What Have You Accomplished Today?

By Marilyn L. Pinsky

That is the question my mother asked me at the end of every day and the question I still ask myself every night.

There’s a ‘to do’ list running on my devices that I look at every hour and I’m either feeling good when I can check things off or unhappy at the end of the day to see I haven’t accomplished what I wanted.

I just started a new one this week called “In the Event of My Death To Do List.” I’m not racing to finish that yet.

I recently read that a morning person, which I am, judges her day by how much she has accomplished by lunchtime. At least that says I’m not the only one out there judging themselves. We are the people who love a snowstorm so bad that there is no choice but to stay home and veg out. We are the ones who look forward to getting a flu that makes us really, really sick so that we can stay in bed and watch TV all day without feeling guilty.

When I retired, I assumed that compulsion would also retire. It didn’t.

So in the category of “maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks,” I came across a class called Triggers, co-taught by a husband and wife team, both therapists — and I signed up hoping to get some answers.

A group of about 15 people, some couples, some singles, were there to learn what causes us to act in ways that doesn’t make us happy.

Not surprisingly, it all goes back to how we were raised as children, which is what made me recall the memory of my mother asking every night “what had I accomplished” that day. So at least I know where that voice in my head comes from. So much of who we are now goes back to our childhood, that at the end of the five classes I wondered how can anyone be sane unless they were raised by wolves?

So triggers. Why do we overreact to certain things people say to us and conversely, why do some things we say trigger strong reactions in others? We learned the top triggers that set most people off are money, time, children, relatives, organization, weight, power and politics. So basically, anything.

Let’s look at a couple where one partner thinks the other is a spendthrift and the other thinks that they’re a cheapskate. In this case the issue is leaving on lights (actually, that’s my issue.) In looking for the cause, probably one person grew up in a family that watched every penny and was taught not to be extravagant and the other in a house that felt money, was to be spent in a ‘seize the day mentality. So if you are the one that grew up in the watch-every-penny house, you can probably figure out why your partner’s habit of never turning out a light bothers you, but you might not realize what a strong trigger that is to both of you until your partner finally yells, “stop telling me to turn out the lights; I’ll turn them out when I want.”

And you’re off to the races.

But by understanding why it bothers you so much to have the lights left on, you can then get to a point of saying to yourself, “is the amount of money spent on the electric bill worth ongoing arguments that can affect the whole relationship?”

An added benefit of examining your triggers is that it can open up a whole conversation of things you each do that bothers the other and work together on figuring out what’s really important.

Triggering is also at work in a broader context. We are going through a difficult time as a country and often find ourselves overreacting to someone who differs from us politically.

My close friend and I are political opposites; because the relationship is so important to us, we find ourselves continually exploring why something the other’s party or candidate says bothers us so much. The fact that we recognize we are triggered but are still able to talk about it, puts it into a safe area for discussion as we can look at it more dispassionately and work at not taking it personally.

And I am so grateful to have this friend in my life. If we expect everyone we come into contact with to have the same beliefs we do, we are really narrowing down our world.

And living in an echo chamber isn’t stimulating for the brain.