The dread-o-meter
Why are you making such a big deal out of something so small? (National Library of Medicine)
I remember being jealous of my cat.
There I was in high school, faced with the misery of having to write a research paper.
Meanwhile, all Kitty had to do was curl up in a fluffy orange ball and look cute. She could sleep whenever she wanted to and relax the rest of the time. It wasn’t fair at all.
Luckily, the horrors I faced as a result of my tenth grade English class were temporary and I pretty much liked my life the rest of the time. But whenever I was jealous of my cat, I knew that I had gotten off track.
Whereas there are things I could have done to make the experience of planning and writing a research paper less stressful, I believe that dread is a useful metric.
There are times when we must push through the dread to do the activity anyway, but the dread can tell us a lot about ourselves and guide us toward a life that we are better suited to.
Dread is distinct from worry, anxiety, and lack of enthusiasm. It’s deeper and more visceral, and often apparently irrational. It might show up when you have a perfectly reasonable, normal agenda that nonetheless triggers that sense of a black cloud on the horizon. Your negative feelings are disproportionate to the benign upcoming event stimulating them.
If you have an aversion to hard work in general, then your dread of that doesn’t mean much. However, what’s left over once you become an adult with a healthy acceptance of the duties you must fulfill? What’s most illuminating are the moments when the dread-o-meter spikes in apprehension of something that you or others might ordinarily rate as neutral or even positive. We can’t always change our path in response, but we should definitely take note.
There is plenty of routine dread that I hand-wave away because I’m used to feeling it. Some of the triggers: Attending any event requiring me to dress up and/or bring a dish to share. Most Zoom calls. Cleaning up after dinner. Outdoor exercise on a blustery day. These all fall into the category of, “You’ll be glad you did it,” so I’ve learned to accept the dread and keep going until I get to the other side.
However, when I dread something I used to love or that I had once been excited about, that’s significant.
When I dreaded my own wedding (for a marriage that is now over), I should have paid attention.
I dreaded performing as a singer/songwriter so much that my dread would ruin several days leading up to each performance. From the hours of practice to fine-tuning my set list to schlepping the gear, every aspect of the work became a joyless ordeal. I was trying to force myself into a role that I did not belong in.
I began to dread teaching music lessons after seven years of doing it full-time. It turned out to be a signal that I was ready to pursue a new direction.
And as much as I liked my job at The Little Middle School, the commute filled me with such dread that I ended up moving a thousand miles away in order to escape it.
To push through dread is to ignore the valuable information that our emotions can provide to us. In each case above, my intuition was telling me that I was ready to make some changes to my life. These changes were inconvenient, but eventually I couldn’t ignore the pain anymore.
If you’re feeling dread around something that you “should” enjoy or accept — and you’re not just balking at the idea of having obligations in general, as I so often do — it might be an important clue about what you value, who you are, and where your strengths lie.
It might feel virtuous to disregard these negative feelings, but if we make a habit of doing that, we begin to cut ourselves off from our intuition and lose touch with what we want. Our preferences matter, even when they can’t be rationally explained.
Sure, there are times when you’ll talk yourself through your dread and go through with the thing anyway (“You’ll be glad to have the salad, but you’re gonna have to make the salad”). But other times, you might take note and adapt (“Last Thanksgiving at my mother’s house, was a disaster, so...maybe I could do something else this year”). Your dread-o-meter is speaking up, and it’s worth listening to. You never know how you might grow as a result.
