What to do when we are simply enduring life
Hello beautiful,
When we are moving through times of deep stress, our instinct can be to hold our breath and just endure until we get out the other side.
Which might work ok in the short term, but when it feels like it’s day in day out, week in week out, maybe year in year out – it’s exhausting.
More than exhausting.
This sensation of having to just endure and get through can lead us into actually not doing things we need to because we know that we will encounter a period of challenge.
It can lead to delaying or avoiding or, if we must do it, pushing through and counting down the moments until it ends.
But given we can’t avoid challenges, how do we move through them without this hold-our-breath and just endure approach? Or counting the seconds until this week is over?
The first thing to know is that when we are trying to ‘just relax’, to feel like things are easier, and it’s not working, is that our body is in survival mode. It has turned on its high alert protection system, which is awesome when we are in an emergency state. But real life shouldn’t feel like an emergency state, should it?
This is why ‘just relaxing’ doesn’t feel possible.
What do we do? How do we unfurl that tightness and tension, how do we relax into a state of being that is able to move through challenging experiences – and even change how they feel for us?
The first step is to notice that when we are feeling a form of deep urgency, when we are in tunnel vision and we can’t think of anything else, when we think about our body and we are holding our breath or shallow breathing, when we feel disconnected from our bodies – these are all signs that our survival mode has turned on.
And when we are in survival mode we are in such a deep state of high-alert, protection mode, we can’t allow ourselves to relax.
So we have to make physical moves to help ourselves feel physically safe, to bring us out of urgency mode.
I want to mention at this point the additional challenge that is our thoughts. Our thoughts are affected by how we feel.
You know that feeling when we are feeling anger, our thoughts will often be angry. When we feel sadness or fear, our thoughts will generate all kinds of sad or fearful thoughts.
But how we’ve learnt to be with our thoughts is we mostly believe them. We think thoughts are saying facts, when in fact they are just generating thoughts based on how we feel.
When they are saying there is something to be scared of, or something to be angry about, we’ll most often totally believe them.
When our thoughts feel overwhelming, panicky or ragey, we believe them too. So we get all lost in this tangle of our thoughts and the more we generate overwhelming thoughts it can feel like the more overwhelmed we are.
Most of the time our thoughts don’t have some incredible facts & evidence at hand that everything is terrible/sad/rageful/worthy of panic.
But we believe them *because* they are issuing opinions about our situation / experience that are pretty dramatic.
I am never going to figure this out!
My life sucks! It’s all terrible!
What’s wrong with me?
Why am I so ragey / panicky / freaked out about this?
My wife/child/father is awful, just awful!
And when we stay with our thoughts, things can get bleaker and bleaker and bleaker.
More and more stressful.
The good news is that it’s like your brain has entered a dark tunnel that is full of rubbish thoughts and stress, but you can learn how to come out of that dark tunnel any time, and open your vision up to the bright and beautiful possibility of a sunny day and bright blue sky.
You can train your brain to see possibility and ideas, instead of dread, overwhelm, stress, rage or panic.
And you do this by bringing sensations of calm ease, regulation and safety into your body.
If you have any questions or you’d like to share anything with me, hit reply and let me know.
Much love to you,
Diana