It’s that time of the year again. That time where you get saturated with fitspiration and shaming about your body and the holidays, and how now is time to repent.
Just change your mindset; just try harder; stop making excuses; work the problem; just take action. How does it make you feel when you read things like this? It makes me mad.
These are the mottos of a grind culture that can’t and won’t acknowledge your humanity. They’re also unsupported by science, as they can only work at all when stress is low.
When the sea of your life is rough and choppy, the body of scientific evidence shows that your limbic brain and reptilian brain can and often do override your cognitive, thinking brain. When you are experiencing high emotional stress or sense a threat, you may take fight, flight, fawn, or freeze actions, but it won’t be because you “stopped making excuses.”
The way to break the cycle is to learn how to use the tools to complete your stress cycle that are supported by science (read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.):
-Feel your real and valid feelings (don’t ignore or suppress them)
-If they are powerful feelings, notice them, and delay taking action on them unless your immediate situation is unsafe
-Process them by talking with someone who is able to non-judgmentally listen, and/or metabolize them through meditation, breathing exercises, music, dance, humming, various touch sensations like water immersion/take a shower or bath, or a combination of the above.
-Then, when you feel your nervous system has settled: courageously try to take the next doable step toward your goals
I know it can feel like there’s no time for all that, you just gotta stop making excuses and go now, right? That’s an ingrained pattern that can be hard to imagine an alternative to. Try to forgive and speak kindly to yourself. You deserve time to care for your whole person, not just to complete a list of action steps. You deserve coaches who can see you and motivate you without playing on your fears. *Deep breath*. There is enough time.
More transactionally, once you start completing your stress cycles sooner by adopting these new tools, you will be freeing up a lot of time and energy where in the past you would have just spun your wheels, or frantically have made a little progress and then backtracked, exhausted from the cycle of it and still stuck.
This time can be different. Consistency is the way to get unstuck, and the only way to be consistent is to have reliable ways to process your feelings as they happen. If you can hear this at all, you are closer than you may think to transformative change. We are here to support you as a human being when you’re ready.
Reply to this email if you are interested in doing it differently this time, with our help.
Coach Mauricio