Reconnect with Yourself
When was the last time you checked in with yourself? Has it been awhile?
How are you feeling right now? Physically? Mentally? Emotionally?
When you don’t take the time to check-in with yourself, you’re taking away some of the most valuable pieces of information to help you feel your best. But checking in with yourself can be super challenging, especially when you’re scared that you’ll get information that you don’t really want to know. Like that you’re feeling tired or in pain.
It’s so easy to use external cues to determine how you should be feeling and ignore what your body is telling you. You look at your watch to tell you if your workout was ‘good enough’. You check an app on your phone to see how many calories you’ve eaten that day to see if you can have that extra snack. You listen to the opinions and expectations of your friends and family to determine if you’re doing ‘the right thing’ with your life. If you keep looking outside of yourself it’s going to be really hard to create a life that works best for you.
But avoiding checking in with the signals your body is giving you is doing more harm than good. If you ignore it when you’re feeling tired and fatigued and push through anyway, you end up feeling burnt out and even more exhausted afterward. If you ignore it when you’re feeling sad and alone, you can spiral into a very dark place and forget about all the people in your life that love and support you. If you ignore when you’re body is telling you that it’s in pain, you can’t take steps to figure out what is or isn’t working in your life to manage your symptoms.
The first step to making an actual change in your life is becoming more aware of yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, and what your body is telling you.
Start by asking yourself:
How do I feel right now?
What is my energy like?
What are my emotions like?
What are my thoughts like?
What are my symptoms right now?
The answers to these simple questions can help make you more aware of how you’re feeling each day and throughout the day (cause you know how you feel in the afternoon may be completely different from how you felt this morning.) And just increasing your awareness of how you feel, you’ll have more information to adjust what you’re doing each day to try to get you to feel better and better.
Try asking yourself these questions every time you go to the bathroom (I mean what else are you going to do) that way you have multiple times each day to check-in.
After you try this, I’d love to hear what comes up for you! Please reach out or let me know in the comments.
-Chelsea