Did you question my sanity just now? You are very wise. 🙃
Okay, okay, I promise that I will not be combining the words “patterns” and “habits” into any various combos!! I shall leave them as is, as much as they are connected and powerful as a duo. 👯♂️
Speaking of one’s sanity, have you ever felt like you were going berserko because of an excessive, overflowing amount of thoughts that flood your head and you can’t think clearly?
Maybe it felt like this:
Or like this:
Or even THIS:
Sooooo very overwhelming and often debilitating and anxiety-inducing, or so I have found.
Taking it back to one of the two questions that I posed last week, am I in control of my thoughts or is my mind in control of me? Well, when this flood of thoughts swarm the brain and create confusion, many various feelings, and the inability to really concentrate, the answer is an absolute THE MIND IS IN CONTROL OF ME!
Upon listening to a podcast that a good friend, Avery, recommended, (Brook Castillo with The Life Coach School Podcast – – I highly recommend!!), the mind has the ability to act like a spoiled, unsupervised, and destructive toddler. And without that constant supervision, HOUSE (AKA brain) BEWARE!! Because the wild child of thoughts is on the loose – – emptying shelves onto the floor, throwing flour and coffee grounds everywhere, touching light sockets, drawing on walls with permanent marker, finding honey in a cabinet and touching every surface with sticky hands – – – so we feel so crazed and powerless to stop this bombardment. It can often feel like we are losing our grasp with reality because in a sense, we are. We have a battle happening in our own head and that makes it extremely difficult to see things with any real clarity.
And this leads me to my second question that I wanted to look at:
If thoughts produce every single one of our feelings, do we have the power to control our own thoughts and therefore guide ourselves to how we really want to feel?
I know that I have already given you the Spoiler of YES, this is actually true!!!! Hooray!!!! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
🤨 However……..
How the sugar do we actually do that????? Let me just clarify that I am a work in progress and I am still figuring this part out!!! Even still, I have started to learn the steps and I shall share some of them with you now.
STEP 1 – – Sloooooooow down 🐢
I have always had the hardest time doing this until recently, since I (and so many of us) have been forced to slow down because of this pandemic.
For the longest time, my self-worth was tied to how busy I was, how productive I was, whether or not I achieved a goal that I had set for myself, AND whether I achieved my expected standard of perfection in everything that I did. Needless to say, my self-esteem was “shaky” growing up with this unrealistic standard that I held over myself. My hard work, all successes, good grades, and my self-perception was intrinsically tied to my desire to be perfect in everything that I did. For example, in school I would always put in 150% effort, pulling all-nighters to perfect homework or to study, spending hours upon hours on creating “perfect” papers and projects, and being absolutely infuriated with myself if I got a 99% on a test, instead of a 100%. And it would bother me for months!!! And months. (Okay, even years after…😐) Yeah, it was bad.
The good part was that my high self-expectation mentality and critical self-nature pushed me to shoot for my dreams of becoming a professional dancer. And even if the odds were stacked against me, (which they really were), it was in large part because of my perfectionistic, determined, work-til-you-drop mentality that made it happen!! And my dreams came true. 💃🏻🙏🏼☘️💫
The bad part? Well, the very same traits and mentality were also my downfall and a big reason (in my opinion) of why I injured my knee in the first place. Because I always pushed myself to do more and more and more until my body was worn down…and then I pushed it some more, which ended up being too much. 👎🏼
I wish that I had seen this quote a lot sooner – – like pre-all-of-my-knee-injuries sooner – – but this expresses exactly what I was doing:
I NEVER wanted to slow down and take a breath. I was always on the move, asking myself questions like “what’s next?,” “why are you sitting/stopping when there is so much you could/should be doing?,” and “why aren’t you doing more?”
Just like the Black-Eyed Peas sang in their song, “Let’s Get it Started,” I was 🎵runnin’ runnin’ and runnin’ runnin’🎶 from all of my pushed down fears, traumas, and sadness as well as from the shame and disappointment that I so often felt about myself. That happens when you always expect perfection from yourself and you constantly miss that mark because perfection is unattainable and unrealistic. I “could always do better,” or so I repeatedly told myself, and I was never fully satisfied with myself, no matter how “on top of my game” that I actually was. And it was this dangerous, severely critical eye (that many of us share) that was the ogre-catalyst that started me down this knee path of destruction. Ahhhhh, how I wish that I could have had a MAJOR chat with my younger self about the importance of slowing down and giving myself a big ol’ loving break. ❤️
Because here’s the thing. If we’re constantly running from something within ourselves, it will inevitably catch up with us, either by invitation (which means willingly stop and face it) or by an earth-shattering phenomenon that knocks you on your booty and makes you face it. For me, I had to slow down since I was FORCED to do so because of my knee injuries. And having the time now to really look at myself with a curious and open mind allows me to see this “trauma response and fear-based distraction” quote as being mind-shatteringly accurate.
Please choose to slow down for yourself, to value yourself, to remind yourself that your worth is priceless whether you are busy or not, and acknowledge if this quote resonates with you, too. Please take the time to honor and appreciate your body so you do not make the same mistake that I did and push yourself too far into the abyss and running away from feeling “not good enough” with that critical eye. When you fight and have inner struggles with yourself, you will always lose. Not only with injuries, like I did, but also with reaching goals/targets in your life because those inner struggles often contribute to you falling short of the things you really want in your life.
STEP 2 – – – Feel It 😺😾🙀😼😻😿
Whatever you are feeling, whether it is blissful radiance or guilty, self-destructive awfulness, allow yourself to feel it. To sit in the vast uneasiness without feeling the need to do anything else. A SUPER tough ask (I’m still struggling and practicing with this one) and yet it’s one of the most life-altering things that we can do for ourselves.
Here is a super interesting question to ask yourself: what emotion/feeling are you unwilling to feel? As in, what feeling creates so much discomfort inside your body that causes you to run from it, resist it, or deny that it exists? Because if you could allow yourself to feel THAT feeling and prove to yourself that it is a terrible feeling THAT WILL PASS, then there would be no reason to run/resist/deny when it happens to come your way again.
Again, in Brook Castillo’s podcast, she speaks in detail about how every feeling that we create is a vibration in our bodies. That’s it. Nothing more than a vibration, even if your stomach is turning, your breathing is becoming restricted, your heart is racing, your blood is boiling, or you’re just feeling plain awful about yourself. So, by allowing ourselves to remember this and to let the feelings briefly exist in our bodies, then there is nothing that we can’t handle because there is nothing that we aren’t willing to feel. Which is such an amazing concept because normally poor decision-making, self-sabotage, and anger expressions that we regret often happen because we are doing everything we can to avoid the discomfort of our own feelings.
THEREFORE: Give yourself permission to feel any feelings. If you’re not afraid to feel a feeling, then you can build up emotional resilience to handle every single feeling and emotion that comes your way. This is a recurring theme in the Stoic Philosophy as well because having control over your emotions means having control over your life, no matter what is happening in your outside world.
STEP 3 – – – Notice Your Habits and Your Special Patterns
With Step 2, no one likes to feel uncomfortable, depressed, anxious, disgusted, or unhappy. So we all have our own special way of handling these negative feelings that start inhabiting our body. AKA: Our habits that we have trained ourselves to do, many times on autopilot without questioning our actions.
Whether it’s eating food to escape, drinking alcohol, doing drugs or other vices, working out, starving ourselves as punishment, whatever it may be, we tend to latch onto an outlet that gives us some relief and/or distraction for a brief time.
My go-to growing up, besides incessant working out, was emotional and mindless eating to avoid my feelings. Which, as many of us know, brings comfort for a temporary period and then it makes us feel so much worse!!! Because that awful feeling remains and now we’ve just given it a plentiful dose of guilt and shame on top…😩 YET, even if whatever we choose makes things worse for us, like leading us away from our goals and the things that we want for our life, (like this over-eating example), we still choose this habit because it has worked for us in the past. It still brings momentary relief even if we’re aware that this habit, that is now an embedded pattern in our psyche, is not the solution to our problems.
Once we have latched onto our “favorite” habits, repeatedly doing them turns them into the patterns of our life. This is why examining the habits that we have created or adopted and the patterns that evolved from them are crucial to having control of our thoughts. When a habit and a pattern in our life are on autopilot, this means that our subconscious mind is in charge. And this is very dangerous territory, especially if that habit/pattern is creating results that are not beneficial to our beings and the direction we would like our lives to go.
In simplified terms, our brain takes the easy road and in this case it chooses the familiar – – the habits and patterns that we have been accustomed to doing, whether they are productive or futile.
SO, by slowing down and becoming aware of our go-to automatic habits and patterns, we can start to acknowledge when they happen and begin the process of recognizing why we have chosen them as our actions. This is a step where we can start to put the power back into our own hands because we are looking at why WE have CHOSEN this course of action as opposed to giving the power to our mind by saying things like “I don’t know why I do this and can’t stop” or “I have to do this because ‘nothing’ else works” or whatever your thoughts might create to justify your behavior. When we take responsibility for where we are and what we’re doing, we can start to open our views and create real change because we realize that we are in control of our feelings (that drive our actions) and therefore the thoughts that produced them.
STEP 4 – – – Start to examine the thoughts that are driving your feelings WITH COMPASSION AND UNDERSTANDING
Once we respect and accept the responsibility in our actions and how we’re feeling, then we begin the work of looking at what are the thoughts that are driving these feelings and creating our actions. Because remember, thoughts are where everything stems from. And by being a compassionate observer to our thoughts that create these negative feelings, we can start to understand the “why” with regards to why those thoughts are there. And this is how people can refute those negative thoughts and consciously choose to think something different and self-serving. And this, in turn, creates a much better feeling that can propel you forward into making better choices and choosing better actions. Thereby bringing you the results that you really want to have.
A very important thing to remember is that this step is very challenging because you start to be even more aware of the crazy, destructive, scary, weird thoughts that come to mind. And it’s easy to want to turn away from this awareness or even to bring that critical, judgmental eye along for the ride and berate yourself for these thoughts. Again, negative thoughts with guilt/shame/frustration/disgust/name-calling on top is much worse and harder to accept.
By realizing that these thoughts, feelings, and actions have served you in the past is imperative and that accepting their presence is a form of kindness that you absolutely deserve. And the beauty is that choosing to give yourself time to accept you, as in all of you, (with love and compassion) also gives yourself the opportunity and the space to change your thoughts, focus on a perspective that gives you the feelings that you want to feel, and gives you the freedom to choose what’s next. You take the driver’s seat and your mind takes the backseat where it belongs.
And there you have it!!! The four main steps to gaining more control over your thoughts and therefore your life!!! 🙌🏼
What I love about this is that it is never ever too late to make a change for yourself. You are not stuck or destined for misery, with “nothing you can do to change it.” And if someone has told you the opposite of this, please call their BS for what it is: TOTAL BULL💩!!!! If “nothing” has worked yet, it’s because you haven’t found the right thing for you YET – – – but it’s there and waiting to be discovered.
And sometimes all it takes is a refreshed perspective (fresh THOUGHTS!!) to open a new door or window of possibility. 🏢
I repeat, IT IS NEVER TOO LATE to make yourself and your life better. A reminder that I love and need to hear from time to time….and time again!! (Ya’ hear that, knees?!?!?!)
And advice that I am telling myself and hoping that it will resonate with you as well:
Never settle. Dig deep within yourself, (because no one knows you better than you do), trust yourself, have your own back, (so, support your vision even if it seems impossible!), do the work, and create the life that brings you the most fulfillment and joy!
AND
Ease up on the self-judgment, make the critical eye a whole lot softer, appreciate how far you have come and what you have overcome, and grant yourself permission to BREATHE….AKA: To get out of your own way and create space for what you desire from a place of gratitude. Then let the magic unfold. Embrace the journey to becoming your best self. 😊🙏🏼❤️
P.S. I’m not the best at all of this stuff yet but trying, working hard, staying consistent, and doing your best are the names of the game!! Along with graciously accepting the hard stuff, the best that you can. To you and to me, KEEP GOING!!!!
💦✨💦✨💦✨💦✨💦✨💦✨💦✨💦