Last Monday was a public holiday, and I had great plans. This was going to be the weekend when I was going to take advantage of the warm weather with loved ones before the days got chilly, to rest, to take care of leftover household chores from the work week, and… to finally fold the clothes that had been sitting in my laundry basket.
The weekend came… and went, and I noticed myself feeling irritated. It all started when I walked into my bedroom late Monday night, feeling tired, and realized that the long weekend was over and the mountain of clothes still sat untouched in a corner of the room.
From this moment on, that was all I could think about.
- Not the much-needed naps I got to take.
- Not the family dinners.
- Not the slow mornings spent baking.
- Not the tasks I had managed to cross off my to-do list.
No. The only thing on my mind was my grey hamper overflowing with every imaginable piece of clothing, and this thought: “I failed my weekend because I did not fold the clothes”.
I had done something, or rather two things, that I had done countless times before, and that you too may be familiar with:
- I had discounted the positive, effectively reducing every favourable element of my weekend to insignificance, and
- I had done something called mental filtering, whereby I mentally set aside all these positive elements, leaving only the fact that I hadn’t folded my laundry.
Perhaps you have experienced something similar.
Maybe you finally sat down at the end of a long day, and all you could see is what you didn’t accomplish.
You prayed, spent time with family and took care of yourself, but you didn’t complete everything on your to-do list.
You made progress in several areas, but your mind kept returning to the one thing that remains unfinished.
This is why I believe self-compassion comes first.
I can start by telling myself:
“I had expectations for how I wanted the weekend to go, and these expectations were all based on good intentions; I wanted to make sure I folded the laundry so our daily routine could be less stressful and go more smoothly. And when I saw that unfinished task, my mind latched onto it, and I felt irritated because doing my best so that my family can have a good quality of life, insha’Allah, is extremely important to me.”
In the TEAM-CBT approach, which I am certified in, once we’ve shown ourselves self-compassion and identified the distortions in our thoughts, there are several ways to change our unpleasant thoughts so they no longer contain these distortions.
One of them is to ask gentle, probing questions. These are some examples of questions we may ask ourselves:
Am I judging the whole weekend based on one unfinished task?
What are a few positive things that happened during the weekend that I had overlooked and should be grateful to Allah ﷻ for?
If I were a journalist who was objectively covering what I did last weekend, what would I report?
Would I normally consider these positive experiences meaningful, or am I discounting them because of what didn’t get done?
What makes the things that went well “not count”?
If the laundry had been folded, would I suddenly consider the entire weekend a success? Why?
Is it possible for me to have had a wonderful weekend and still have unfinished chores?
What did Allah ﷻ allow me to experience this weekend that I might be taking for granted?
What does my focus on something like laundry show about the blessings of Allah ﷻ upon me?
Once we’ve answered these questions, we can then ask ourselves: How can I change my initial thought (‘I failed my weekend because I did not fold the clothes’) to a positive thought that actually reflects reality?
Update: As I am writing this blog, my pile of laundry has officially doubled in size. But I am happy to report that my irritability is sitting at a 0, Alhamdulillah.
If what I have said is correct, it is from Allah ﷻ; and if it is wrong, then it is from myself and Shayṭān.
As Salaam Aleykum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatouh.