Do you ever have one of those days where you’re just “off” from the second you wake up? Have you ever had something happen to you in the middle of the day that completely changed your emotional direction? I consider myself to be a fairly emotional woman, and so it doesn’t always take much to turn my mood. The problem I have is that I can’t always change it back. Many times, once something has happened to make me feel sad or worried or stressed I can’t seem to get to higher ground.

I have found that more often than not, it is my own attitude that is creating most of the problem. When I’m feeling dumpy it’s generally because I’m feeling bad about something in my life that I haven’t resolved or completed. Rather than focus my attitude on the positive, I get trapped in thinking about what I haven’t accomplished. In other words, it’s not the initial problem that’s keeping me in a bad mood, it’s my own view point. So, I have been experimenting with different ways of hitting the emotional reset button and once I started trying, I realized that it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it was. Here are some great tips and ideas to try next time you’re feeling stuck in the dumps.

1. Go to the gym. Getting in a good workout helps in more ways than one. Exercise not only releases those famous endorphins which naturally improve your mood, but going to the gym can also have a positive effect on your attitude. After a workout, I leave feeling good about myself because I did something positive for my health. Add to this list it’s ability to relieve stress and increase your energy level and working out becomes even more valuable.
2. Find a Distraction. Distraction can be a great tool. Read a book, watch a movie, read the news or your favorite blog. Call a friend and talk abut something other than your troubles, take a walk, or play ball with your dog. Sometimes all you need is to change your focus for a bit- it can give your brain the break it needs to reset. Once you come back to it, you often realize the situation isn’t nearly as bad as you thought it was.
3. Take a nap. Falling asleep and visiting your dreams for a while is the essential reset button! I find that things that looked hopeless the night before, seem trivial to me the next morning. A good 30 minute nap can have the same effect.
4. Journal. I am a hardcore journal keeper. I have stacks of dusty spirals in my closet. If you’re stuck in a bad mood, try reasoning with yourself. Ask yourself what is bothering you? Why is it so important? What is the worst case scenario, and would your life literally be “over” if that happened? Then ask yourself if spending all your energy being upset or bummed about this one thing is really worth wasting a day of your life. In my opinion, being in a crappy mood makes it impossible to enjoy all the good things around us, so think of it in terms of what you’re giving up just to be in a bad mood.
5. Get Serious. If all else has failed and you are still feeling low, then it’s time to get serious about what’s bothering you. Sometimes there’s a reason the reset button doesn’t work! If it’s something truly important to you then isolate the problem and give it your full attention. Journal about what the issue is and how you feel you can resolve it and feel better. Then, DO IT. Take a mental health day off from work if you need to, but until you look it straight in the eye and tackle it once and for all it is consuming time and energy that you could be putting towards something that brings you joy.

There are a lot of different ways to emotionally reset yourself, and some methods will work better than others for each of us. The important thing I think is to remember that being in a bad mood really energy expenditure that is wasteful! Find out what helps you to reset yourself so that you can enjoy the rest of your day. You’ll be glad you did.

Here are some other places with great ideas:

• Joy to the Planet
  
• Fit Links: Mood Boosters
• 31 Sneaky Mood Boosters
• Take a test and find out about how your mood swings

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OK, so I’ll be the first to admit that I generally shrug off any article involving new ways to fight cancer.  Of course I want to improve my chances of staying cancer free, but frankly these article are too frequent, making them hard to believe and even harder to implement. However, I ran into one today that made me take notice. Apparently, if you drink coffee AND exercise regularly, the combination will help you avoid skin cancer. Seeing as how I am addicted to coffee I am always looking for another reason to continue consuming the stuff; and since I try to go the gym everyday this is one more reason for me to keep it up.  So, thanks my latte! I knew there was a reason I loved you.

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In the past year I have dabbled in online a dating a few times. I know a lot of women who have found it to be a great alternative to the “old fashioned” way of meeting men, and their success prompted me to give it a try. While I went on a few dates, I can’t say that I found it all that helpful. I met one guy who was amazing online, only to find out he was a self-revolving bragger on the first date. Another man I met apparently decided to post a picture of himself from a few years (and a couple hundred pounds) ago. Yikes! Needless to say, I still think it’s a great way to meet people and for some, even Mr. Right.

My online dating experience did teach me something; I learned that the way that I find attraction in another human being has an elemental aspect to it that can’t be identified or realized in the virtual world. There is a certain amount of chemistry through a face-to-face interaction that for me has to come first. The online dates that evolved into real dates always seemed… empty.

For many us, our lives are just too busy to play the dating game. I don’t have the time or the energy to go to a bar on a Friday night and try to weed a couple potential dates from a hoard of drunk and rowdy sports fans. So I’ll admit that online dating provides a great avenue for finding a special someone, even for me. No one can enter the online dating world with reckless abandon however. We must be savvy in the ways of the web! Let’s break it down:

The Good- online dating allows you to weed out the ones that you know instantly won’t work for you. Take the Green Bay Cheese Head, for example. Loves anything and everything revolving around the Packers. His “about me” reveals nothing less than the fact that he enjoys spending all his free time on the couch watching NFL Sunday Ticket. Sweet. This for me, is an easy weed-out; I love football, but I need diversity in my life!!! Then there’s the guy who sounds absolutely amazing, but has clearly pointed out that he is not open-minded enough to consider meeting someone who has children. As much as this is a major bummer sometimes, I am glad that these guys are honest- it saves me a lot of time. That said, with a little perseverance, you eventually have yourself a nice handful of seemingly great guys and you’re on your way to finding something special.

Then there’s the bad, which has sadly been primarily my experience. The bad is weeding out and selecting that one man to go on a real date with, and finding out that he has not sold himself honestly to you online. I suppose everyone does this to a certain extent, but it’s a serious drag when the guy approaching you at the movies appears to have no resemblance to the man you just spent a few weeks of your time getting to know. Does that make me vein? I guess; but it also makes them dishonest and that I just don’t do.

Dare I even discuss the ugly? The “I hope that never happens to me” kinda ugly? I have no personal experiences to share, but we’ve all heard the stories (mostly from our old school very concerned mothers). There’s the married guy, the perv, the felon, and the scam artist; the ugliest part is that these guys can be some of the best at selling themselves online.

I’m not the best at providing advice in the online dating department, so here’s some cool links about online dating and how to improve your chances of getting the good without the rest.

• Here’s a site full of online dating tips.
• Here’s a blog that will help you with online dating and help you keep things going strong in the romance department.
• Looking for the right online dating service? Look no further.
• Smart Divas Online Dating. Need I say more?

As with everything in life, educating yourself first (instead of just jumping into the deep end like I did) can save you a lot of time and possible heartbreak in the online dating world. Best of luck to all who venture for online love!

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Being a working Mother is hard. I don’t know what the percentage of working mothers is anymore, and I don’t know if the numbers are increasing or decreasing. I have heard more and more about working mothers making the switch back to staying at home with their kids (I think that is supercool, by the way). I am a working Mom and given that I am single, I probably always will be. But, as my kids get older (and I get wiser!) I realize how nice it would be to not have to fight to balance raising a family with my career. I constantly feel out of balance to tell you the truth. It seems like a continuous battle because if I’m focusing on one, then I automatically feel that I am not giving the other the attention it requires for true success.

My day entails nothing less than an hour of driving to deliver my kids to their appropriate destinations, work, swimming lessons and soccer, dinner, a walk at the park for the dog, the gym and then HOPEFULLY some downtime. If I stop for a moment to think about it all, I realize that my focus should always be on my children. Always. This means not working more than 40 hours a week when most of the other people at my office work 50; it means using up all my vacation time to stay home with my kids when they’re sick; it means missing important meetings sometimes because my kid’s Halloween parade at school is more important (How can a blue poster board Monster Truck NOT be better than a meeting?). In the end, this translates into missed opportunities for advancement, bonuses and other perks at work. Now, I’ve clearly made my choices and I accept them, but it is hard to be at work some days and know that I can’t necessarily always reap the same rewards that other employees do.

Then there’s the reverse. A huge project is on my plate and so I start bringing work home at night and on the weekends. I may complete the project on-time and I may feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that I contributed to my company, but there’s this underlying feeling of knowing that because of that project I have not spent as much time with my kids as I could have, or that I’ve been particularly grumpy because of too many late nights. I never feel as though I have proper balance. It seems to be one or the other. In doing some research for this post, I realized that I am not alone in this feeling. There are a lot of resources out there about this very subject. I hope in the future to provide posts about finding this balance, or at least happily accepting the unbalance! But for now, I thought I would provide some links of places that I have found helpful.

• Working Mother has a lot of contributing bloggers serving up their best information and advice.
• Job-Mom is all about the balancing act.
• DotMoms promises “Better Babies through Blogging”.
• Self-Made Mom serves up a ton of info and lots of links to other Mom-friendly places on the blogosphere.

These are just a few of my favorite places to go. The balancing act is a fact of life if you’re a working Mom. I suppose its more about attitude than achieving balance. By looking at it that way, we can just consider this “extra” challenge as a daily character-building exercise.

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If someone were to ask me to describe the “ideal woman” by society’s standards, I would say just look on the cover of a magazine. She’s tall, generally skin and bones, perfect skin, flawless hair and makeup, and she’s always wearing the most fashionable outfit. We all know how those women get to be like that. They have a personal nutritionist, their own stylist, and they pay thousands of dollars (or the media outlet taking her picture does) to wear that outfit. And I won’t even get into the airbrushing and graphical editing that goes on. Despite what we know about how much it takes to make a woman look like that, we still spend a sizable amount of our energy trying to “measure up” to that image. We buy into every crash diet we can find, spend money on self tanners and makeup and other expensive girlie gadgets. Many of us will shop and spend ridiculous amounts of money to find clothes that will only be fashionable for a summer.

The thing that bothers me the most about all of this is that it’s not just the magazine or the TV show that promotes this. If it was, it would be simple to tune out the message. There are other aspects of a woman’s life that may not control or market the “standard”, but they certainly support it. Whether it’s to be taken seriously at work or to be allowed in to a new downtown hot spot, a woman feels the pressure from many sides to do everything she can to fit that “perfect girl” image. I call this the Cosmo-girl, because Cosmo-girls truly define this image in my mind. But ask yourself: Is this realistic for me? Is this healthy for me?

There are many of us who feel that this expectation is not only unattainable, it is downright unhealthy. I am one of those people. Partly I am biased though, because I am also one of those women who will never fit that mold no matter how much I try. I am not 5′10″, and I’ll never be a size 1. I don’t have perfect skin, I’m white as a ghost and my idea of a fashionable outfit is a comfortable t-shirt and jeans. I am a single mother, so I can’t afford to even entertain the idea of an outfit that costs $500!

I can maybe laugh about it now because my life is more about making sure I get to the gym and have dinner on the table after work… and there’s no one standing outside my kitchen denying me entry because I’m wearing the wrong brand of clothing. But historically, my life has many times been about “if only”. If only I could wear those jeans, if only I could afford those shoes, if only I could look like that… things would be better or different or easier. What a sad way to spend your energy, right?

It is important to remember that there has to be balance though. While I may feel that the size 1 image is a ridiculous expectation for everyone to meet, its still a positive thing and a health thing to be healthy and fit. A woman can accept that she will never be a size 1, but should still be active and healthy. A woman can and should accept that a $500 outfit is often unrealistic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that she should spend her life wearing paint-covered sweat pants! This is my definition of the anti-Cosmo girl. So what is the distinguishing factor? In my mind, it’s that the Anti-Cosmo girl does all of those things because she cares about herself first. She cares about being healthy, and she wants her outer appearance to match her inner beauty. She is less concerned or maybe even completely unconcerned with status and fitting a particular image. Cosmo-girl types on the other hand, will do whatever it takes regardless of the costs to their own health. I once fasted for 10 days because I was so caught up in my image that I was desperate for immediate change and results. What allows the Anti-Cosmo girl to succeed in her life?  Self-respect and confidence. This is huge, and it escaped me for most of my young life. I couldn’t really find a reason to appreciate myself unless I was accepted by the masses; unless I fit the mold. You can imagine how much torture it was since it was an impossible expectation for me to meet.

So, after many years as a teen and young adult of feeling the pressure, I guess I have tried very hard to fight the societal programming that has waged war against my better judgment inside of myself. I have to be at peace with myself as I am. I find that to be a very difficult thing to do though. Because of the female images we are force-fed on a daily basis, we are all set up from the very beginning to compare. To compare ourselves to every other woman that we see or interact with in our daily lives. Think about it- how often do you size up a woman as she walks by you at the grocery store or mall? Probably more often than you realize. Sometimes we size up a woman who appears to be “better” than us, while other times it is a less than fit woman we stare at to determine if we are “better” than they are. This whole mentality puts us in a state of constant competition.

I have spent many hours in my past at the gym “sizing up” the other women working out alongside of me. It helps to have mirrors, because then you think you might be able to pass judgment without drawing attention to yourself.  And when you inadvertently make eye contact with another woman who is sizing you up at the same time… well you just look away as quickly as you can and hope she didn’t notice.  I will admit I still have trouble fighting this urge. But mostly now, I watch the other women do it to me, to each other and to themselves. I try to remember that the diversity of skin color, size, curves, hair and everything else is what makes us all so great. It is sad to think we’ve reduced ourselves to this; its especially sad when you consider the fact that there is really nothing to be gained from any of it.

Every once in a while you see a woman or know a woman who doesn’t do this. She doesn’t look at anyone else, doesn’t judge, and she seems completely oblivious to the people who are watching her… another Anti-Cosmo girl trait in my opinion. I am always so envious of her, because she is quite obviously content with herself as she is; she has no reason to compare herself or judge herself against others. I strive everyday to be that kind of woman. To free myself from these images that torment me and make me believe- if only for a few seconds- that I’m not making the cut.

I am a work-in-progress. I think we all are. I don’t succeed at this ideal everyday, but I certainly work at it everyday and it seems like a far better way to spend my energy. Here at Goddess I’m hoping to channel that energy into productive discussions about what it means to be a woman, and why there is value in fighting the Cosmo-girl mentality.

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