What to Do When You’re Dreading Your Own Life
When the life you chose starts to feel heavy, and what that feeling might actually mean
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Even before I experienced many years of dark and sticky mental health struggles, faced clinically suppressed fertility head-on while actively trying to conceive, eventually went on to become the parent of two disabled (special needs and autistic) children, and suffered a nearly complete loss of my sense of identity, there have been seasons during which I would wake up and soon after begin to sense a low and steady dread about the day ahead of me. And this still occasionally happens today.
There isn’t an accompanying panic. A crisis is also no companion to this form of dread… There isn’t even a dramatic desire to just make myself disappear… Just a quietly persistent heaviness weighing me down with its massive load.
There are the dishes, the emails, the requests, the small negotiations, the noise, and the invisible checklist of To-Do items always running many steps ahead of me before I can even leave the bedroom.
And the strangest part about this whole ordeal is that I generally DO love my life.
That goes to say that I feel a deep contentment. I adore my family. I’m grateful for what all we’ve managed to build together as a unit. I intentionally chose this lifestyle rhythm, after all. I wanted this.
So then why does it still sometimes feel as if I’m bracing myself for it?..
If you have ever felt anything similar, like feeling as though you’re dreading a life you consciously chose for yourself, know something immediately:
None of that means that you made the wrong life choices along the way.
It doesn’t mean that you’re an ungrateful person. Or that you must secretly want to burn it all down to cinders. Because sometimes, the dread you feel isn’t actually an accurate reflection of your life. It’s indicates much, much more about the way that you’re living inside of that life…
And before we can rush on to approach just how to “fix” anything about this fact, let’s slow down long enough together to understand what this feeling might actually be trying to communicate to us.
What Dread Actually Signals
As you can imagine, dread is rarely an isolated random occurance. This all-too-human sensation is actually valuable information to us. Often it is a nervous system whisper before it can emerge as our literal scream.
Whenever I’ve traced my own bouts of dread back to their source, I’ve discovered that it has hardly ever been truly about desiring a different family, another partner, or even a completely different life path. It has usually been one of the following:
Constant overstimulation
A lack of solitude
Carrying around too much invisible labor
Suppressed resentment
No margin built into my day
Becoming only one role
Dread can build up slowly inside of us when there’s insufficient room for us to land inside of our own lives… When every day you live already feels spoken for, when you can’t even hear yourself think, and when you haven’t had a single private thought that wasn’t interrupted.
It is very possible for one to be both deeply committed to his or her own life and still somehow feel inside of themselves as though they are disappearing inside of it.
And that quiet, gradual, and barely even noticeable at first disappearance of a person is actually what your feelings of dread are reacting to.
You’re not necessarily longing for a whole new life. You may only be longing for more space within the one you have already.
Five Gentle Things to Do When You Feel Dread
Not dramatic interventions or entire life overhauls. Just small, sustainable shifts that create more breathing room.
1. Shrink the Day
When the full weight of your life feels like too much to carry all at once, the most quiet, yet radical, thing you can do at that time is to resist your urge to solve all of it, and then ask yourself: “What would make today even 10% softer than yesterday?”
Maybe that looks like canceling the optional commitment you said “Yes” to out of a feeling of obligation. Maybe preparing dinner becomes something much simpler than what you had originally planned (and you then release yourself from the pressure of having planned it that way). Maybe you allow your home look lived-in for the day (or two weeks) because it IS, and you decide that this is enough for right now.
Dread has a way of expanding to fill all available space with its pressure... And when we soften just one edge of one single day, we interrupt that cycle, even just briefly. You are not being asked to redesign your whole life this week. You are being invited to locate just one small pocket of relief and to climb inside of it, even if only for a moment.
2. Create One Private Ritual
(I love this one.) Something that belongs entirely and only to you. Take ten quiet minutes alone with your coffee or tea before anyone else in the house wakes up. Go on a brief walk around without your mobile device waiting to buzz inside of your pocket. Allow yourself to experience a few extra minutes sitting alone in your parked car before going inside your house. Write down three exquisitely unfiltered sentences into a notebook that no one else will ever read…
This ritual doesn’t need to be “impressive”. It doesn’t even need to make sense to anyone outside of you.
Our private rituals do something that nothing else quite can: They restore our felt sense of identity. They are small, but consistent, reminders that you and I are full and separate people, and not merely a fixture that the people around us rely on daily. When every single part of your day is shared or managed or monitored in some way, even the smallest privacy can begin to feel genuinely radical... You don’t require hours carved out of your schedule to begin feeling this way. You only need the consistency of returning to something that is yours.
3. Audit the Invisible Load
SO much of our dread quietly accumulates in the things left unspoken in our lives... In all of the things we hold inside (that no one ever officially assigned to us), and that we have never even said out loud or been acknowledged for carrying.
Try making a list, not of what all you have managed to accomplish in the day, but of everything you are currently holding inside your mind… The medical and therapy appointments, those emotional temperature checks you quietly run on everyone within the househould except for yourself, the constant future planning, the birthdays you remember so no one else has to, the way you’re troubleshooting problems that haven’t even occured yet…
Write ALL of it down. And then, with as much honesty and compassion as you can come up with, ask yourself the following questions I learned to survey myself with as a solo online business owner: What on this list can be delegated to someone else? What can actually be delayed without any real consequence? And what, if you gave yourself the permission to, can simply be dropped altogether?..
You may not be able to offload everything. But the act of just naming it out loud, even just to yourself or onto paper, is a form of validation itself. Sometimes dread is nothing more than our body’s response to carrying around a huge invisible weight for too long without a moment of acknowledgment.
4. Add One Drop of Aliveness
Not one more item from a productivity list. Not an entire personal-development project, either. But actual… ..aliveness. That’s the only word that fits what I mean here.
Read one page of the book that has been sitting on your nightstand long enough to collect dust by now. Play the song that somehow still makes you feel like yourself (that version of yourself that exists underneath all of the roles you inhabit, at least). Reach out to a real friend whose presence feels like oxygen to you rather than pressure. Step outside for a few minutes and let the sun touch your body without also forming tomorrow’s To-Do list in the back of your mind.
We sometimes have the tendency, those of us who are tired in our bones and very heavy, to consider productivity as a cure. But dread is hardly ever resolved through this sort of optimization. It IS gently eased through the introduction of incremental degrees of vitality. And the beautiful thing about this vitality is that it does not require bold moves on our part. Small doses, when offered consistently, can genuinely count.
5. Let Yourself Tell the Truth (On Paper)
There is something quietly powerful about finally writing down the things you have not been able to say out loud to anyone else…
So, sit with yourself and try asking:
“What am I tired of pretending doesn’t bother me?.. Where do I consistently feel unseen, even by the people who love me? What would real relief look like for me during this week? And what parts of me haven’t had real space to exist lately?..”
You are NOT looking for polished or even coherent answers here. You are only looking for honesty… the quiet, unguarded kind.
… And gratitude… IS a genuinely beautiful practice...
…I believe in it fully. But gratitude that is forced to sit on top of our active feelings of resentment towards our life doesn’t actually function as true gratitude... Over time, this becomes our suppression. And suppression is unsurprisingly one of the primary ways that dread finds its way back into our mornings to begin with... When we give Truth even just a small amount of room to breathe, dread begins to slowly and mercifully soften.
What Not to Do:
When you are tired and depleted from carrying much more than you should, there is a very human temptation in us to make the heaviness mean something enormous and permanent about ourselves and our lives: “I chose wrong. I have wasted years of my life. I need to burn everything down and start over from the beginning.”
I gently ask that you pause right there.
Exhaustion is not an accurate narrator. It distorts our perspectives in significant ways by narrowing our frame of vision until everything we are looking at appears fixed and immoveable when often, it isn’t.
But don’t ever shame yourself into performing gratitude over your feelings that are asking for something different from you... Don’t attempt to optimize your way out of what is actually a nervous system signal asking for rest. And please don’t make any general and permanent decisions about your life from inside the very middle of a season of depletion.
Dread is not a moral failure of ours. It is not proof that you are an ungrateful or weak person, or that you have gotten your life all wrong along the way... It IS feedback. It IS your body and your nervous system asking in the ways that they know how to, for some form of reset.
A Different Reframe
What if the Thing you are currently dreading isn’t actually your life?..
What if it’s the pace of it instead? The noise inside of it. The lack of any margin within it. The way that you have become so constantly and completely accessible to everyone and everything around you that YOU have lost access to yourself in the process?..
What if the life you’ve built doesn’t need any reinvention… but only to be inhabited differently?
Intentional living is about becoming more present inside the life that exists for us already... And our real, embodied presence requires space... It needs space for you to feel what you actually feel, to think a thought from beginning to end without interruption, and to want something for yourself without the immediate reflex to label that desire as selfish or undeserved.
You can love your life and still need it to change in some way. You can be deeply grateful and also overwhelmed, and have both of those things be completely true at the same time. You can be fully committed to the life you chose and still be exhausted by the weight of living it. Ask me how I might know…These are not contradictions. They are among the most honest signs that you are a human being paying attention…
So, just soften ONE edge today.
That is genuinely enough.
With love and a little more breathing room,
If you actually wrote down everything that you’re currently holding inside mentally (not what you DID, but what you’re carrying) what do you think would surprise you most about that list?..
What would it look like, practically, to soften just ONE edge of your week?..
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