Can you recognize whereabouts you are on this stress curve? 🙄
If you are on the right side of the curve, then here is a little something to help you shift gears.
Moving away from exhaustion, anxiety, panic, or breakdown, and back into that sweet spot of sunny yellow productivity, (aka - the place where the magic happens) means being able to chase your dreams with gusto and passion and still have enough energy left to have fun at the end of your day! Here I am uncovering the magic formula for maintaining those optimum stress levels, as well as a wonderful short audio exercise, to practice stilling the mind, through the enjoyment of your senses. Why not practice switching off that troubling inner dialogue and "mind chatter" that has been stressing you out. 🤯 ✨The Magic Formula For Optimum Stress Levels = Self-Care + Self-Awareness+ Boundaries Read on to learn more about the recipe for stress success! 1) Self Care 🥰 This means taking care of your basic needs and engaging in activities that actively recharge your batteries instead of depleting them. To make sure you are self-caring rather than distracting yourself, check how you feel AFTER you have done an activity, rather than how you feel during.
Self-care leaves you with what I call a "positive echo" long after your activity has ended. Action Tip: Make a list of all the activities that give you a “positive” echo when they are over. Maybe it’s sports, or luxury spa treatments, or time alone reading, or it could even be doing something creative, social, or fun. Everyone enjoys different ways to recharge. The important thing is that if you have a busy schedule, don´t wait until you feel like you “need” to practice self-care, it is important to pro-actively program these activities into your day before it gets to the point that you find yourself becoming "stressed out". Prevention is always better than cure, especially when it comes to handling stress overload. 2) Self-awareness 👀 Action Tip: Be sure to actively check-in with your feelings each day and ask yourself these 5 questions:
What is my emotional state today?
What do I need more or less of in my life?
What one thing do I really want to get done today?
What do I need to let go of?
What do I cherish the most in my life and how can I make time for this today?
Introduce more sensory awareness, mindfulness, self-hypnosis, or meditation into your daily life.
This switches off the chatter in your mind and puts all the cells in your body into healing, calming, and positive chemical bath (as opposed to the toxic bath of cortisol that stress creates). The more time you push your body into this calm state, the stronger you will become at having this as your default setting. Each time you practice silencing your mind in favor of enjoyment of your momentary experience of the present, it becomes like a mental push-up. 💪 ⭐ Here is a fantastic “now sensing” interactive exercise for you to practice having fun with this process. This 5-minute audio will take you on a magical tour of your hand in a way that you never experienced before.
I do hope you enjoy this sense-ational experience :)
By practicing more mindful awareness of your needs and your feeling energy, you can use your senses to place yourself firmly into the "now" moment, where you can more easily unhook yourself from unhelpful thoughts, overthinking, ruminations and stress. 😌 “The hand experience” - is a technique used in both mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy. You can listen to this whenever:-
You can´t switch off your brain
You feel negative about life
You are overthinking or ruminating about the past
You are worried about the future
You are feeling or showing symptoms of stress
You want to get better at mindfulness practice or meditation You want to experience calm inside
You want to ground yourself in your senses
3) More Assertive & Helpful Boundaries! 🖐 Boundaries can be challenging for all of us at times, and many of us are often not very naturally good at these, due to the way we may have been raised as children. Most households do not encourage a direct and assertive form of communication and actions from children, and many of us were raised in households that leaned towards a more passive-aggressive style of communication.
Parents may resort to this style of training in order to control our behaviors or to encourage us to develop some of our more necessary life skills. ⭐For example: "Be seen and not heard, You are naughty because you didn´t tidy your room, Bad children have tantrums, Don´t do that (followed by disapproving stares and withdrawal of love), You shouldn´t have done that (implied tone that the child is bad and should feel guilty)" This is not a malicious or "intentionally" damaging strategy but is simply a product of an inherited psychological control technique that has been passed down from generations that went before. Our parents simply had it unconsciously installed by their own parents. When we were born, we were generally really good at asking for what we needed (aka crying to be fed) and taking action to get whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted or needed it.😃 With time, however, this is trained out of us in favor of more socially "acceptable" etiquette and cultural ways. Most of this training works by using a form of shame, anxiety, guilt, ignorance or other negative emotions to control our behaviors as children. We were not generally encouraged to say "no" to things, as this is often considered to be disobedient or a sign of open defiance. We may have been told that we were “good” or “bad” for doing certain things, maybe even called words like “dirty, terrible, naughty, etc” when we didn´t do things quite in line with what was expected of us. 😳 This as children can make us feel ashamed and guilty, the aim of which is to enable the adult to control our behavior. By using labels like “good or bad” a parent is also able to shuffle the focus away from themselves - as if it´s not them that wants you to do something (like tidy your room), but it is instead just “good or bad” to do it. As if the universe or God is actually labeling you instead of them. Eventually, with this training, we become more socially appropriate, but we may also lose our capacity to be assertive with our needs. This can often manifest as having a problem saying "no" to people and things as adults. The guilt has unfortunately been trained into us along with our nice upbringing and good manners. 🙄 Without having proper boundaries as adults, we may go on to regularly sacrifice our own needs for other people´s. And even cultivate people-pleasing habits. We might say yes to too many things, to avoid our own guilt or the pressure of failure, and can find ourselves taking on too much in any area of life, and then later feeling "stressed" about our overwhelming situation. Action Tip: When setting boundaries, it´s a good idea to practice: 1) Saying "no" a lot more in our life.
Create your reasons for saying "no" before you need to use them.
Have set rules and know your limits so that you know what you need, in order to keep your life manageable. Be aware of what you can and can´t do, and how much space you really need in your life for yourself.
Accept that if you don´t say no "in the moment" to save yourself feeling “bad/guilty” you will only feel “bad” later when the stress and overwhelm sets in, or when you find yourself feeling resentful about doing something that you didn´t really want to do.
By saying "yes" to these things you do not stop the “bad” feeling, you only postpone it for a different sort of bad feeling later on. You are actually hurting "future you" rather than risk "current you" having to risk some form of immediate discomfort.
Use some alternative new phrases for "no" and offer compromises or "alternative" help instead:
“I´m sorry but this isn´t going to be part of my journey today” “I´m honored you asked, but I can´t” “I wish there was two of me” “Thank you for asking, but that unfortunately isn’t going to work out for me.” “I can’t do it, but I’ll bet Susan can. I’ll ask her for you.” “Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and support! I’m sorry I’m not able to help you at this time”
Once you gave a "no" feel proud of yourself and do a “no” dance in your head to celebrate, because every time you say "no" you are actually saying “yes” to something much more important for yourself. 🥰
2) Keep your dignity and self-respect intact by treating yourself with respect first and foremost.
Don´t cook dinner for everyone else and leave yourself short!
Treat your own self-respect like a limb or body part. Would you sacrifice your hand for some peace? No! You wouldn´t… so why not practice holding onto your own dignity with the same sort of attitude? 🤩
Have respect for the differences between you and others. Stop needing to argue your point or trying to change people´s minds in order to bring them around to your own views.
It´s ok to have different opinions, values, and beliefs. The more you practice respecting others’ differences the more strongly you will feel about your own identity. It is a double-edged sword. To practice this more, try to expose yourself to a variety of conflicting opinions and beliefs by following people who have opposing beliefs on social media, watching alternative views to your own, and being more curious about other people´s differences, rather than disapproving. (If you want to work on improving your personal stress management and coping systems, I have a special program of 6 sessions where we focus on this formula and your assertiveness, using skills to stop people-pleasing, and saying "No" more often in your life - just click the link here and you can book in to ask me about this on a complimentary 15-minute call ⬇)