Category: stress

Autoimmune Disease, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Health, Health Coaching, self-care, stress

Your emotional wellbeing is just as important to your healing as Kale!

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Three ways to protect your emotional health during covid-19

We are in a situation once again when the world seems to have gone all topsy turvy. Things are so strange that we can’t even agree on what name we are using for this virus that has done so much damage. Is it COVID-19, Coronavirus, or SARS 2? There is a lot of uncertainty out there and for those of us with Autoimmunity or other health issues, there is a lot of fear. I’m not going to go into all the ways that you can take care of yourself right now because I think we all got the message- wash your hands, stay inside, and eat your veggies. What I do want to do is to give you some tips on tending to our mental and emotional wellbeing.

First, stop getting your medical information from your aunt on Facebook (unless your aunt works for the CDC) and go to reputable sources. My functional medicine doctor put out this amazing COVID19 Action Plan and I think it’s a great and comprehensive source of information.

Secondly, manage your energy! I like to think of my energy the same way I look at my money. When I tend to it and invest it wisely it grows and I have more of it to do the things I love but if I don’t, I fall into a cycle of struggle. Struggling to sleep turns into struggling to work in an effective manner which then turns into limited time to be with the people I love or do the things I love. Right now, during COVID 19, managing our energy is also another way to protect our mental and emotional health which is important to our overall health and well being.

Here is how I manage my energy

  1. Get adequate sleep, ideally between 10pm and 6am since research shows that those times are when our body is doing its job to repair our body and brain.
  2. Limit and put boundaries around what information is coming in. This looks like checking the news only once or at the most twice a day. You aren’t going to change anything by holding vigilance on twitter. Also, only tune in or read sources from media that has your best interest (not your spending dollars) at heart.
  3. Stop scrolling and start connecting. Social media is a really amazing tool but since it’s built using the same algorithms as slot machines we have a tendency to scroll for ages. The problem with this (other than its a massive time suck) is that you have no control over what is coming. Maybe its more cute kittens but it also might be a horrible and scary story that causes your body to react like its being chanced by a bear. Instead, get on Skype, FaceTime, Google messenger or whatever you have and check on your people. Tell them you love them, ask them how they are feeling, trade your best stories, or just have them on the line so you can work together.
  4. Go outside as often as you can. Go for a walk between meeting, do some yoga in the park, go pull those weeds in the garden, or just slip off your shoes and feel the earth under your feet.
  5. Have a mindfulness/spiritual practice. You don’t have to be religious or be a master meditator to have a practice that gets you grounded, calms your body, and helps you to put things into perspective. Find something that you do every day that grounds you. This could look like prayer or mediation, or it could be journalling, gratitude practice, a mindful walk in nature. There are hundreds of spiritual practices so try some on and see what works for you.
  6. Take action. So much of our stress comes from a sense of helplessness. You aren’t helpless. Yes, you probably aren’t the person who is going to cure this disease and you can’t save everyone but you can do things. You can take care of yourself, you can remove yourself from the general population so there is less people for the virus to hold on to, and you can tend to your emotional wellbeing. You can also reach out to your friends, donate to the food bank, give your neighbor a roll of T.P. or anything else you feel called to do. Don’t surrender all your power just because you don’t have all the power.

Finally, honor your emotions but don’t get stuck. Its 100% normal to feel fear, frustration, anger, sadness, or any other of the 100s of emotions we can feel as humans. We tend to think we need to push these feelings away but that doesn’t work. They just get louder. You can take a deep breath and say I’m feeling this way and that’s okay. And then, you do the work to say how can I tend to this. I’m feeling anxious, what do I need to do to remind myself and my body I’m safe? Who do I need to reach out to or what thoughts do I need to think?

So what are you doing to protect your emotional health? And/or what song are you using to make sure you get your 20 seconds of scrubbing? Let me know!

stress

Bump this to the top of your to-do list RIGHT NOW!

 Glennon Doyle's Facebook post showing a mom napping on the sideline of a soccer game. Head on purse, blanket over her face. Showing up for her kids but recognizing that she is tired!

Glennon Doyle posted this awesome photo on Facebook.

She captured a moment at a soccer game of a mom who not only showed up for her kids but she also showed up for HERSELF!

Glennon captioned the photo:

“I give you: MY NEW HERO. This Soccer Mom, at my kid’s last game.
Whilst the other parents stood loudly and earnestly and concernedly on the sidelines: this mother laid her body down on the ground, her head on her purse, and her blanket over her face – and napped.
Her entire existence said: I am showing up for my kid. But I’m not gonna pretend I’m not exhausted about It.
Please understand that periodically- when the sideline yelled and woke her from her warrior sleep- she would raise that little thumb of hers and say: yay. And then she’d go back to sleep.
I love her. She is a cultural icon for our time.
Here’s to WOMEN WHO FREAKING REST WHEN THEY’RE TIRED. May we know them. May we raise them. May we be them.
I would like to formally nominate this hero as the president elect of our Women Who Have Run Out of Effs to Give Club.
There will be no meetings.
I salute you.”

As a business owner, a mom, and some other titles that I’ve agreed to,  I can fall into the “productive trap.” You know that place where you have be productive all the time?  If you are up, you’re working or cleaning. If you are sitting down, you’re checking emails or googling your worries.  If you are in the car, you’re thinking about all the things you need to do. And if there is nothing to do, you damn sure can figure out something to do!

The productivity trap is addictive, and it hurts our health and keeps our body in a stressed state. We do not want to live in the stress response!

As a health coach and a fellow productivity addict, I don’t have the answers for you but I do have some ideas and some questions that I’ve been asking myself.

1. What do you want to do? That is, what really lights you up, gets you excited, and leaves you feeling accomplished?

2. How will you say yes in a way that protects your time, energy, and health?

3. What do you not want to do? What drains you and leaves you feeling frustrated?

4. What can you let go? What can you delegate?

5. When is your downtime for today?

This last question is frankly the hardest because we often batch our “downtime.”  If we are lucky, we are only getting a portion of the desired time one or maybe two days a week.

That ain’t great, and it doesn’t support our desire to calm our stress response, lower our inflammation, or even just find joy in this one, imperfect life.

I’m taking a cue from this soccer mom, and I’m starting to show up for myself.

stress

What if we just trusted ourselves?

I trust you

Like some 40% of humans, I have an MTHFR gene mutation. This means, among other things, that when my stress response gets turned on I have really hard time turning it off.  This means that I take my stress management very, very seriously. But sometimes the pressure from the outside gets to be too much.  Like it did this last Friday when I was getting whiplash from the personal, professional, and social deadlines coming on top of the daily maintenance stuff and other responsibilities — like my brand new threenager.  (If you pray, please throw one my way because threenagers are no joke.)

But I digress.

Stuff was a lot, and I was feeling really, really stressed. So I tried something different. I decided to just have faith in myself. I made a physical list so I wouldn’t have to try to hold all that stuff in my head, and then I just said, “I trust you.” And then every time I felt that familiar feeling of stress and being overwhelmed I would just repeat it to myself, “I trust you.”  And you know what? It worked.

While this was a new tactic for me, it’s not a new concept. In psychology, they call this reframing, changing how you perceive something so your experience of it changes.  When I was feeling overwhelmed with all the to-dos, it was because I approaching them from a place where I felt inadequate to do it all. But that feeling of inadequacy was a false one. In my nearly 4 decades, I have tackled some pretty nasty to-dos. This was not my first rodeo or even my biggest.

But it’s so easy to forget how very adequate we are.  I see this in my clients (and in myself). We downplay our achievements, and we highlight all the ways we feel inadequate. So what if you flipped that script? What if you took a few minutes to see how far you have come, how much you have accomplished, and then just said, “I trust you?”

Lupus, stress

Having Lupus doesn’t mean the world gets less crazy. How to deal

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Self-Care Checklist for when the world has lost its mind

Warning: I’m going to talk about current events. If you are in a phase of your journey where you have more than enough on your plate with just waking up every day and have no desire to know whats going on in the world, stop reading here. You do your journey and don’t feel guilty for a minute. With a disease like Lupus, we all do the best we can. There are plenty of great blog post you can read on this site that will help you on your journey that don’t deal with the news.

Now for the rest of us: This weekend was an especially brutal one. The events in Charlottesville are deplorable and heartbreaking. Like you, I am angry and sad. After holding vigil by my phone all Saturday, I was in a pretty horrible place. I woke up feeling ill for the first time in a long time and, frankly, a little depressed.

Maybe this describes you this past weekend or maybe it’s some other horrible thing happening out there that takes you down. Whatever it is, I want to remind all of us (myself included) how to manage our reaction to the craziness of the world so we can protect our health. This is vital because we aren’t just women with chronic diseases, we are a citizen of the world and what happens in it affects us deeply. But, unfortunately, the world didn’t stop being crazy when we got our diagnosis, and worry and stress tend to exacerbate our symptoms.

These are the things I reminded myself that help me take care of myself while being a citizen of this world.

  1. Care and worry aren’t the same things.  I give myself permission to care about the world and the people in it, but my worry doesn’t help anything. My worry doesn’t stop bombs, or change hearts, or rewrite history. My worry only hurts me; it compromises my physical and mental well-being. When I figured this out, I started saying this mantra when I find myself being consumed by worry over issues I can’t control: “I can care deeply, but this situation doesn’t need my worry.
  2. Act on your convictions. If you struggle to get out of bed every day you might be inclined to skip this step, but please don’t.  When I say act on your convictions, it could mean go volunteer or go to a meeting to talk about the big issues and brainstorm solutions, or it could just mean pray or meditate. Smile at a stranger. Tell someone in your life how amazing you think they are.  Action doesn’t have to be a big grand gesture, it just means to strike back against the ugly with love. Remember to direct that love as much inwardly as you do outwardly.
  3. Use your energy wisely. I woke up on Sunday feeling horrible because I spent my energy on worrying over Saturday.  When you have dealt with or are dealing with fatigue (like the exhausted in your bones kind), you realize that energy is kind of like money. You don’t always have it. If you don’t spend it wisely, you can end up hurting. Spend your energy wisely, preferably on things that will increase your energy and help you heal.
  4. Get yourself to your community. A big part of taking care of yourself is finding and being apart of a community of uplifting people who support you and are worthy of your open heart. Maybe that means your local lupus support group and/or your church. Maybe it means an online community of people who share your love for knitting or Jane the Virgin. Thanks to the internet, community can be cultivated anywhere, it just takes action on your part to find it and show up.

The world is a broken place filled with broken people but it’s also a beautiful place filled with loving and caring people. Take care of yourself, your heart, and your mind.

XOXO,

Carrie

stress

Three tips for making stress management tools work for you

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During the Q & A section of a recent presentation, I was asked how I managed stress. I reviewed the information on the worksheets I’d been discussing, but I realized her question went deeper than simply “What do I do?” She was really asking, “How do you actually remember to use these tools?” Because stress management tools are only helpful if you use them, I make it a point to cultivate tools that are as practical as they are effective. Here are my simple tips to work life and health affirming habits into your day.

 To get some of these tools for yourself you can get instant access to my free stress workshop here.

  • Step one, pick tools that you can actually do. I would love to manage my stress by getting massages or spending an hour in a sensory deprivation tank, but ain’t nobody got time for that! I do, however, have a few minutes every day to do some breathing exercises. If you need more stress tools you can get instant access to one of my most popular workshops on stress management right here.
  • Step two, schedule it. I did not go from being fueled by stress to effectively managing my stress because I had some tools. I had to plan when and how I was going to do things. I created intentions before I went to bed and ran through those intentions when I woke up. I put things on my calendar and scheduled my work/life around them.  Using tools to address my stress did not come naturally, so I had to be very intentional.
  • Step three, I started “taking a second.”  In the past, I would encounter a stressful moment at work or at the dinner table or wherever, and it would just rule the day. But then I started allowing myself the space to ask,  “What’s the alternative here?” For example, I would be sitting at dinner with both of my kids refusing to eat the beautiful and nutritious meal I just made, and I would think, “What’s the alternative to all this? I have expectations that aren’t being met, so I can either dig in and let stress rule the situation or I could do something like take a mommy time-out and do one of my stress management techniques.” When I took those moments to calm my stress response, I was able to view the situation more clearly and with more empathy.

At the end of the day, it boils down to being intentional and strategic. You know what your day looks like or the resources you have at your disposal, so seek solutions that work within your constraints. The transformation from stressed-out Carrie to the person I am today didn’t happen overnight, but the more intentional I was about addressing my stress (and the way I ate, moved, and thought about my body) the easier those things fell into my life and the more natural they became.

I hope this helps you find and use the tools that work for you. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

 

stress

Reduce your stress and get focused now with one simple tool!

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School event The other day I had the privilege to see an acting troupe perform plays written by my kid and her classmates. It was awesome! But it was also on a Friday afternoon in the cafeteria with about 200 kids who were ready for the weekend. To say the energy was up would be an understatement. The teachers and the performers did a great job of keeping the kids quiet, but one really exciting moment on stage was just more than these kids could handle.

Remember how loud it could get during an assembly when you were a kid? I was having major flashbacks!

But then one fabulous teacher got their attention and started counting out the breaths.  Breathe in for four, hold for seven, and breathe out for eight. Two rounds later the energy had shifted! I knew this worked for me and for the adults (like the teachers I taught it to) and my own kids in a one-on-one situation, but I was floored by how immediate and effective this breathing exercise was for some 200 kids with weekend-fever.

If I hadn’t already been sold on 4-7-8 breathing as an effective tool to immediately reduce your stress and get focused, I would have been in that moment. All these kids brimming with energy and feeding off of each other were able to calm down and get centered in less than a minute! When they took those deep, intentional breaths, they were telling their brains (which told their bodies), “Everything is cool; you can relax.” When their bodies received the message, they turned off the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight)  and engaged the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest).

And you can do that too. Feeling too scattered to write that to do list or just get after it? Feeling overwhelmed by stress? Can’t sleep because your mind is racing? Take less than a minute and breathe in for 4, hold for 7, and breathe out for 8. Do this for two to three rounds, and you will send your body the relaxation signals it needs to calm down and focus on the task at hand.

Check out my video for a guided practice and let me know how it worked for you in the comments below.

Until next time,

Carrie

stress

Stress management during the storm

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Before I became a health coach, I was a policy lady. I went to policy school because I wanted to help right some of the injustices of the world. I still do, but I’ve changed my approach a bit. However, coming from this background, you might imagine that, like many of you, the last few months have been pretty stressful.  In that spirit, I want to dive into how you can manage your stress even if you can’t do anything about what is causing the stress.

First, our body’s stress response is very important. It keeps us alive by diverting our blood where it needs to go in the event that we need to fly or fight. Think about being chased by a bear or lion, you definitely need to run away or fight it off if you are going to survive. But when we are constantly under stress, it can harm our health by causing us to store fat around our organs and by creating inflammation. But it’s more than that. It can rob us of joy, and it just feels really horrible.

But what do you do when the thing or things that are causing you stress are out of your hands? Here are my tips:

    1. Get as much trustworthy information as you can. My tactic is to stay away from any news outlet that needs you to watch or click ads because those sources tend to sensationalize things. 
    2. Create a plan to act on that information if needed.  You don’t have to do everything, but pick a thing and do it. 
    3. Disengage from social media. Social media can be fun, but it can also be full of inaccurate information that can cause a lot of fear and panic. And you have no control over what you are going to see. While you are scrolling through pictures of cute kids or puppies, you get smacked by hateful or scary memes. Back away from your devices for a few hours or even a few days to give yourself a rest. I hear the world outside is pretty beautiful. 
    4. Hang out with people who lift you up. Share your concerns, your fears, and then listen to theirs. Sharing our concerns helps us feel like we aren’t alone.
    5. Take care of yourself. This isn’t a time to fall off the wagon. In fact, it’s a great time to up your health game. Exercise to reduces stress hormones and lower inflammation and eat those vegetables, fresh and fermented, to keep that brain-gut connection well-fed.
    6. Implement stress management techniques into your day. 
      • Breathe. A solid breathing practice is one of the fastest ways to calm your stress hormones. 
      • Practice gratitude. This means taking a few minutes to write down or meditate on a few things you are grateful for. This not only anchors you in the present, but it also has been shown to reduce inflammation. 
      • Meditation. Meditation is a powerful tool, but it’s basically just giving your brain a break from all those thoughts going through your head. Simply get comfortable in a quiet place, close your eyes, and focus on your breath. You can do this by slowly counting as you breathe in and out. When I meditate, I like to count to 10 and then start again as I breathe slowly in and out. During this time, my mind might start to wonder so I just bring it back to my breath. There are loads of guided meditations out there. I really like the Headspace app (paid) or this resource from UCLA for free guided meditations. 

I hope this help you and that you will make it a priority to take care of yourself, no matter what storm you are weathering.

 

Carrie