Click HERE to listen on iTunes or HERE to listen on all other platforms. The transcript is also available below. Enjoy!
Please subscribe and SHARE with anybody you think would be helped by this message. If you love the podcast, please leave a review on iTunes. Thank you and have a great day!
In this episode we will talk about how important it is to make a distinction between ambition and not listening to your physical body. We talk about teaming up with your body to go farther, rather than creating a battle with the very vessel that makes it all possible. Enjoy!
TRANSCRIPT:
I have so been procrastinating this week as I have been off of my schedule. My kids have been coughing throughout the night so I’ve had them in our bed and I’ve been on a mattress on the floor with my husband in the other room. My six foot four man in our five year old’s room… thank God we bought him a twin long hahaha. It’s great to be there for them, but being up all night again reminds me of the early years of motherhood and how exhausting it is, despite the joy it brings. It very tangibly represents how fast it’s gone; but at the same time, because I’ve been up all night, I have not been getting up early to have time to myself.
Now, I envision the motivated, driven, mind-over-matter type of people might say that this is unwise, push yourself, don’t get off track. And that’s fine for them. My take on this is that I have been there and done that and it never works for me. My body needs rest, and when I push myself to try to do it all, I crumble. When I crumble, it impacts our whole household significantly. So, on the occasion that my kids are sick enough to need my presence at night, or in some other way, impacts my sleep, this is a priority thing for me. I will choose to miss the run rather than the sleep. In taking the time to be present in these types of shifts to our day, it can definitely be challenging, but more importantly, it can help our bodies to trust us.
My typical operation in the case of this type of event used to be that I would still push myself to do whatever I would normally require of myself despite the sleep loss or feeling sick myself. I would push and be grumpy and tired and depleted; and then not only would I get really sick, but I would be taken down HARD. Now, I think there is incredible value in knowing when, against your desire, the wise choice is to slow down and honor your body’s needs for sickness or whatever the shift is, understanding that rest is critical to your health; to your physical AND your emotional well-being.
So, today I am coming to you finally at the end of a long week of staying home with these boys, all of us resting, all of us slowing down. Yes, we were sick; yes, our rhythm was off; no, I did not get up and push myself to run despite the utter sleep loss and myself feeling a little under the weather. I did things for myself and for my family, but didn’t check all of the boxes. But because of this, I am depleted of the total renewal I find each morning getting up before anybody else awakes. I thrive with rhythms, and when my routines are off I can really struggle to be productive. When I am not getting time in the morning to process my emotions and expel pent up energy, to rev up for the day with endorphins, I feel a lot of feelings bubble up and impulsively am inclined to emotionally run from them with mindless distraction or physical control of some sort… like cleaning or organizing. So, all week I wanted to share something with you that has kind of evolved as the week went on and as I think about it, but I felt my thoughts and my world too disorganized and my emotions as a result all over the place and trying to signal to me.
So finally, here I sit, making it happen.
What I want to talk about today has to do with this very idea of rhythms and road blocks and what it looks like to be an incredibly motivated person who struggles with the changes along the road. I think there is so much about pushing yourself out there, that in some ways is incredibly fantastic, but for those of us that struggle with perfectionism, we can tend to digest these ideas into beliefs that we need to adhere to whatever is helping us to thrive at all costs. It sort of becomes a condition for us to love ourselves. We decide that this is helping, so we will do it no matter what. And that is fantastic, to honor yourself enough not to break any more promises to yourself… but, this needs to be balanced with your physical and emotional needs. This needs to be weighed and I really think our perspective needs to take into account the idea of the fact that life is not a straight line and is not all about action. These habits that allow us to move forward in life, that help us to gain momentum toward a future that is aligned with our intentions and our integrity; these are incredibly good in and of themselves; However, there will be times in life when you need to just stop. You need to breathe and slow down. You need to take a break and you need to allow things that you wanted, not to happen, so that the cost is not your health or your sanity. I am all for pushing through, when appropriate. But our bodies have needs as does our very existence. We may face glaring challenges within the roles that we play, which require of us a rebalancing, often only temporarily, of things that we love in order to be there for both our own physical and emotional body’s and the people that we love so deeply.
I think too many people treat consider bodies as though they are an annoying hinderance to achieving goals, always disappointing us; requiring punishment and reward and rigid control. To me that’s just plain garbage. It is true that we will not find growth if we don’t push ourselves outside of our comfort zones, and that includes physically; but we also need to learn to listen to our bodies and that starts with learning to look at our bodies with respect and then treat our bodies with that respect. When we see our bodies from a perspective of gratitude, of amazement of the things it allows us to do, we will start to see how our bodies are on our side. My body is on my team. Just as I have talked about before with our brain and the way our mind works, once we start to understand that the intention is for our good, we will shift our relationship to our bodies.
Our bodies and our minds need pushing. But our bodies are also constantly speaking to us. Just as our emotions are like a signal from our mind telling us what thoughts we are having that are interfering with our life and our happiness; our bodies are also telling us things with physical symptoms. Our physical bodies tell us when they’re tired, sleepy, thirsty, sore, overworked, hungry and so much more. Our bodies need physical exercise. They need adequate rest. They need us to listen.
I remember I once listened to a whole series of talks in a webinar about 7 years ago when my eldest was not even a year old. One of them was a health coach and he said his entire practice revolved around rest. His whole strategy in working with people to turn around their health could essentially be boiled down to sleep. He threw out the nutrition facts and needs; he threw out any and all other lifestyle modification and simply helped people to focus on sleep. On going to bed on time and on getting enough restful sleep, and creating this habit in their lives. He said he recommended people work on this for a year before they focus on any other areas of health, and he was incredibly successful in his practice helping people improve their overall wellness with this at the core of his strategy. I was dumbstruck. At the time I was utterly obsessed with all thing’s health. What was healthy and what wasn’t. What I could do naturally for X, Y and Z. I was floored.
When I started to think about it, I realized that over the past nearly 30 years of my existence at the time, I had never remembered a time when I had had what he had coined as “healthy sleep habits” and I had never had adequate rest.
Really soak this idea in. Rest as a focus… a primary focus for health.
I recently read a book that was all about sleep as well. It was an incredibly in-depth book about sleep and the connections between sleep loss and disease and mental health along with car accidents and so much more. It was deeper perhaps than the average person needs, but with our fast-paced world and with my overly active brain, getting enough sleep is about as rare for me as seeing someone pay with cash and I really, really needed motivation to make it a priority in my life. I mean, come on seriously. Think about it. How often do you say or think or feel, not just tired, but utterly exhausted? As we age, and our bodies become less and less resilient, and the sleep loss compounds, it becomes harder and harder to deny.
I have spoken on several occasions on this podcast about how sleep deprived I became so quickly as a new mother. Now, I know that a lot of this had to do with the fact that I had already not had enough rest, of my own doing, for pretty much my entire life. And I am not complaining or calling myself unique here either, as I know for a fact that our culture is incredibly sleep deprived. It’s just a fact. The culture demands much more of us than the moments of our daily life actually allow for. Whether or not you are a parent, I am sure you get how it feels to be utterly exhausted and how it is to feel like you can never catch up on sleep.
Our bodies are our ally’s. I have another episode about making your body your ally and if you haven’t listened to it yet, I highly recommend that you go back and have a listen if this is resonating with you; it takes this specific idea on from a different but profound angle. But, regardless, our bodies are incredible physical houses for our inner being. Day in and day out, this Vessel works tirelessly to allow us to live every single aspect of our lives. The highly complex networks that are combined to make up the functioning bodies we have are still beyond our capacity to fully understand as science continues to unpack more and more about the miracles our bodies perform in every day activities we take for granted. Whether it is in seeing, or hearing, or walking… just keeping our hearts beating and our lungs breathing, and working them together… that alone should pivot our internal awareness toward humility, gratitude and complete and total respect and regard for the most incredible machine that exists on the planet, period; and yet, we disregard it regularly.
This is not at all me shaming anybody on your attitudes or habits, or trying to set yet another standard to which you now must try to meet. What this IS about is waking up to what our bodies do. Waking up to the privileges that our bodies afford us and starting to form the idea that will flourish in our minds that our bodies deserve listening to as much as our minds. When we meditate, we learn to listen to both our body’s and our minds. We learn to allow thoughts to come through without judgement, and to look at them with sort of a respectful observing.
The incredible intertwining of our body and our mind is a whole other topic, but the body works intimately with the mind as one. The body will manifest physical symptoms of something emotional that needs attention… this may sound like hoopla, but there is science to back it up. Check out the work on this by Dr. John Sarno. If we are not paying attention to our thoughts, and we are ignoring our bodies, our bodies will talk louder and louder until we listen. When emotions don’t get our attention, perhaps physical pain will. Or if the body perceives the emotional pain to be too intense for us or too dangerous, it might also use physical pain as a distraction. But regardless, our bodies are always talking to us.
My point here is that in seeking growth, we need to not be attached to the perfectionist idea that we have to do something at all costs. We need to be flexible. We need to be humble. If we choose to ignore our body, we can and will run it into the ground. Our bodies are each unique just as our very existence, and our bodies need us to listen, honor and respect them.
Time and time again, over the years, I would get sick and refuse to let the sickness take me down. I would push my body. I would get mad that I was sick, I would have internal dialogues running amuck about what was at risk if I didn’t push through with fear and anxiety and anger and I would push. It was a battle and I had to prove myself. I had to punish my body for not listening. To rebel against the limits my body threw at me. And time and time again my body would crumble. My body wanted to be my friend. My body needed me to feed it, to rest, and rest, and rest some more. My body needed me to work on the thoughts that were producing all sorts of unhealthy emotions that were being shoved down internally and manifesting physically. I chose to shove them down in the name of attempted or perceived control. Of fear and perfectionism. But I would inevitably lose, because I made it a battle.
This isn’t a battle. This thing you’ve got between you and your body… it’s a relationship. And the sooner you realize this, the sooner you can find a growth that is sustainable and gains incredible momentum because there is so much peace in learning to work with your body. There is a lot to working on your thoughts and understanding how they affect you physically, and in just listening to your body when it needs rest and when it needs food. When it needs water and fresh air.
As I mentioned before, simply focusing on rest will yield an incredible benefit. Focusing on checking in with your body regularly and stopping to rest.
Understand that when you rest when your body needs it will sometimes mean that you will feel like you’re failing. You will let people down. Even yourself, but this is where it gets tricky. When you’re a perfectionist, it goes from disappointment of a situation and assessing to understand… to disappointment in yourself and judgements of yourself. It can quickly move into punishing yourself physically or emotionally and that will never help you.
If you write anything down, I want it to be this. Listening to my body’s needs is never bad. It’s never something to be ashamed of and it never makes you less of anything good. Being brave here means you do what you need to do even when you don’t want to and even when it lets some people down.
You know what, when we make decisions there is always the potential that other people will themselves feel let down. There is always the possibility that you yourself will be let down, and more often than not I feel like I have let people down and only then do I feel that I have let myself down. We are NOT responsible for everyone’s emotions. We are responsible for our own emotions, and our own emotions stem from our thoughts. We cannot and should not try to control other people’s emotions and thoughts. Other people are autonomous beings. They are separate from you and outside of your control. If you spend your time and energy on worrying about or trying to control what other’s think of you then you are not living your life. Get your eyes on your own paper and remember what you can control. You can only work to control your thoughts.
Also remember that you won’t always do well at that either. That you will grow and improve and it will get better, easier, more second nature… but even your own thoughts will derail you at times. That is called, as I have said before, BEING HUMAN…
You can choose to become aware of these thoughts. Assess them and work on changing them again. You can realize where they came from and make a change.
This is where I believe that the idea that of defining failure differently is incredibly helpful. There was a Ted talk I listened to years ago where a woman was talking about how when she grew up her father gave her a totally different perspective of failure. Every time she would “fail” he would celebrate with her. He would get excited and they would rejoice together, reveling in it as a revered step in success. Every day at dinner he would ask what she failed at that day. If she hadn’t failed, the idea was that she wasn’t really living. He planted a thought within her that set her up for a different kind of life. One that didn’t fear failure, but looked forward to it… realizing that it is all about growth and progress and learning from the steps we have already taken.
When we don’t listen to our bodies it’s often because we are afraid to fail. Fear of failure keeps us from actual success as it either keeps us from acting or it keeps us acting in a way that’s not actually moving toward growth.
About this… this not listening to our bodies because we are afraid to fail: First of all, something not happening how we want it to because we listened to our bodies and filled our needs, really has nothing to do with listening to our bodies at all. This often means we tried to do too much regardless of the cost, and the ultimate choice at the end is between providing for our physical needs or pushing through and risking a battle of wills with our blessed vessels.
But then secondly, we see letting people down as failing. This is worth a whole other episode because sister, this is deep. We are not responsible for other people or how they think and feel and if we are wearing other people’s expectations on our shoulders then meeting them has become a prerequisite for our own self-love… and failing their expectations is not about failure at all, it’s about not really believing that what you can achieve is enough unless it’s what someone else either wants you to achieve or what you perceive that they want you to achieve. It’s about your value somehow hinging on them… on something outside of you.. That’s is completely backwards and where we find ourselves trapped.
If this is what you’re afraid of then sunshine, this is where our work is most vitally important because let me repeat, your value does not rest on the approval of any other human being on this planet. No matter what you do or do not do, you are enough. You are worthy of love and you are lovable. You were created for unconditional love. That means, you were created to be accepted sitting still in a chair doing nothing or sleeping as much as out in your day to day being productive. You were created for relationship; for relationship where you are fully loved, and where you love as well. When expectations of any other person matter to you, then they are binding you. Binding you to their judgement of whether you did or didn’t meet them and to your perceptions of meeting them. Binding your joy and the heartbeat of your life to something beyond your control. This is an utterly hopeless and dire pursuit.
This week, if you so desire, I would love it if you would try to become aware of your body and what it’s telling you day by day. Write down, now if you have a moment, how you feel both physically and emotionally. Recognize that more often than not, these two are related. What is your body trying to tell you? How can you respond? IF your body is trying to tell you to sleep, how can you make that happen?
Now, write down your apprehension here… because if there wasn’t something holding us back, then we would all just do what we need. Specifically, what is keeping you from meeting your body’s immediate physical provisions? Do you have too much to do? Do you have kids and a job and you just feel like you can’t?
In this culture and in this time, a large portion of the unmet needs we face have to do with rest. But our society is so over-taxed that when we list the things that we want to do for self-care, sleep is one of the last things on the list. Or if it’s at the top of the list, and given the time to sleep, we often choose other things. And, as I have said before, this is a whole other episode completely, but we need rest. If your body needs rest, you need to push yourself to make it happen. Stop pushing yourself to do all of the things on the to do list. Spoiler alert, the list usually doesn’t get smaller. I know, I am a productivity junky but I have kids and it just doesn’t shrink. No matter what, there will always be a list,.. BUT there won’t always be a person able to perform anything on the list or some of the things well if you don’t take care of yourself. You are your body’s team. Write down three ways that you can actually work towards meeting your needs for rest.
If sleep is your issue and you’re struggling… here are some ideas… many of which you’ve heard before but some of which you may not, and whether you’ve heard them or not, I’ll echo them as a reminder to you to select some to make the change happen. They will be a different kind of pushing yourself 😊. Delete Facebook or other social media apps that are time suckers. Put your phone on a timeout at 9 O’clock. Remove your TV from the bedroom. Get black out curtains and a sound machine. Hydrate all day long, and then drink your last glass of water about 7 or 8 or two hours before bed. Quit caffeine.
Do a deep breathing exercise just before bed drawing in a full breath through your nose and into your belly for a count of four. Hold it for a count of 7 and release it for a count of 8 through the mouth slowly. When you do this holding your tongue on the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth, this supposedly takes you out of your body’s fight-or-flight response, which so many of us are often stuck in with the stress of our culture and lifestyles, settling the sympathetic nervous system and allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to do it’s job in allowing you to rest and repair. If you’re in fight or flight, you’ll find it incredibly difficult to focus and your body will struggle to repair even during sleep. Try to get up earlier and go to bed earlier. Alternate with a spouse if you have kids for bedtime, if that’s an option. Get ready for bed right after dinner. Then wind down with a book rather than television.
Your body being exhausted might just be telling you that you have too much on your plate, and so many people do. Where can you take some off your plate? Where can you allow yourself to downsize your schedule to make room for the thriving in the rhythms of real life. Life doesn’t stop. It doesn’t slow down. In order to find rest and to thrive, you need to make it happen.
Forming a connection with your body takes appreciating it. To help begin to appreciate your body, write out things you’re grateful for regarding your body. If you have body image struggles, as most of us do or have struggled with in the past, you can write down things your body has made possible that you’re thankful for as a beginning step.
Remember, you can pursue success and thrive and grow and embark on this incredible journey toward more of the life you want but it should never come at the cost of your physical health. Your body is your biggest advocate and wants to be treated like your ally and not your enemy. Work with your body to help you to thrive. Thank your body for the loads of work it does for you every single day, since the day you were born. Remember that your body has enough work, and don’t expect more of it than is reasonable. You wouldn’t get mad at your car for running out of Gas when you didn’t fill up the Gas tank. You can’t get mad at your body for not running when you don’t allow it to recharge either. The idea of pushing yourself and not giving up and all of those incredibly empowering and beautiful messages is so true, but with context. Care for your body so it can take you to where you want to go. Listen to your body so you can push together, grow stronger, and go farther than you ever thought possible.
No, you won’t do it perfectly. Your body isn’t perfect and neither is the one who lives within it, but sunshine you’re incredibly loved and incredibly worthy and you will do and are doing great things. God needs only what you have, not more than you have. Give what you have and watch what can happen, but don’t neglect the very vessel you were blessed with which makes it all possible.
My hope for you as you go out into your day is that you feel overwhelming connection to the container that is your body; that you rethink the way you talk to and interact with your body and begin to nurture the beautiful relationship that is ready to flourish in the unity of your physical and non-physical being. This is only the beginning. You’ve got this.
Holly Ann Kasper
The Radical Imperfectionist