Episode 078 – how I quit listening to the crappy thoughts

Hello loves, today I’m talking about how I quit listening to the crappy thoughts.

When I was unwell I worried a lot about my life and if I’d get better. If I didn’t, what would happen then. I worried about being able to go to work. Which led to worrying about money and what if I lost my home.

I worried that I wasn’t eating well enough to recover, but I didn’t have the energy to be able to stand, let alone cook decent food. At the height of my illness I was also dealing with a shoulder injury, which caused a lot more pain, and didn’t help with being able to do much as it was my right arm, and I am right-handed.

If you are like me, you can spend a lot of time worrying and wearing yourself out, using up energy that you just don’t have. I felt helpless and hopeless.

When I was feeling like this I would binge on rubbish food, rubbish tv, and barely move off my sofa. I worried a little more, because I wasn’t doing anything, so naturally the vicious cycle continued.

It took a while to figure out that I was doing all this to myself. That I was the one standing in my way.

When I had that lightbulb moment of realising that it’s my thoughts that suck, and that I had absolute control over them, I was able to change them.

I don’t mean it to sound that easy. Because it isn’t. It still isn’t. It’s a fine line between the crappy thoughts, and toxic positivity.

Changing how you think isn’t easy. Neither is being unwell. You have more choice over one of those.

When I look back over the initial 3 years of recovery, I can see that the real work, the hardest work, was changing what I believed about myself.

I had to stop telling myself that everything I was doing was wrong. I had to stop telling myself about all the things that I couldn’t do. I had to stop telling myself about all the things other people were saying I’d no longer be able to do.

Most importantly I had to stop me from beating myself up for having these thoughts in the first place.

As humans with a brain designed to keep us safe, we are going to think thoughts that are designed to keep us small. If our Amygdala can keep us small and anxious, we’re not about to go out there and try anything that could get us hurt. And by anything, I mean living a life. Or if anyone makes a comment that might hurt. If I don’t pay attention to the things I then say to myself, before I know it I’m turning to all the foods that are going to make me feel worse.

We all have our comfort zones. Lately mine has felt bigger than it has for a while. It’s easier for me to sink down into the warmth of my comfort zone than it is to face up to what’s really bothering me.

I’ve been off social media recently because I’ve been taking the time needed to grieve over not birthing my own children, and to adjust as my body settles (hopefully) into its new peri-menopausal life. It’s like dealing with the ME all over again.

I am curating my thoughts. I am dealing with exhaustion, joint pain, my eczema has gone wild, and as for the mood swings…. Well… and everything feels like effort. 

James and I were offered an upgrade on our recent holiday to a room with a private pool. It was only for the first two days. Thank goodness James stepped in because I turned it down. A free upgrade to a private pool. But the thought of having to pack everything again after a couple of days to move rooms just felt like too much hard work. I wanted to just get into a room, and relax. It turned out that having a private pool so I could just lay in the sun without anyone else around me was ideal and appealed to my introvert self. It was actually, heaven. Then, when we moved into the room we had booked, it was beautiful and much bigger, and helped it to feel like we had been away a lot longer than we had. But honestly, in that split moment….

You have to slowly start finding the thoughts that are holding you back. 

Create a crappy thoughts list. You’ll start to spot patterns in both what you are saying and when you are saying it. And that’s when you can start to change it. You get to choose your new thoughts. Make them positive ones too. Don’t go overboard, we need you to be able to believe them when you’re in the bad thoughts place.

A huge crappy thought system with both chronic health and going through the menopause is that thinking and feeling of being unloved. Write a list of all the things that show that your partner does love you. So you can review it when you need to. Little things. Big things. What they do, what they say. Maybe it’s how they say it.

And in this difficult and trying time, I want you to remember these 6 ancient wisdoms:

Situations don’t upset you, beliefs do.
Control what you can, ignore the rest.
Accept everything, but don’t be passive.
Choose whose child you will be.
Morning and evening routines are essential.
Practice gratitude.

Okay, so this week I am also sharing that I am creating a free mini course, a mini SHIFT. 

It is a taster of my SHIFT to Alignment 8-week experience designed to take you from drained to sustained, chaos to calm, uncertain to confident, to become the most aligned, powerful and magical version of yourself.

My SHIFT to Alignment programme is more than just coaching. It’s nurturing, expansive, guidance, and strategy rolled into one, and you will literally have me at the other end of the phone cheerleading you as you progress, grow, and SHIFT.
We work through your mindset blocks, and how to take massive action on any area you want to realign.
We work through ways to work best with your body, and how to love your body, flaws and all, and see them for the powerhouse that they truly are, and much stronger than you think, as you find balance with the transition of menopause with a chronic illness.

And now you can have a taster of that in this free mini SHIFT. 

Five little units that you can complete at your own pace. Doing this work has such a profound impact on my life. Not by giving me all the answers, but because as life changes, new things come up, as we heal one thing it makes us stronger to take on the next. The work I put into SHIFT gave me the potential for massive, focused action that I had inside me to create change. And that potential, of course, resides in you, too.

You can get on to the waitlist at lifeinalign.com/minishift. I hope you check it out because everything on there is something that I have personally tested and love using, and have seen great results with clients.

And that is it for this week. 

Everything I mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes at lifeinalign.com/78.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Life in Align podcast. If you liked what you heard and want to hear or read more, head over to lifeinalign.com. 

Thanks for listening, and remember – you are worth it, and you get to choose.

Have a lovely day.