When my youngest daughter gets stressed about something I will often start to sing ‘Let It Go’ from the movie Frozen. I’m an awful singer and she’ll roll her eyes at me. Sometimes she even beats me to the punchline, “…And don’t start singing Let It Go… please.”
If it’s a serious topic, I won’t start to sing, but when she is perseverating on a small issue, I let it rip, nice and loud, “Let it go, let it go!” Just that verse, I honestly don’t know the song that well and have always struggled remembering music lyrics.
What’s interesting though is that it’s always easy to give advice like that to others, but not so easy to feed the same advice to yourself.
There is the saying, ‘Death by a thousand paper cuts’ to suggest no one wound that is fatal but rather the accumulation of many wounds that finally leads to your demise. Sometimes stresses and challenges are like that. No one stressor is too big to handle, but not being able to let go of a thousand little stressors feels overwhelming. Or, life just gets busy with many many stressors then one or two slightly bigger stressors get added and it all seems too much. Just those couple issues on their own would be fine, but they add to an accumulation of things you didn’t let go of and suddenly these slightly bigger items seem gigantic.
It’s not easy to let even little things go when they are sitting on your brain. And sometimes you can’t let go of the problem or challenge, you actually have to face it… and that’s the thing that stresses you out. But the time and energy you spend worrying really doesn’t help. So be it a song, exercise, a quote, or even meditation, the trick is not to let the stressors live in your brain rent free. Stress as you deal with them or ‘let it go’ until you can deal with them. Just don’t think avoiding them altogether works. You aren’t actually letting them go, you’re just not letting them accumulate and consume your thinking when you aren’t dealing with them.
And if this was easy, there would be no reason to get this song stuck in your head.
