I. Naps as a “soft addiction”
I’m into naps these days. It’s a little scary to admit it, especially to people who might not have a chance at siestas themselves, but it’s true. I can blame it on my cat who responds to end-of-lunch sounds by requesting a place to curl up. I am quite good at the blame game. But, in fact, I love naps. Even though after lunch is when I meant to return to the studio, a nap often wins.

Being a trained professional (don’t try this at home, kids), I certainly know how to handle any wisps of guilt about sleeping during the day. And I might have gone on enjoying my literal catnaps if there wasn’t this tiny nagging glimmer that maybe they also served to avoid whatever was next in my creative work.

This is a very delicate bit of discernment. In fact, a friend of mine admitted he too had discovered naps after lunch but for him, the resolution was to work out guilt about resting at all. It also turns out that after lunch is a very good time to sleep because of a normal drop in body temperature (see books below). For me the suspicion that naps were a kind of avoiding invited exploration…avoiding what ????

I watched for a few weeks and discovered first that if I had boring paperwork to do after lunch, I was perfectly fine about procrastinating until after either a nap or a dose of escape reading. If I’d intended to head for the studio, though, it didn’t seem to matter what stage of creative work I was in. It could be enticing color decisions, the meditative rhythm of laying down patterns, or the boring business of measurements. That lure of sleeping first, just a bit, crept right in.

It was only after carefully tracking my visual imagination at the choice point that I caught the avoidance. I’d picture re-entering the studio to work and noticed my inner movie was dull, the colors grayed out, and the end product was blurred either because it was still unknown or, if close to done, paled in comparison to what I’d like the world to see. It was like I’d shone a heavy spotlight on the work leaving it drained of nuance like overexposed film.

Yuck. Let’s take a nap.

I still have little idea of the details of how or why this happens but now recognize that some large group of inner critics looks over my shoulder, sees only lackluster work, and convinces me to "forget it, why bother."

Thanks for joining me in this journaling. I’ve now hung a favorite fiber art dancing doll at the entry point of my studio who let’s go exuberantly of critical thinking. Above her is a sign: “Who knows?”

Definitely not my inner critics.
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II. Energy Management: Translations from the Psych Research Lab, the Board Room and the Shrink’s Couch  
If you’re interested in looking at your own use of “break” times and better discerning which are nurturing and which are avoiding, you can benefit from Judith Wright’s book on “soft addictions” (see below). The idea is similar to Jennifer Louden’s “shadow comforts” whose comfort queen work I wrote about last month.* We have many ways of denial, avoiding, and consuming that have left the dock of conscious choice and become so habitual that they are not longer choices at all but automatic behaviors that we just get used to.

Because soft addictions are socially acceptable and pervasive in our culture, it’s hard to even focus on some of them. They include various way we use up time and energy without actually choosing - media, computer games, online, catalog and store shopping, moods that are reactive (I'm cool) and troublesome areas of life we tolerate or avoid.

"Living in clutter” is a state that many people learn to tolerate; it is often a major, but unrecognized energy drain. (see Richardson under books, below). When one of my clients realized the drain, she said it was like “trying to live with a cloud of gnats flying around my head”. Her breakthrough came with a major purging of her clothes closet and brought her undreamed amounts of reclaimed energy.

A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision and a task are the hope of the world. ~ from a church in Sussex, England, c. 1730; quoted in Wright, Judith. There Must Be MORE Than This.

Identifying these background patterns of our lives underlines how we often give away control over more of our life than we meant to. The truth is that each of us makes these choices and they extend to how we deal with making changes in our lives. It is only be discernment and honesty that we can tell when it’s a planned nurturing break or needed fresh start or when it’s a way to avoid the harder work of digging in.
*See September 04 Newsletter (www.dianereardon.com/nlarch9-04.htm)
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III. Friends in Print: When you feel like reading
Click on amazon link for book details and to support breakTHROUGHArts.

Wright, Judith. There Must Be MORE Than This: Finding more life, love, and meaning by overcoming your soft addictions. 2003.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767913396/breakthroug00-20
Be warned that simply reading about the benefits of freedom from “seemingly harmless habits that keep you from the life you want” may change you. It may result in fewer episodes of channel surfing, compulsive consuming, overwork, gambling, computer games, and, of course, sleeping. Like all self-help books, you can skim it and get the concepts or actually do her well-honed written exercises and reap the benefits.

Richardson, Cheryl. Take Time for Your Life. A Personal Coach’s Seven-Step Program for Creating the Life You Want. 1999.
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767902076/breakthroug00-20
This is one of the better guides to positive changes by subtracting from our lives rather than adding to them. Her checklists of energy drains are useful even though they mix specific items with those that are more generally applicable; for example, “I am not computer literate and it gets in the way of my productivity.”

Smolensky, Michael. The Body Clock Guide to Better Health: How to Use Your Body’s Natural Clock to Fight Illness and Achieve Maximum Health. 2001.  
www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805056629/breakthroug00-20
A detailed guide full of tips to fine-tune your own bodily rhythms.
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IV. Creative Links.
www.theremustbemore.com  A full-service site with many tools for both enriching your life and working with your soft addictions.

www.cherylrichardson.com Access to the various writings by this personal coach including a weekly newsletter and an on-line community.
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V. Newsletter Info 
E-mail changes. To change your e-mail address, subscribe, or unsubscribe please e-mail connect@dianereardon.com. If you use a spam filter, please add this e-mail address to your list of approved senders. This material is included on the breakTHROUGH Creativity Coaching website (www.dianereardon.com). All material is copyrighted ©, 30 September 2004, Diane Reardon. All rights reserved. Visit the website for back issues and details on scheduling a complimentary one-hour coaching session.
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