Kaia Roman - The Joy Plan: How I Took 30 Days to Stop Worrying, Quit Complaining, and Find Ridiculous Happiness

Copyright 2017 by Kaia Roman

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For Kira and Nava, my fiercely joyful role models.

When I grow up, I want to be just like you.

CONTENTS

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

INTRODUCTION

It was cool on that early October day. The afternoon Santa Cruz fog had rolled in and covered our town house in a blanket of gray. But I was sweating. I paced the floor in my small home office, listening with disbelief to the conversation taking place with my business partners over the web conference on my laptop.

Even though I was the only one home that afternoon, I locked the door to my office and drew the curtains closed tight. I needed to somehow block out the world so no one would see my rising shame. The words shut down the company, buyout, and bankrupt sounded as if they were spoken in a dream as white noise began to fill my ears.

Feeling dizzy, I stumbled to my desk and tried to focus on the computer screenbut all I saw was black. The sound in my ears was growing, and I was falling into it. What started as static had become a scream, and I felt it reverberate through my entire being: NOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Not this. Not now. I had put it all on the line, and I had failed. All that time. All that money. And Dan. Oh shit, what would I tell Dan?

Please trust me, this business is going to be a huge success! Within a couple of years, youll never have to work again if you dont want to. I just need you to give me time, I had begged my husband when we first discussed my investing large amounts of time and money into a start-up business.

But now the time had run out, and I had crashed and burned. Dan would not be retiring anytime soon. I would not be making millions of dollars. And I had little to show for my eighteen-hour workdays except for the twenty pounds Id gained from sitting at a computer all day, every day for months on end. The irony of this was not lost on me, since all the work was for a health and wellness company that helped people, among other things, lose weight.

In the days that followed, I numbly signed papers, closed accounts, handed over passwords, and cried in the bathroom. I felt like crawling into bed and not coming out for a year. But that wasnt possible. My two daughters, Kira and Nava, were six and eight years old. I had responsibilities I couldnt escape. So as I went through the motions of my life, I just tried to get through another task, another checklist, so that another day would end.

Ive read that when you have depression, you dont care about anything, and when you have anxiety, you care too much about everything. But what is it called when you have both at the same time?

I felt the anxiety most in my chest, but it was more than a rapid heartbeat. It felt like my lungs were in a vice grip, each gasp for air tinged with panic. My mind was racing on red alert, but rather than having productive thoughts, it only said the same thing over and over again: Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And yet in this state of panic, even as fear prickled my mind, all my body wanted to do was sleep.

While anxiety yanked me upwardpanting, grasping, scratching, clawing for breath, for safety, for answers, for anything but this depression heaved me downward. Sleep, depression said. Perhaps if I could sleep, I would wake to find it was all a dream. Perhaps if I could sleep, I would come up with a solution in the morning. But sleep didnt bring relief, only fitful dreams and waking in more panic. I dreaded the prospect of leaving the bed, even though things werent any better from there. I quickly slipped from being a capable executive leading multinational teams and complex marketing campaigns to an apparition barely capable of taking a shower. Usually ambitious and organized, I was now a shadow of my former self.

From the time I could talk, I had been organizing thingseven if they were my stuffed animalsand taking practical steps to achieve my next plan. I was so good at making plans that I even got paid to make them for other people when I grew up, as a marketing and event planner for businesses and organizations. Throughout my life, each time one of my plans was complete, I would already have another one in place. But when this plan, my grand plan , took a nosedive, I was caught completely off guard, with no backup plan or direction.

Its just a business, some rational voicemine or anotherswould say from time to time. But it wasnt just a business. It was my plan . My plan to create financial security for my family. My plan to free Dan from the job he hated. My plan to make an impactand an incomethat I could be proud of. I had already played it all out in my mind: the companys success, our eventual expansion, my cut of the profits. I was so sure the plan was foolproof. But now I only felt like a fool. And what felt even worse was that I didnt have a plan for what to do next.

Knowing I was desperate for a way to move forward, my friend Niko told me about a concept shed heard recently: you could turn your life around if you made your own joy your top priority for thirty days. Granted, this concept came from a rather supernatural sourcea channeled message from a spiritual teacher that Niko turned to from time to time for inspiration. But with no other ideas and a small buyout that was enough to float me for about a month, I decided to give it a try. Which shows you just how desperate I was: spending a month focusing on my own joy actually seemed like a viable plan for changing my life.

I figured I didnt have to believe in the spiritual aspect of this idea for it to work. I knew enough about brain behavior to understand that my thoughts are formed by neural connections, and those thoughts influence my outlook, my actions, my choices, and eventually my life. Perhaps thirty days of intentional joy was long enough to get my life back on trackeither from the magic of outside forces or from the power I possessed within. If this strategy didnt work, I promised myself I would get a job and go back to contributing to society after thirty days. But if I was going to try it, I was going to give it my best shot.