The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (18 page)

“All our lives, my sister and I have watched what we eat, and bonded over our endless diets and exercise routines. Then we get frustrated and pig out. We grew up with this rule: If you blow your diet, you can eat anything you want that day until midnight, but then the next day you try to be healthy again. I know that’s not perfect, but it has been my food psychology over the years.”

Work is the only thing that distracts Lori from her food obsession, so she’s in the office early and late, which leaves her even less time or opportunity for meeting new guys. “Nowadays I work all the time and have lost touch with friends. I start to think: Food is my friend.”

Catherine says Lori’s issues may not be as much about the bathroom as they are about the connections she craves, which she wrongly associates with food. She really wants to connect with people, but the only people she’s connecting with are her family. She even says it: “Food is my friend.” She needs to get into the living room and be more social. She and her sister are close, and if she’s not at the office, she is in the family room, where she grew up (and ate and enjoyed big dinners), and neither place is allowing her to be independent and a sexual being. She knows she’s smart and nice and should be able to find a guy, like her sister did, regardless of her weight. But she can’t.

Lori’s life is very comfortable, so she is resistant to change. Food and family has become a substitute for being with friends, finding a man, and starting her
own
family. She isn’t really in the bathroom (where she beats herself up), or the kitchen (where she is “treating” herself, and food is her friend). She is stuck in the family room, using food and family as a security blanket to keep herself swaddled in the safe space where she doesn’t have to go out and take a risk or eventually grow up.

Why does she allow her size to be her defining feature? She has to shed the safety net—the overdependence on family and food—and get out there and risk being herself. She’s begun to do so by online dating. She may or may not choose to lose the weight to be her true self, but either way it’s not about food and weight. Saying, “I’m too fat to get married” is just an excuse for staying in the bosom of her family.

Lori can’t live in the past, or in the family room, thinking about all those wonderful family dinners. She needs to launch herself out of the cocoon. After all, food isn’t going to abandon her, and neither is her family. The pearl for Lori is that she needs to take risks and not be afraid of what she will find out there. It might even be a husband.

Sitting at a desk working as a tax attorney for the past eight years had taken a toll on Pamela’s body. She was never fat, but one day she realized her hips were spreading and that her “muffin top” was getting harder to lose. Exercise became a necessary evil, so she dragged herself to the gym and started seeing some impressive changes in her body and her energy level.

“I thought about how to make getting in shape more fun and I discovered that trying to push myself to do something a little better than last time worked. So I go for a jog on the treadmill and I think,
Let’s see if I can go a little faster today.
I turn the speed up just a little further or go a little farther. Or I try to lift one slightly heavier weight than the last time. It’s suddenly like a game. I look at another machine and think,
I haven’t tried that one before; let me see if I can do
that.”

In just three months her body got more toned and her clothes fit better. She used to notice herself getting down over little things at work, and now she is able to ignore minor assaults in her emotional office, such as when her boss asks her to work late and she has to cancel dinner with friends. “I actually enjoy being at the gym, and I can tell my mood is improved on the days when I work out. For the rest of the day I just feel better, like I can handle anything because I did this cool thing for my body. So everything else seems less upsetting.”

Catherine says that Pamela is unconsciously creating what is known as a “parallel process,” through which one good event spills over into others and starts to ignite a chain reaction of emotion. So the positive area for her now is the bathroom, since she was able to lose weight and get in shape and that is now creating a ripple effect. Her new confidence is having positive benefits in her office, and she is better able to withstand the stresses of work.

This is how making one room clean can help you tidy up the rest of the house. You feel better and get more done, and that means you have more time for relationships and perhaps even a new romance—all from just starting to work out regularly before the workday begins.

“Someone once told me I always looked sad at work, and I realized this was a problem at my job,” Pamela says now. “Work was what I called a ‘happy-sucker,’ and I knew I had to make an attitude adjustment. Now I don’t let myself get too down about what happens at work anymore since I refuse to connect work to my mood.”

Pamela has a new personal motto, or catchphrase: “‘Up the happy!’ is my little code for cheering myself up, and now I do as much as I can to ‘up the happy’ in my life. This starts with going to the gym and working out, because I realized part of what I loved about lacrosse was actually running around and feeling winded and exhausted afterward.”

So Pamela’s key process is to work out, “up the happy,” and then take that attitude to the office. A recent review of data shows that people with better cardiovascular health (through exercise) have fewer depressive symptoms than the general population. So research backs up what Pamela felt intuitively: Working out made her feel better, look better, and even perform better at work.

Getting regular exercise may be one of the best things a woman can do for herself, since it benefits her wherever she goes. Study after study shows if you’re physically active and fit, your mood will improve, and if your mood is up, you’ll not only have more energy and be more productive, but your success will spill over into every area of your life. The bathroom therefore connects back to the living room (Pamela found a new
social scene at the gym), the office (she’s a rising star at her company), and the bedroom (she’s feeling sexier and more open to dating possibilities). For Pamela, the pearl is “up the happy,” meaning, get up, get going—to the gym, to the park for a jog, or to the pilates studio for a class—and you’ll be happier too.

Liz, a freelance fund-raiser for nonprofits, had a major health scare a few years ago when her husband had a tumor, which turned out to be benign. She believes that even the transient fear of losing him was a wakeup call, which, she says, changed the dynamic for both of them “in terms of how we related to friends, family, jobs, everything. How we view the world basically shifted.” They thought they might not have much time together, and they wanted to spend it in a meaningful way.

“Suddenly we decided to act on ideas and fantasies and everything around us because there was something hanging over our heads. I think it was very positive for us, not that everything wasn’t going well anyway, but it did change the dynamic within our family.”

How she related to others was part of the equation, but the biggest shift was how she chose to fill her days. Liz decided she no longer had time for things she found trivial, like gossip and needy friends who sucked her energy. “I realized that most people bug me and I am happiest with my family, my very best friends, and my sculpting.”

She has friends she plays bridge or tennis with, but she finds she is opting out of more foursomes these days. “I am
so
not interested in the chatter. I don’t care what so-and-so said to her, and what she said back…blah blah, blah. If you tell me gossip I will probably forget it anyhow. I don’t have time for it. Something that really annoys me is when a friend complains, ‘You never answer your phone!’ Doesn’t it occur to them that maybe I don’t want to talk on the phone at this moment?

“I have a new passion, which is sculpting. I go to a studio where there are other artists and the people are so happy to be there, and we all feel so lucky to be able to do what we love. Everyone is so supportive of each other’s work that I feel like it’s a new family, a cocoon of sorts, where it’s safe to be creative.”

Catherine points out that often it is a health scare, even someone else’s, that is finally what it takes to feel totally alive. You suddenly realize that you have been wasting your time with things that don’t matter to you. You can feel dazed or in a rut until something jolts you and makes you realize that your life is passing you by. You suddenly “wake up.” Rather than being a bystander in your life (and letting the gossips and petty annoyances take over your time), you need to take action and be the scriptwriter of your own plot and next chapter.

Here the key process is to take the wheel. You may need to tell your friends they won’t be seeing you as much, since you are spending time on something other than, say, bridge, and that you are working toward a new goal, such as your first art show. If they are truly your friends they will support you and these new interests, even though they miss you.

Liz’s husband’s health scare led her to new places and interests and people. Her world shifted, like after an earthquake, and the landscape now looks different. Liz says her new motto is “Don’t waste time—in any part of my life.” That’s her pearl, and it’s making her happy every day.

Julia has three kids, ages twelve to sixteen, and lives in a beautiful house in a Seattle suburb where most of the women stay at home and raise their children. She knows that caring about her looks is superficial, but she can’t help but feel uneasy when she doesn’t look her best. Plus she feels she has so little to show for herself these days, other than being a great mom. “After my kids go to school I go straight to the gym every day because, whether I’m at my target weight or a little over, the physical activity clears the cobwebs out of my head.”

Julia may need to examine how she is spending her time and why. She is so busy getting her children to school, to dance classes, to soccer practice, and to all the other extracurriculars that she feels like an air traffic controller, keeping everyone on the right path.

She requires that the family gather for dinner every night and “spend an hour, at least, catching up and reconnecting. I insist on it, because otherwise we never get to see each other together. The kids need that family time, and I do too.”

But it doesn’t always happen, because some soccer matches can last till six and then dinner gets delayed and the youngest one has to eat, so she eats alone, and then the homework starts and Julia’s plans for family time are forgotten. “It stresses me out and then I just want to cry because I can’t control how our days are getting away from us.”

Julia also gets anxious when she compares herself to the other moms.
“I feel like all the other mothers are so competitive, and if they say their child is doing something like taking music lessons, then I have to sign my kids up for that too.” That means she is so overbooked that she never has time to pursue her own interests. Not that she has that many—“Honestly, I feel that I am boring, because the only things I really feel passionate about are working out and being a great mother.” Julia is stressed-out, exhausted, and her gym time isn’t making up for all the other ways she’s not taking care of herself. She feels depleted, emotionally and spiritually. When she feels down about her looks she has nothing to fall back on to boost her self-esteem.

“I love the way I feel after I exercise. My stress level goes down, and I think I handle the crap that’s thrown my way a lot better. I know if I haven’t exercised in a day or two then I can feel the way I process things slow down, and it’s not the same.” Julia is doing the right thing for herself by exercising, but it can’t be the only thing she does for herself. It’s as if every other room is full of the needs of others, and her bathroom (aka taking care of her body) is her only sanctuary from the chaos.

Catherine would tell her that her exercise is great, but the rest of her life is out of control—though she’s trying so hard to control things. She is so overbooked with kid duties that she hasn’t set aside enough time for herself. She has to leave the bathroom and get to the kid’s room and say to them, “We are doing too much. Which activities do you want to keep and which do you want to give up?”

Julia should use the same “I need my gym time” mentality to fill in the blanks on:
I need my ___ time
. That could be solo time, to read and reflect and write, or do whatever she loves. It could be a hobby or a passion. She needs to value her inner self as well as her outer self. She is not taking the time to nurture her intellect, her spiritual side, and her emotional life.