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The new year often means more pressure to do the things we think will make us “better”. This attempt to fix ourselves often comes from fear motivations… we think we aren’t enough and we are finally going to change that. But since our action comes from our emotion, which comes from our thoughts; a root of unworthiness will never produce a more satisfying life. Join me as I discuss letting go of more this year and assessing your motivating beliefs so that you can find the joy and peace in YOUR life being who YOU are, right now. Subscribe and share this episode with anybody who needs this message.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello Everyone! I hope your holidays were incredible, and not draining and you are excited about the new year. Today my talk will be pretty relevant to how people are feeling right now. I think that going into the new year, the topic of stress is a very relevant one. People get so excited for the new year, but it’s mixed with all sorts of emotions resulting from unchecked thoughts. We are amped up to make changes. We are motivated and excited, but again, underneath all of the hype, there is a litany of thoughts that can be overwhelming and cause more harm than good.
Recently I saw a post by a popular personal-development Guru that I follow (Brendon Burchard) that talked about figuring out what to do less of going into the new year. It talked about letting go as we plan and make changes in our lives, not just adding to our already full plates. I have seen a couple of these messages on social media and not only did they really make sense to me, but they resonated deeply with my tendencies and the tendencies of our culture in general to do more and strive for more.
My vision for my life is very counter-cultural. I do not wish to have a busier life, with more on our schedules or even more marked off of my to-do list. I wish to have less on my to-do list and less on my schedule. I wish to have more down time for reflection; down time for connection; and down time so that I can really absorb the goodness and beauty of what my life already holds in each moment; to fuel my life even more with gratitude and awareness. I want to have less emotional clutter, less digital clutter, less physical clutter and a slower, richer, and more focused life.
We are way too stressed out in this current age because we feel like we don’t have time for all of the pressures placed on our lives. We think that we have to know all about what is going on so we have the news on constantly, and we have notifications on our phones. We are afraid to miss out on anything, and because of this we overwhelm even our minds with a checklist of things to look up, and things to learn. Things we should be doing for our kids, or things they should be doing. The “should’s” and the “more’s” and the “have-to’s” are too much; they’re simply exhausting.
I have a really amazing friend that I’ve only begun to get to know on a deeper level these past several months and she too is a homeschooler and business woman and coach and her facebook page is appropriately named A Spacious Life. That phrase has come to represent a lot for me over the time that I have known her and as we have gone below the surface. She constantly inspires me, as Brendon mentioned, to let go of what’s not working… to do less, and focus more on what actually matters. That’s what I am talking about. She asks the question, is it a Hell Yes? And says if not, it’s a Hell No. We don’t have a lot of extra space in our lives, and yet we so often can unintentionally overload our lives with things we don’t even care about.
I am reading a book called The Self-Driven Child and it talks a lot about our human need for some sense of control. It talks about how much a perceived lack of control in life significantly and negatively impacts stress levels. It talks about how many children these days are chronically over-stressed and how that impacts the brain. Now, I’m not going to talk to you about parenting here, instead I am attempting here to share a little of the science that I am learning about in this incredible book to help you understand what happens to your brain when there is too much stress on a very basic level.
Backing this up a little bit, I wanted to share a bit of my story that relates well to this, as I love to do this. I am a person, and I struggle. Period. My many many struggles have led me to the work that I am doing here and to all of the great improvement I have seen in my life in the past several years.
Anyway, when I had my second son in Washington State, I was chronically stressed… but in denial. My husband and I had just moved with our two and a half year old son to Washington pretty spontaneously without me having even gone to the area first. He interviewed and got a job there and we got on a plane and moved away from family and friends and into the rain and snow of the beautiful pacific northwest just about the time that I was 8 months pregnant.
My husband did not enjoy his new job, he was incredibly stressed. I had a two year old with endless amounts of energy. I could barely sleep, and since my husband had gotten really sick just before we moved, I had packed us almost completely and found our desitnation rental and we moved.
Anyway, when my second son was born, he had a double heart beat and an eye-turn. This had never been on my radar. As I’ve said before, I was obsessed with health, but my obsessive attempts to control things (including health) and lack of awareness of the role of stress and emotions on health, I just didn’t understand how this was possible and I completely resisted it.
When I say he had an eye-turn, let me explain. I learned that an eye turn, also called esotropia when they turn inward (cross-eyes), is the most common type of eye turn and happens in around 5% of children. I learned that vision is not the same thing as eyesight and that the vision centers of the brain produce the cells for the brain to merge the images picked up by the eyes and perceived in the brain. If each eye does not produce a mirror image of the other, then the brain is unable to fuse the images into one, three-dimensional image and so this results in one of two things, either the person experiences double vision (two images close and somewhat overlapping but not the same, essentially blurred and very difficult on the eyes and brain) or the brain shuts off one eye deliberately, and only accepts the more clearer image. If the brain does this a lot, the shutting off of the one eye can result in blindness of that eye. Yes, the person can lose eyesight in the eye because the brain shuts it off. In order to shut it off the brain turns the eye in about 15 degrees or so roughly. This results in a cross-eye. There is also exotropia where the eye turns out, which is less common and different but not what my son had, and still has.
I learned that this can be from birth and accommodative; accommodative meaning that one eye is weaker than the other which causes the images not to be mirrored and that can cause the brain to turn the eye in. This can also happen from a brain injury or other experiences.
Anyway, I explain this because I never knew any of this and having this experience at the time was a lot, for me emotionally and because of my lack of knowledge… and because of fear. I didn’t know what to do. Doctors where pushing me to do surgery, and telling me that he would lose his eyesight. I was researching all I could and going to various doctors, also trying supplements for myself and I just became consumed. I even remember a woman coming to me in tears at the park one day seeing his eyepatch and unloading on me her turmoil with her son losing his eyesight… I had no idea what I was facing, and that did not help.
You see, I thought it was all my fault. The thing is, the stress I was under (by mere habit of my perfectionist tendencies along with external pressures of the move and so on) very likely contributed to this… it is possible… but I didn’t understand how to accept this. I needed to fix it. I had to control it. I couldn’t handle the guilt, and shame and fear. The fact is that although I could advocate, and learn, and do my best, (all things I did), I could not control the situation or undo it; I couldn’t rewind and make it not happen. I myself could not get in his brain and fix his vision so that his eyes worked together.
For all of you perfectionists, you know what I’m talking about and how hard that is. And this was my baby boy…
The truth is that we can’t control it all. We can do our best, we can work hard to manage what’s in our power, but doing our best DOES NOT MEAN doing it all or doing it all perfectly. Doing your best doesn’t mean that you know everything or how everything will turn out or that you can or should try to, control it all. It doesn’t mean you should prevent everything, because you can’t know all of it.
Motherhood is one of the most challenging experiences for perfectionists because we can’t control our kids; we can’t take away their challenges; we can’t make it all okay. We want to. But we can’t. I remember wanting four kids. I felt so knocked down when this happened, not because I wasn’t grateful to have a healthy beautiful baby boy, despite this challenge with his vision. I was knocked down because I took it on as being my fault, that it made me a terrible mother, and that I had to fix it. I was trapped in my fear and guilt and shame and it was so overwhelming. I made these circumstances that I couldn’t change mean something about me that I didn’t know I had a choice. I didn’t have to make this mean I was a terrible mother. I didn’t have to take this as being all my fault. I didn’t have to make this mean I had to fix it. I now know those are all choices of how to look at it. I now know that I can look at this as a part of life, and a challenge that will stretch me and teach me and trust that God will use this experience for both my son and for me, not to mention to help others that we meet along the journey.
I share this also because as I read this book, I am learning even more about how the brain works. We Perfectionists put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It’s too much. This pressure is overwhelming. When this happens, our subconscious mind is telling us to do more; telling us we are failing, telling us we have to do it better and saying it’s all our fault. While the lies are coming through our mind, our hero selves are also trying to break through, telling us it’s too much, telling us to rest, to take a break, and we don’t need to do it all… and yet the liar keeps pushing us. In our mind the thoughts can come from both ends, the thoughts cycling mostly are the ones we are listening to and believing; those are the ones we are feeding. We get run ragged when our thoughts are run by the lies… by the thoughts that are pushing us and blaming us, shaming us and running us by fear and guilt.
When we do this, the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that monitors, organizes and regulates the brain, can be taken offline and the amygdala takes over. The amygdala runs the fight or flight responses.
The part of our brain that allows us to learn, the pilot, stops working well and we become unable to retain information in order to learn, and to make well informed decisions. The amygdala, now in charge, makes us defensive, reactive, and sends messages to the pituitary and adrenal glands to release hormones which cause more issues. When this kind of stress is extreme and or chronic, the prefrontal cortex can then even shrink and the amygdala grow to accommodate the demands and then it becomes harder to plan and have self-control, to learn and organize; and easier to get caught in defensive and reactive patterns, procrastinating and so much more.
It throws hormones out of balance and makes sleep more difficult, so depression and anxiety more likely. This is not a life sentence, and I don’t say this to scare you. The brain is incredibly adaptive, as proven by all of the research done on neuroplasticity of the brain. I share this to help you to understand what is happening and what an impact it can have when you take the pressure off of yourself. We feel very trapped when we are stuck being run by the amygdala part of our brain, as the lies are perpetuated and yet there is a way out. Perfectionism makes us feel out of control. The pressure is too much and the goal of perfection is so impossible that we feel we can’t control anything. All of our energy is used up and as a result we are drained.
The pressure I used to put on myself to be the perfect mom, made it harder to be a good mom. When I was pushing myself this hard, I didn’t take care of me. I had no energy and no patience and I struggled deeply to be present. My thoughts were consumed with what I should have done, what I did wrong, and trying to fix and control all of the problems.
I want to share this as we go into the new year because the pressure from the outside world to do more, to be more, to have more and to do it all perfectly will not relent.
However, YOU DO GET TO make a difference in how this impacts you. You can proactively decide what in your life is not working. I am not saying to go “should” all over yourself, adding to your list of what you need to do to be perfect. I am saying, you need to ask yourself what is taking up space in your life and not fueling your purpose. Is there an area where you need to let go a little? Perhaps there are circumstances in your life that you don’t have control over, but you’re resisting and won’t let go. Like me, with my son’s vision… I had to learn to let go. I still care, and we still do vision therapy and I work for him as his advocate, but I let go of the story that made this my fault. I let go of the lies that said that I am a bad mom, or that I need to fix it for him and instead I love myself and I love my son. Instead, I am now grateful to God for this experience that I sort of allowed to break me, until I was in a place where I could see that it was never in my hands to begin with. I am now grateful for the experience because of all that I have learned, and grateful for what an amazing creation the human body is.
You get to choose what’s not working and let go. Let go of beliefs that are from lies, which produce fear and shame and pain inside. Let go of expectations of the future for what is beyond your control and then focus on love. Focus on what fuels your life and provides energy for you and your family.
Just like the visual process of the brain, the thought world too can change. Vision is not something you’re born with, it’s something your brain learns to do, unlike eyesight. This is similar to thoughts. Your brain learns to filter through thoughts in a certain way and believe them, but you can learn how to change the way your brain filters through information to form thoughts by becoming aware of the thoughts, practicing the ones that actually help and rewiring your brain with what you choose to believe.
Remember as you go into the new year, that it’s not just about starting new, it’s about accepting yourself where you are at. Look at the motivation for any of your resolutions, and if they are from lies that you feel you need to do in order to be loved or lovable, then reevaluate because sunshine, you’re already enough… you always have been. If you don’t believe that, then this should be your number one focus, starting now, not on on January 1st or 2nd or 10th, RIGHT NOW. Simply assess the thoughts motivating the planned resolutions you hope to act on. You’ll find that if your thoughts are from freedom, love, and truth; which have to do with acceptance and embracing who you are in all of your imperfection, then you will find incredible growth in this new year. However, if your resolutions for the new year are based in thoughts of needing to change yourself to be enough, to make up for something you’ve done, or out of fear, then even with good actions, your internal world will feel empty and you will struggle to maintain momentum. Shame causes people to crumble, and love causes us to soar.
I know I am an incredibly imperfect mother who loves both of my boys well. I am confident in my mothering now, not because I know if I am doing any or all of it right, but rather because I actually truly love and accept myself and so my pursuits in the realm of mothering have to do with loving and accepting them too from the abundance I already have from God and myself internally, they have nothing to do with meeting some impossible external or internal expectation.
I hope, as you prepare to take your steps into the new year that you find not only some motivation in this but some clarity on where your motivation should come from. Take time to rest. Assess where you want to go from the perspective of freedom, not fear, and find peace in not doing and being and having it all, or doing it all perfectly.
Continue the conversation with me on Instagram or over at theradicalimperfecitonist.com. Until next week my friends, I hope you have an amazing new year’s two-thousand-twenty and I will talk to you NEXT YEAR!!! Happy new Year! This is Holly Ann Kasper, the Radical Imperfectionist.