Episode 204: Fall Feelings

Introduction

You’re listening to Live Free Creative, an intentional podcast with practical tips for living your life on purpose. I’m your host Miranda Anderson. And I believe in creativity, adventure, curiosity, and the magic of small moments. I hope that every time you listen, you feel empowered and free to live the life that you want.

Hello there. Welcome back to Live Free Creative podcast. And so happy that you’re here. Today’s episode is Episode 204, Fall Feelings. Do you just feel it already? This is a season of transition. It’s a season of change. It’s a season of letting go and moving forward. 

And in my case, as I am a Winter-challenged individual, I think of Fall as my bridge into hibernation, a time of preparation for my mental health during the long, cold, dark Winter months. It’s a chance for me to gather together my toolbox and consider how I’m going to best make use of the rest and recuperation, that coziness that comes with the end of the year and the beginning of a new year.

Today I wanted to share some thoughts and ideas around Fall Feelings.

Did you know that there’s an actual psychological phenomenon around the Fall season? That transition that you feel as the air starts to cool down and the leaves start to change. It triggers something in your actual brain that then leads to a domino effect of all of the other ways that you might feel around this time.

And so I wanted to dive into that a little bit today, share some thoughts and ideas around Fall Feelings and also some really fun, different ways that you can embrace and celebrate Fall. 

Whether you find yourself being someone who really enjoys it, or someone who might not, there’s lots of different ways to take advantage of the best that it has to offer.

I wanted to start today with a magical adventure moment.

Magical Adventure Moment

We moved to Austin, Texas, in the summer of 2013, I was pregnant. I had two little toddler boys running around my ankles and we were going to settle into this new city and new life. The summer stretched on and we went downtown and swam in the cold, natural Barton Springs. 

We looked for salamanders on the rocks. And then we stopped for snow cones at a snow cone truck nearby. We learned to love breakfast tacos, and I got a thrill out of seeing prickly pair cactus in a lot of the natural landscaping. 

I felt my soul at home in the desert, and as the months turned on and the weather didn’t turn down, I got a little bit curious about what autumn would look like living in Texas.

September turned into October and about mid-October. I decided we are going to go on a leaf hunt. None of the trees nearby, which were sparse to begin with, had started to change colors. And I wondered if this was something we could even expect at all from our new landscape. 

I piled the kids and my big belly into my little Mazda hatchback. This was pre minivan days and we started to drive the windy roads of Texas hill country.

We wound down the canyon-like hills around Lake Travis. We admired the beautiful views of green leaves as far as we could see. These live Oak trees stretching over the landscape. But we didn’t see any Fall foliage.

About 30 or 45 minutes into this Fall leaf peeping drive, I noticed one small specimen that had started to turn red. I wasn’t sure then, and I don’t know now, what type of tree this was that was putting on its brightest Fall display, despite the rest of the Texas desert deciding that it was going to stay the evergreen course.

I pulled over to the side of the road and hurriedly unclipped my toddlers from their car seats so that we could scramble up the side of this little hill and each pluck a little red leaf from the tree. We cheered and did a happy dance to welcome in Fall in this tiny symbolic moment while the whole world wasn’t awash in color, like we had experienced in other cities that we had lived in.

There were sparks of autumn if we went looking for them on the way home. I ducked into a local craft store and picked up a bag of faux autumn leaves, yellows and oranges and reds in different shapes and sizes made out of satin that I could scatter around our backyard when we get home to let the boys play in the leaves.

We celebrated our Fall adventure with hot apple cider and donuts. And I still have one of those red Texas autumn leaves, dry pressed into a book in my bookshelf today.

Main Topic: Fall Feelings

Now let’s talk about Fall Feelings, shall we? What do those look like for you? How do you feel with the approach of Fall? 

The slow closing down of summer, the pools close up, the weather starts to dip. Depending on where you live, this is going to look and feel very different. And if you’re not listening in the Northern Hemisphere, then you’re experiencing the opposite right now, the slow warming up again, as we head into the end of the year.

In most cases, and thanks a lot to social media, Fall is now synonymous with pumpkin spice lattes and sweater weather, apple picking and pumpkin carving, and getting ready for Halloween. 

Some people really love Fall for its own sake. And some simply enjoy the return back to a routine, the cooling down of that hot summer weather, and the ability to reset for a new season.

Psychologists say that there’s a reason that we feel a little bit different during the Fall. And that’s because Fall is a temporal landmark that’s described as something that’s a moment that influences how we see and use time, and that temporal landmarks tend to boost people’s motivation. 

Dr. Madison Sawd has said that temporal landmarks divide life into distinct mental phases. They allow us to put in the past negative experiences and propel with a positive outlook as we look around. In the Fall, we can see a lot of nature–unless you live in Texas, of course–releasing their leaves. The plants slowly go dormant as they’re going to prepare for the Winter ahead.

The trees stop trying to stretch outward and upward, and instead start shedding leaves and branches that no longer will serve them for the upcoming season.

There’s something very real to the season of letting go and change and transition. There’s a George Eliot quote that says “Is not this a true autumn day. Just the still melancholy that I love that makes life and nature harmonize along with the feeling of a fresh start and getting back on track with your schedule.”

I want to mention as well that there can also be a sort of melancholy to Fall, the feelings of loss and grief and letting go that underlie this season in the natural world, as well as in our emotional lives. In fact, as we were getting ready for dinner last night, I was mentioning to Dave, I can’t pinpoint exactly a specific circumstance in my life right now that is contributing to this feeling. But I have just this little bit of heaviness around my emotions. 

I feel a little bit of a sense of grief and sadness that I don’t really know what it’s about. It just might be seasonal. It might be that there’s a combination of changes happening in our lives, in our family lives, even just the kids getting a little bit older and, saying goodbye to another summer and preparing for life changes in my own life as I’m going back to school and shifting around my own schedule and reprioritizing the way that I spend my time and energy.

All of that contributes to the way that we feel. Any of those shifts or changes and especially the letting go can be difficult and can lend to this underlying sense of melancholy. So as we are heading into this season, I want to encourage you to feel all of the Fall Feelings, allow yourself to wade through and process both the sadness and the excitement and anticipation. 

I want to share a few ideas that can help you feel those different Fall Feelings and process through them as you go. 

1. Reorganize

The first one is to consider some reorganization, shedding what no longer serves you. There is a reason that I host my Decluttered Intentional Living workshop during January at the beginning of the actual calendar new year and in September, which is the beginning of this Fall season of renewal. 

Shedding and moving on in this season of reflection is a great time to notice what we have, what we have saved that is no longer serving us, that we’re no longer using and that we can get rid of.

We can work on simplifying and releasing instead of piling on more and more. This is a great time to dig in and clean out closets or our junk drawer cleaning out the back seat of your car or your cabinets. If you’re interested in some guidance during that process, the doors for Decluttered are opened for just another couple days.

And I would love to walk you through these steps over the next six weeks, whether or not you join a guided course, using a little bit of time for reflection on what in your life is serving you that you want to appreciate and maintain. And what right now is no longer serving you that you can consciously release will help you get closer to alignment with the life that you want to be leading.

And Fall is a perfect time for that reflection. 

2. Proper Sleep

The next idea is to allow yourself to get back into a routine with some proper sleep. This is when our days start to get shorter. We’re heading into the sun setting a little bit earlier after those dog days of summer, which means that you may find it a little easier to go to sleep closer to your desired earlier bedtime.

This Fall/Winter season for sleep is so nice, especially in the evenings. It’s not quite as easy in the mornings when you’re trying to wake up and get ready for the day in the dark. Especially if you have young kids. However, being able to set the clock back on bedtime to an earlier, more sustainable timeframe so that even though it’s dark in the morning, you feel rested and ready to wake up and begin the day can feel really great. 

3. Go Outside

And here’s the next idea, it will help with your sleep routine and with getting more sleep as we head into Fall. Going outside more. If you have a hard time with the summer and the heat, now is the perfect time to make up for lost time by going outside on your daily walks, head to a local farm to pick apples or pumpkins, or take your kids on a hike.

Spend time in nature. Getting outside and enjoying the fresh air is a natural way to feel better. If you’re having a little bit of that melancholy that we talked about earlier, it’s also a great way to reset your circadian rhythm so that you are able to sleep better. 

4. Experience Gratitude

My next idea for those Fall Feelings is to encourage you to seek out opportunities to experience gratitude.

Of course, with Thanksgiving, the idea of gratitude is in the air during the Fall anyway. What if you gave it some attention right now? What if you’ve been listening to me for four years telling you that it is absolutely transformational to write down things you’re grateful for every day and you haven’t yet done it.

Today could be your day. 

This week could be your week to pick up a journal, a notebook, an app on your phone, and to start to record the things that you’re grateful for and why. Give thanks for the changes that are occurring in your life, because you know that they will lead you to the learning and progress that is ahead. 

There’s a reason that I talk about gratitude so often on the show and that’s because it is verified by research, the impact that it has on our emotional lives. Gratitude boosts our emotional wellbeing. It’s an antidote to anger. It’s an antidote to overwhelm and stress. 

If you can simply write down or even say aloud the things that you’re grateful for at the end of every day, you will notice a massive transformation in the way that you think.

And one simple practice that we’ve instituted in our own family is to do what we call ‘What Went Well’. We used to do something called roses and thorns or the pits and the peaks. And I decided that I liked what went well better, just an easy way to focus on something good that happened during the day.

And we recognize that there are things that go wrong or that don’t meet our expectations every single day. Of course. And when we reflect on what went well, it trains our brain to focus on the positive, to see things differently. 

So this simple practice starts at the dinner table when we’re all seated and one person asks another–it’s usually me–I ask someone at the table, What went well for you today? And they share a little bit of what went well. And then it’s that person’s turn to ask someone else, until we’ve gone through the whole family and shared just a little positive snippet of gratitude from our day.

Try this super simple exercise with your family and see what happens. 

Other ways to recognize and experience gratitude are to write a thank you note. Who do you appreciate in your life right now? What is something that someone has done for you recently that made an impact that you may not have mentioned back what a positive influence they had? 

Who’s in your corner supporting you right now, or has been in the past? Now could be the right time to write them a note, send it in the mail, give them something tactile to recognize the impact that they’re having. And you will notice a difference in how you feel through the process of writing out and sharing how much you appreciate someone else.

5. Reconnect

Let’s move on to the next idea for Fall Feelings. This is a great time to reconnect with your friends and family, especially if you’ve been on the go during the summer months, as many of us tend to be. 

Maybe you’re feeling a little bit disconnected. Like you weren’t crossing paths because you were out of town or work was especially busy or you were, often at the theme park, whatever it may be.

If you feel there are people that you want to be connected to, that you feel a little distant from right now, Fall is a great time to reconnect. We’re getting back in a little bit of a more standard rhythm, and you can take a little bit of time to reflect on who you would like to invite back into your circle of connection as the weather turns.

And we might not be spending quite as much time in outdoor activities around the neighborhood as we have in the past, being able to really feel connected to other people on an in-home basis is going to be really important for your ability to have a community during the Winter ahead. So now’s a great time to reconnect.

I started a book club about six months ago, and I look forward to sitting down with those women every single month. It’s been such a huge blessing. That might be a fun idea. If you have always wanted to be in a book club and you haven’t started one, I have a whole podcast episode on how to start a book club that I will link in the show notes.

Fall is a great time to get started with some sort of regular social activity that you can plan on to get you through the Winter. 

6. Make Time For Things You Love

Another idea is to make time for things that you love. This is going to be really important. If you happen to be affected by seasonal affective disorder, like I am, then your mental health takes a nosedive during the dark cold, long Winter months.

You can prepare right now so that you can mitigate some of the negative effects of seasonal affective disorder. 

One thing that you can do is to calendar things to look forward to all throughout the Winter. Maybe it’s a weekend vacation, maybe it’s dinner out with your spouse, maybe there’s a fun movie coming out or a theater production.

Even if you’re normally not a person that plans ahead a lot, if you know that you feel a little bit more low energy and a little bit more down during the Winter, take advantage of this Fall season of transition to look ahead and make plans for yourself so that you prepare yourself ahead of time for feeling as well as usual.

Also, as you’re looking ahead at your plans, take note that for a lot of people, Winter is a time of lower energy. Naturally, we follow some of the patterns of the cycles of nature. We are nature. We sometimes forget that we are human beings, organisms that are connected to the natural world in ways that we often forget because of the advancements in technology.

We can spend most of our days inside and we can eat things that don’t look like they were ever growing in any way. 

But we are part of the earth and our bodies respond to the natural seasonal changes that are happening in the outdoors. 

Fall might be the right time to look ahead at what you have coming up during the Winter and to really take inventory of what is absolutely necessary, especially during the holidays.

I’ve done a lot of workshops around the idea of simplifying the holidays. While some of it may feel really fun. But if you’re doing things or planning on things for Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and Hanukkah and the upcoming holiday season that feel overwhelming already, or that you feel a little bit of dread when you think about them, consider allowing yourself to let go of those expectations.

Choose now, before we’re in the middle of it, all the things that you do not want to get caught up in over the holiday season. 

I know that during the Winter is probably not the best time for me to be launching new products, doing a whole lot of really deep creative work, or taking on a bunch of new hobbies and activities.

Winter for me tends to be the season that I want to pull back a little bit, allow myself more time to spend cozy up next to a fire and a hot chocolate and a book. I know that I’m going to yearn for slowness during the Winter, and I can prepare myself now with this Fall feeling to be able to have success with that in the months ahead.

7. Become More Grounded

The last idea I have for you today as you’re embracing your Fall Feelings is to work on being grounded. Summer energy is bold and enthusiastic and flighty and a little bit casual. Fall can ground us and bring us back to our roots. I’m going to share a few ideas from an article on Healthline about how to become more grounded in a moment.

These are actual, tangible ideas that you can use when you’re feeling a little bit out of your body, fighting through memories, or maybe feeling a little anxious or having a little bit of stress or kind of moodiness. These are some things you can do to help you move through those feelings and reground and recenter yourself.

Number one is to put your hands in water. I actually don’t do the dishes very often at home because that is one of my husband’s responsibilities in our house. However, washing my hands, when I do get into scrubbing a dish, there is something about feeling that warm water that brings me back into my body and brings me back into myself.

Number two is to touch items near you and notice them. So I have a glass of water on the table near me as I’m recording. Even just picking this up with intention and noticing the weight of it. It has a little bit of water in it. So it’s a little bit cool thinking of the way that it feels. The way that it looks. Some descriptions of it–the way I would describe it to someone else–can be grounding and bring me back into the present moment.

Number three is to take deep breaths. We talked a few episodes ago about box breathing and that’s something that can really help here as well. Breathing in and pausing and breathing out and noticing the way that it feels. 

Number four is to savor food or drink. Again, it all comes back to noticing, to bring yourself back into your body, actually pay attention to the textures and the flavors and the nuances of the things in your mouth.

Number five is to take a short walk. I’m all about going on a walk–a five minute walk down the block or around the block can bring you back into your body. Notice the rhythm of your footsteps on the pavement. Look around and see the way that the world looks with intention. 

Light a candle, and watch the flame for a few seconds. Just take notice of the way that it flickers and dances. And if it’s a scented candle, close your eyes after you notice the flame and inhale and exhale and notice the way that the scent around the candle starts to change. 

The final idea is to take out a journal and just free write and reflect. This doesn’t have to be a gratitude journal. It can be putting down on paper some of the thoughts and ideas that you have right now, the way that you’re feeling today in this moment.

You don’t have to share it with anyone. You don’t have to try to learn anything from it. You’re just giving yourself some space to come back into your own body and mind and be with yourself.

A Few Literary References

Hopefully one of those grounding technique ideas resonates with you and you can try it out today.

To finish out this episode about Fall Feelings, I thought I would just share a few fun literary references to Fall. There are so many. Fall is definitely a season that poets and writers love to reflect on and share about in their works.

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to read Anne of Green Gables every October. Because of that line, I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It’s been a fun tradition that I’ve had over the last several years. Here are a couple literary quotes about autumn that might help you get into those Fall Feelings:

 

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

 

Stephen King, Salem’s Lot

 

 

That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air … Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.

 

Wallace Stagner, Angle of Repose

 

 

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

 

George Eliot, A Letter to Ms. Lewis.

 

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed this dip into Fall Feelings and that I’ve echoed some of the things that you’re already feeling, and maybe given you some ideas for how to process through this season of transition, how to enjoy all of the upcoming excitement of the holidays without getting overwhelmed, and how to ground yourself in what really matters to you, what you want to maintain as you allow yourself to release things that aren’t serving you anymore.

As I mentioned earlier in the episode, the doors for registration to Decluttered are open just for another couple days when this episode releases. We begin on September 19th, the first lesson unlock, you can listen in, go through the workbook, and then we meet once a week for a Q&A live webinar where we can dive a little bit deeper and also I can answer your questions big and small about the lessons that we’re learning each week. 

This course is really meant to be a guide to help you dive deeper into what matters most to you and how to help you identify habits that you have, that you might not be aware of, that are preventing you from having the balance of energy and money and resources and time that you really hope for.

It helps people overcome overwhelm, feel a little bit more centered and have some more confidence around the way that they want to live individually. Accepting that things that matter to you might not matter to other people and that’s okay. We are here to live our own lives and walk our own path. 

I would love to have you as part of this Fall group of Decluttered. Visit livefreecreative.co and hit the button that says Decluttered to learn more and to sign up.

If you’re joined already, I can’t wait to see you next in our live webinar. If you’re new to Live Free Creative podcast, I want to welcome you and invite you to hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss an episode. 

You are also always encouraged to leave a five star rating and written review at iTunes so other people can find out what this is all about. I hope you have a wonderful week. Enjoy those first Fall Feelings. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.