To illustrate, let me tell you what has happened with this blog. As you know, if you’ve been reading, my husband and I have been in the throes of making a big decision. We’ve been a little busy. So it has been harder than usual to find time to write. Also, my brain has been occupied with gnawing on the various pieces of this decision, and not with the usual random assortment of thoughts that I like to share with you. Some of the issues at play in our decision-making are probably of broader interest, but after a while I figured you’d get tired of hearing about my angst. (After a while, I got tired of it myself.) And because the decision has involved some delicate negotiations, I have not felt free to share all of my musings with the big wide world.

The upshot of all of this is that I stopped writing. And immediately started feeling guilty. (I have literally had “blog” on my to-do list for weeks now.) The longer I waited, the worse I felt, until I didn’t even want to think about blogging because it instantly conjured up all these feelings of failure and regret and frustration. Sitting down to write a post stopped being fun, and started to feel like this miserable, looming chore.

But the truth is, of course, that writing a post is as simple and pleasant as it has always been—as I remembered the instant I sat down at the keyboard just now. The hard part was getting over the emotional barrier that I created when I lost my rhythm.

Writer’s block is a well-known phenomenon, but I notice this pattern in just about every arena of my life. I miss a call from a friend I haven’t talked with in a while, and for whatever reason, don’t return the call right away. And then I spend weeks with “call friend” on my mental list, but feel increasingly sheepish about the delay, and decreasingly likely to just pick up the phone. Or I get in a good exercise routine, but then miss a few days, and a few more, and pretty soon I have to start all over again, convincing myself that I really am the kind of person who exercises and that I should just lace up my shoes and go.

In every instance, resuming the lost routine is much easier in practice than it is in my imagination. In fact, it is usually instantly satisfying because it removes the whole mess of guilt I’ve been carrying around. The frustrating part is that although I am fully aware of this pattern, and recognize it as it is happening, I still succumb to it more often than I would care to admit.

What do you do when you lose your stride…in your work, your hobbies, your relationships? Any tricks for getting back in the saddle more gracefully?

A fascinating report from the Pew Research Center recently highlighted just how difficult it is to balance work and motherhood. Among their survey respondents, the majority of working mothers said that their own work-family balance was less than ideal and identified some other model as preferable. And 40% of working moms reported feeling rushed all the time, as opposed to only about a quarter of the overall public. Whether the moms worked part-time or full-time had no impact on how rushed they felt. (Interestingly, working dads and at-home moms were no more harried than everybody else.)

The fact that working motherhood is tough is no news to me, or anyone else I know who’s doing it. But here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough—my life is more joyful and fulfilling right now than I could ever have imagined. When my husband picks me up after work and my daughter catches her first glimpse of me walking toward the car, her whole face shines and she literally dances in her carseat. It is impossible not to be cheered by this welcome at the end of a long day.

My dad said an interesting thing to me recently. It was during a phone call in which I’d been running through the usual litany of daily chaos at our house—deadlines and chores and colds and decisions. He’s retired now, and he said that from his vantage point it’s clear that the stage we’re in now—just establishing our careers, and our family, and our home—is really the most compelling epoch of a lifetime. Other times are more restful, more settled, maybe easier, but never are you more deeply connected to the work of building a life than we are right now.

It’s true. I know what he means, and I feel it. It’s easy for that feeling to get swamped by the tide of everyday details, but I try to pay attention to it. In the midst of the clamor and the mess, I will sometimes pause and notice how happy I really am—how much I laugh these days, and how much hope I have. These moments fill me with gratitude and humility. I hope I can hold onto them, like photographs, to look back on in later years.

Hardship is always easier to talk about than joy, and working motherhood is no exception. It’s not easy to stay afloat in this busy life of ours, and there are times when I gripe about it, but I know just how lucky we are, and I wanted you to know too.

Hat tip: Nataly of WorkIt, Mom! for the Pew study.

But what do you do when confronted with a real whopper of a decision—one whose scale justifies all the angst that you could possibly devote to it?

Welcome to our life right now. We have been offered an opportunity, and we have a decision to make. It will dramatically shape the future of our lives. It is complex, with many variables and many unknowns. It’s exciting and scary, and I am completely at sea. I usually cobble together some combination of logic and intuition to guide me in big decisions, but neither my head nor my gut is serving me well right now.

Rather than spending another evening running mental laps around this issue, I thought it might be helpful to consult the internet and share any useful findings with you. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of info about decision-making out there in the ether. Depending on your preference, you can use complex mathematical functions or a spiritual visioning process, or anything in between.

Here are a few tips that I found helpful for this particular decision. (You will note the prevalence of clichés in this list. As a writer, I am a bit sheepish about this, but as a human being I’m not. Sometimes the most important advice is overlooked because it is too familiar.)

1. Don’t try to do it all—Big decisions often get tangled up with lots of secondary decisions. This gets messy really fast. Trying to anticipate and optimize so many outcomes at once is paralyzing. Keep the focus on the core decision at hand, and gather as much information about that decision as you possibly can. You can figure out all the other stuff later.

2. Imagine the worst case—This is age-old advice, of course, but it’s useful to stop and actually do it. Fear is a driving factor in decision-making, and this exercise helps you factor it out. Often the worst outcome is not nearly as bad as you’d think, and having considered it gives you confidence as you make your choice. (This is especially helpful if you are leaning toward a particular option but hesitating because of fear.)

3. Trust your gut—Research shows that 90% of decision-making is intuitive. Leaders in business, medicine and the military have all acknowledged the importance of intuition in decisions. This is hard for me. I’m a pretty analytical person, but I’ve realized that going through the rational part of my decision-making process often just clears the way for me to discern what my heart is telling me.

4. About that fork in the road—We all know the Yogi Berra-ism: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Partly, of course, this just means that you’ve got to stop dithering and make up your mind. But to me it also implies permission to be bold. I’ve never totally bought into the business about regretting the things you don’t do more than the things you do, but I do believe that you build an interesting life by seizing the opportunities that are presented to you, even if they’re a little scary. Given the choice, I’ll err on the side of adventure every time—but only after I agonize about it first!

I don’t know about you, but when I come apart, I do it with gusto. Here’s a typical scenario:

Something frustrating happens at work–a bad interaction with a coworker, or something I didn’t do as well as I could have, or just a really boring day. Which makes me wonder whether I’m in the right career, and whether I’ve made terrible and irreversible decisions in my education and job choices, and whether I’ll ever excel at anything. I invariably decide that I need to go back to school for something (usually law or business or journalism–varying based on the cause of the funk). I come home cranky and snap at my family, which convinces me that my marriage is stagnating. I despair about whichever issues present themselves in the moment…our finances, the cleanliness of our house, the contents of our refrigerator. Finally, when I’m headed into the home stretch, I get teary about how I’m old and saggy and wrinkly and my new haircut makes me look like Angela Merkel.

And usually, sometime around then, I snap out of it. At least enough to laugh at myself a little. And remember a few things:

1. There’s probably something to it—Convincing myself that I shouldn’t be upset and that there’s no cause to be so blue never works. It’s true that come-aparts do tend to coincide with certain times of the month, but woe unto him who points that out. Hormones and brain chemistry are never the whole story for me. Insufficient sleep and irregular exercise often play a role, but when I really unravel it usually means that things are out of whack outside as well as inside my cranium.

2. It might not be what I think—Here’s the tricky part, though: the root cause of a funk is not always, and maybe even not usually, the thing I’m most fixated on. I can get a major bee in my bonnet about how we need to move to a bigger house, when the real issue is that I need more challenge at work. Or I can get all mopey about how there’s no romance in our marriage anymore when what I really need is to get out more with my friends. It’s totally unpredictable. Also exasperating. Self-awareness is fallible, and even though I recognize this pattern, I can still waste a lot of energy looking at real-estate listings before I figure out what’s actually going on.

3. Now is not the time to fix it—This is the hardest lesson of all for me. With time, I always manage to sift through, figure out what’s really wrong, and make the necessary adjustments. But it is never a good idea to attempt this in the midst of the funk. By the time I’ve reached the Angela Merkel stage I’ve lost all perspective on what’s bothering me and what’s important. But the deeper I get into a funk, the more doggedly I want to fix it right now. I am oh-so-gradually learning to be more patient with myself. Silly movies are good in the middle of a funk. So are backrubs and cups of tea. Discrete, menial projects like organizing the closet are satisfying. Anything to take the mind off until the worst has passed and everything has returned to its usual order. I have found that things are always both brighter and clearer in the morning.

In case you are wondering, I’m not in a funk right now, but I did have a classic one recently. As I watched myself go through all the stages, this post started to take shape in my head. It was kind of fun, actually.

What are your tactics for coping with a funk?

One of my favorites was the instructor whose universal response when approached by students with problems, complaints, and tales of woe, was:

“Put on your hat, drink some water, and look at your map. If you still have a problem, come talk to me again.”

I find myself recalling these words remarkably often. It’s amazing how many of life’s problems disappear when you take a few moments to tend to your basic needs and think about where you are and where you’re headed.