Regaining Agency Over One’s Life & Health
By: Dr. Peter Rawlek
What a time we are coming out of. You may have recognized that many friends and colleagues are not in the best state right now. You, yourself may be feeling a little shell shocked. A little out of sorts. Life is not recognizable. Actually, it is completely different. There’s little one feels comfortable to anchor one’s life on to these days.
As a physician, it has been a bipolar experience of extremes for us in emergency medicine as well...
This is a time to share a secret. And this secret should be shared.
We have a colleague we work with at GoGetFit. She is religious about one thing. Establishing routines. She often refers to it as “taking back control.”
I have watched over the years. She is not enamoured with winter, actually she simply does not like it. How does she take back control? Every morning she goes out for a walk. -20, out walking. -30 out walking. -40… Ok, there are limits, but on a few occasions she still went out for a walk in -40, but more commonly not. My point is she practices something we should all consider at this time. Taking back control.
The taking back control is called in psychology terms the “regaining of agency over one’s life.” What is that? How do I do it? And how to be successful?
Regaining Agency Over One’s Life & Health
What is that?
To have to regain something we have to first lose it. There is fair agreement that we have somewhat lost control over our lives recently. And… we need to regain some control.
How to do it?
Imagine a pond. Plate like. Nothing but reflections. This is your day some days, maybe most days. If the pond is a day in the life, how do we start to build back control in this pond of life? It is about the little things and the ripple effect they have throughout the rest of the day. Like dropping a pebble in the middle of that pond, creating an ever so small wave, a ripple that travels throughout that pond, the ripple effect that goes from end to end.
In similar fashion, there is a ripple effect that travels throughout ones day from an action one might organize, schedule and do… that has a ripple effect having introduced it and the doing of it.
So, the how to do it, has three pieces to it being impactful:
Organize an activity
Schedule that activity
Do it
AND log it ... so you can recognize you did it…
And How to be Successful?
Nice thing is you can do this every day. My suggestion is to schedule anything active. Invite your friends to do the same thing on their own time. We will support them if they want to sign up. It is free and we enjoy making things happen
Thank you, Kerri for being such an inspiration to all of us.
