Do your best. We hear this statement often. And what does it mean? Feeling you did your best should enable you to go to sleep at night feeling fulfilled and satisfied with the activities you engaged in that day. Wanting to do your best encourages you to put forth the effort needed to meet your goals. How do you define your best? The answer depends on your individual goals and gets harder to navigate the more you look outside yourself for the meaning.
Let it hurt, then let it heal. There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad, with being unhappy, or with anger. When you have negative emotions feel them. Don’t push them away, don’t pretend they aren’t there. Acknowledge them, bring awareness to what you’re feeling, get curious …
There is a period, the time of which is different for everyone, where a gap exists between knowing better and doing better. It is when you have taken the step of becoming self-aware of what habits are no longer serving you, or are hindering you from enjoying your life, however you find yourself continuing to fall into the same unhealthy patterns nonetheless.
This gap between knowing better but failing to do better is in part due to our homeostatic impulse. The homeostatic impulse regulates physiological functions from breathing to body temperature. When you try to push yourself out of the familiar patterns you’ve grown accustom to, you face resistance from your mind and body. The mind likes the familiar, even if it makes you miserable. This impulse helped keep our ancestors alive, but today it helps to keep us stuck.
You make active choices during only a small percent of our day, letting your subconscious run the show the rest of the time. When experiencing times of distress, it is even harder for us to make conscious choices, our brains turn to autopilot. We fall back on the things we’ve done in the past, which were often easy but unsustainable short term fixes, instead of consciously choosing habits that leave us feeling good in the long term.
When this gap between knowing better and doing better arises, you may fall into negativity. Often judging and shaming yourself for failing to choose the healthier option. Don’t judge yourself if you fall back into unhealthy coping mechanisms. Judgement and shame are never the answer.
Our tendency to fall back into what’s familiar, even if it’s not what’s best for us is why it’s imperative to make healthy coping habits part of your daily routine. Don’t solely keep healthy habits in your back pocket for when life gets hard. Practice them and strengthen them. This will reinforce the positive consequences of their use. The more practice you have, the more familiar these habits will become. The more familiar the healthy habit, especially when times get rough, the more likely you will turn to it instead of a destructive habit.
It’s important to keep in mind that what “healthy” means is different for everyone. For some people working out is a great stress reliever, others excessively exercise and use it to distract themselves from their emotions. For some people turning to food for comfort causes addictive behavior, for others a couple cookies helps improve their day.
Living a balanced life is a goal many of us are after but there is no one size fits all approach. Determining what works best for you takes time, work, and honesty. What actually leaves you feeling your best? What helps you cope with stressors? What leaves you feeling great about yourself?
If you’re having trouble making changes in your life, here are some things you can do:
[1] “How to Do the Work” by Dr. Nicole LePera.
This dish is seriously delicious! It’s hands down my favorite salad I’ve ever made. It’s simple and easy to throw together for a quick lunch and is perfect to meal prep. It’ll keep you full and satisfied plus it gets those greens in! Brussel sprouts are high in fiber and antioxidants. They help protect against cancer and help with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, and diabetes. This salad will leave you feeling your best!
We go out of the way for the people we love. It’s often how we show them we love and support them. We make extravagant homemade dinners for our families, we pick out the perfect presents for our friends, we buy bagels for our meetings …
Challenge: make a list of the times you have felt genuinely happy or at peace.
This list will remind you that your happiness never came from things looking seemingly perfect on the outside. Your happiness came from being present and open and connected to yourself and to the moment. Let that be a guide as you move forward.
Brianna Wiest talks about this in her book “The Mountain is You.” Have you read it? If you have let’s chat about it! If not, I highly recommend it! It has a lot of great thoughts that will help you become the best version of yourself!
Everything in life is temporary. So when you feel content and satisfied, ground yourself in that feeling. If you’re used to chaos it can be tempting to focus on if or when things may go wrong. Worrying about all the ways your peace can be …
The holidays are a joyful time of year for many but it can also be overwhelming. It’s the season of more. Many times that’s more love, more yummy food, more warmth, more family, more rest. But it’s also more money spent, more parties to attend, more cooking to be done, more conversations to be had, more expectations you want to meet. If you’re feeling overwhelmed and drained it doesn’t mean you’re a grinch, it means you’re human. It’s normal and it happens.
If you are able to step away this holiday season without it having the adverse effect of making you more stressed once it’s time to step back in, that’s great. Keep doing that. But if you find your stepping away is creating more stress than perhaps it’s doing more harm than good. Here’s 7 tips to combat overwhelm this holiday season.
I heard a quote recently, source unknown, that resonated with me, “if I’m too much, go find less.” I’ve been told I’m too much numerous times throughout my life. That I’m too loud, too excitable, don’t know when to stop, too big, too small, too provocative, too shy, too loud, that I try too hard, that I don’t try enough. You name it, I’ve likely been too much of it.
Recently, someone commented that my dog was “too much.” Their intention was not to offend me or my dog, they thought it was a comment made in jest. However, I was triggered. I vehemently defended my dog’s honor. Telling the individual that my perfect puppy was not too much. He was, in fact, perfectly enough.
Whenever you are triggered by something, take it as an opportunity to explore that thing further. Usually, what triggers us is also what we need to heal. The truth is sometimes my dog is excitable. He’s gets hyped up when he sees the people he loves. Sometimes in his excitement he forgets his manners. He’ll jump on you with wet paws, and he loves to lick faces. And although sometimes inconvenient for others, those things are not flaws. They are part of what makes him, him. I love how his face lights up when he sees the people he loves, how his tail wags uncontrollably, how his feet dance in a happy little dance, and how he wants to get as close as possible to us when we come home. That might be seen by some people as too much, some people may not appreciate him jumping up and licking their faces. But these people simply aren’t his people. I, however, am his people. I appreciate and love every part of him. Even when he sometimes forgets his manners in his rush of excitement to see us. Even when he sometimes accidentally scratches me in his rush to say “hi, I’m so happy you’re back.”
And that’s what I wish I would have told my younger self when she was called “too much” of anything. That she was perfectly enough. That the people who didn’t see it that way, simply weren’t her people. And that is okay. That those individuals’ thoughts on her too-much-ness meant everything about them and nothing about her. They could go find less. I did not have to make myself less to keep others comfortable.
We abandon ourselves every day. We say yes when we want to say no. We eat foods low in nutrients when we want to eat healthy. We agree to stay late at work even though we’re tired. We forgo our daily routines that help us …
