You don’t need to “solve it all” right now

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When I’m PMS’ing, I’m extremely emotional and often overcome with the belief that I need to “solve everything”.

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I wake up thinking, “How have I let my life spiral this far out of control?! I have to fix all my relationships!!”

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And then when my period is over I look back and think...

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WTF was I thinking? My life is great. Why was I so upset again?

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There are actually very few situations in life that require immediate attention.

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Though we may be led to believe that we need to “put out the fire” right away, most things actually tend to fizzle out without much involvement from us. In fact, jumping in to fight a fire often just heaps on the gasoline.

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I’m a problem solver naturally. I’m a “doer”. I hate procrastination. I like to check things off lists. I hate lingering awkwardness and hard feelings. I hate feeling like there’s “something I’ll have to deal with” in the future.

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But the fact is that in this life, things are rarely black and white.

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There’s a lot of gray.

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Though I hate simmering in the discomfort, though my instinct is to wrap everything up in a tidy bow, if I jump ahead to a solution all the time, I wind up missing the valuable lesson contained in the tension.

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The only method I’ve discovered to get me through these moments- to force myself to remain in the emotional discomfort of an unresolved issue rather than to prematurely “solve it”- is to provide myself PHYSICAL comfort. Drinking tea, soft clothes, taking a bath, moving slow.

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Particularly when I’m about to get my period, I try to remind myself that I’m allowed to check out a bit. That the world doesn’t rely on me to hold it together.

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It doesn’t always work. But at least it’s something.

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Am I alone in this PMS-motivated drive to “fix everything”? How do you feel when those hormones drop?