Dad Attitude: Our Inner Worlds
Guys tend to turn things into competitions. Who knows why we do this. I haven’t devoted much time to teaching my eldest son about winners and losers, and yet he relishes in getting to the front door of our home first, or beating his younger brother to a speed bump in the road when they’re riding bikes. Our competitive natures are just that—built into our biological impulses.
I tend to be more of a scorekeeper, monitoring who’s doing what, for how long, and how they’re doing it. I track my own individual highs and lows a little too closely, and this bothers me. I’d rather re-program this reactive instinct to just find joy instead of points.
It’s not that I can’t find joy. I see it all the time. What I’m in search of is genuine, sustained joy. Happiness at its highest. One of the main challenges, however, is Big Bad Stress. I admit I let it get to me. Big stresses and little stresses. All of it. It piles up sometimes, even multiplies or mutates. I wish my days could be one long happy-breathy meditation, but I get twisted up by the most insignificant !@#$. See, just talking about it agitates me.
So what’s the solution? How do we find joy to combat the storm? We ought to look for the smallest bits. Start with the crumbs first. That kiss from your wife that felt like the first one? Your kids cooperating with you and sending love your way? Your recent win at work? Those new flip-flops you bought on vacation? (Yes, they’re a material object, but don’t you like slipping them on?) All good, joyful things!
The tiniest happy ideas, good thoughts, or sparks about something you own, have accomplished, or wish to do are all the fuel of joy. They keep the happiness engine running, and we men from getting stuck on the small stuff.
Stress will always be there. A caveat: distress will always be there. It’s eustress that we need and must learn to cultivate. Eustress, by definition, is: “a positive form of stress having a beneficial effect on health, motivation, performance, and emotional well-being…” (Miriam-Webster). If we start to use our competitive brains to parse out distress from eustress—keep score of the joys versus the pains—we might become the ultimate winners.
So here’s the challenge. Seek the stressors in your life that make you feel good and keep after them. Log them, store them away. Be able to get back to them with ease. Layer them, enjoy them. Make it a game. A competition. The prize? Your mental wellness.
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Photo by Luca Upper on Unsplash
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