isn’t realistic. Be gentle to yourself and appreciate the ways in which you’ve gotten through this so far, however imperfect it may feel right now. Make a list of all the ways you’ve coped, taken care of others, improvised, and otherwise gotten through the last year.
2. Work on acceptance. There’s so much that’s just plain out of our control right now, including seemingly-simple things like make dinner plans in advance. It’s unsettling for a lot of people to feel they have no idea what’s around the corner and be unable to plan for it (and if it’s a relief to be able to just go with the flow, you might feel you can’t actually say that out loud). But if this is what passes for normal right now, you need to come to some sort of peace with it.

Some acceptance strategies include voicing your feelings without acting upon them and giving yourself permission to not do something as well as you ordinarily expect. Consider whether you would have the same expectations of another person and adjust your self-talk accordingly. Complete a finite project to give yourself a sense of closure (I’ve cleaned out a lot of closets this year!).

3. Practice self-care. This can mean a lot of things, from a meditation practice or reconnecting with nature to setting healthy boundaries with other people or being more mindful about the ways you consume information. I’ve found it helpful to use a mood tracker app to better see connections between my sleep and my mood, or the activities I do that make me feel happy; it’s helped me see that when I’m having a rough day, I need to change up my physical environment in some way – moving my computer to a different room, taking a shower, changing my playlist, or otherwise altering my surroundings.