SURVIVING MAY BY FINDING THE "YAY"

Experiment #12

Welcome to all of our new experimenteers! I’m here each week with experiments in breaking up with perfectionism and all-or-nothing achievement culture nonsense, and finding all the good stuff we can in the in-between times of life.

There’s been a lot going on here. ICYMI:

Lots of amazing response to the experiment I published over on

It's Not Too Late

. TBH, this is one of my favorite and most helpful experiments so far!

Out beyond "Killing it" and "I suck" there is a field...

My words were also featured in

Being in Motherhood

about expectations in motherhood. It was a rich conversation there, for sure! Check it out and add your own thoughts!

Our expectations of motherhood

This month I’m keeping my experimenting super simple. Let me know in the comments if you’ll join me in seeking out the Yay’s of May!

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Hi fellow life fumblers and experimenteers!

How is your MAY going so far? Good? Just don’t check your calendar. Bwahahaha.

Last year I wrote a post about Surviving the “Hundred Days” of May. This is what I wrote at this time last year:

Both my kids have at least one 4-hour rehearsal or performance on 12 out of the next 14 days. My daughter has to build a lighthouse out of recycled items found around the house and write a report on it. My son has to complete hundreds of middle school math problems that we can all remember as being tediously useless (rays and diameters and variables, oh my!). My daughter’s birthday is just two weeks away (her expectations are high as ever!), and we are in the final throes of putting together the last details for our first trip abroad as a family. My husband is traveling for work in the midst of an insanely stressful work negotiation. I’ve got pages due to my book coach, invoices to wrap up in my business, and the laundry waits for no one.

We can just copy and paste this list onto the agenda for this May. Just substitute this year’s Bar Mitzvah planning for last year’s travel planning, a “state report shoebox float” for the lighthouse project, and this year’s algebra problems for last year’s rays and diameters. (No stressful work negotiation but yes, husband traveling for work.)

There’s “a lot going on” right now, and It can all feel very stressful.

But you know what’s great about living in 2024? We’ve got SCIENCE.

Science is always here for us! If we’ve got a problem, chances are someone has done a study on it. Anyone want to guesstimate how many results show up when one googles, “research on stress management”?¹

I, personally, have probably consumed at least 385 articles that tell us what we can do to manage stress, most of them saying the exact same things. If I want to “feel less stressed” this month, all I have to do is:

• get enough sleep

• get some daily movement

• drink water

• take breaks from the news

You know, the little things that should be so simple but feel so damn hard sometimes.

But, there’s one more thing Science says we can do to manage stress. Yup, it’s the G word.

“When we express gratitude, our brain releases dopamine and serotonin — two hormones that make us feel lighter and happier inside.” -Harvard Business Review

If you’ve been reading for awhile, you know I sometimes have gratitude issues. You can read more about them here, but the gist is that when I hear, “Be grateful,” my first instinct is to respond with an extremely mature, “You can’t make me!”

I don’t know why I resist the concept of gratitude so hard, but I do know that I love the feeling of excitement. (My commitment to exuberance is, in fact, award-winning! See Davidson Middle School yearbook, 1989 under the designation “Most Spirited”.)

As I thought about it, I realized the feeling of gratitude and appreciation is not that far off from the Yay! feeling I adore cultivating.

So this month, I’m going to experiment with managing stress by finding 100 Yay’s in May.

Yes, I’m cheesy like that. I’m going to practice focusing on the things that light me up this month, instead of dreading the ways I will most certainly fail and fall short.

When my brain runs ahead to all the things I “have to get done”, I’m going to stop and ask myself, “Okay, now find 2 yay’s.” Here’s a sample of yay’s I’ve found so far:

• Walking outside yesterday, no headphones on, feeling the sun warm my face.

• Finding the perfect turn of phrase to express an idea when working on my latest essay.

• The internal ahhh feeling I felt when I flipped my phone to grayscale.

• My husband taking care of dinner. Every. single. night.

• My new desk set-up which overlooks my neighbors’ leafy yards and golden hills in the horizon!

A fun game can be turning life’s Ugh’s into Yay’s. I’ve got multiple backyard parties scheduled at my house for the upcoming month. I’m feeling a little ugh thinking about everything I have to do to “get ready” for them. But can I find a yay here? One is that I feel super fortunate to have this awesome space to host friends! Another yay is imagining all the joy and laughter these parties will bring. Just thinking of this fills my heart, which counterbalances some of the stress, and I’m ready once again to tackle my list.

I’m going to keep adding to my list of Yay’s over in Substack Notes all month. Join me over there, and add some of your own yay’s?

And if you’re a reluctant yay-er, I get it. Finding yay’s doesn’t mean we have to love everything. (I can definitely feel excited about seeing the joy on my kids’ face on her birthday, while still dreading the trip to the party store!)

1. If you guessed 921,000,000 results, you win!