How to Not Take Your Hard Week Out on Your Family

Episode 134 - How to Not Take Your Hard Week Out on Your Family

Have you had a hard week? Do you feel depleted and have nothing left to give? Has your brain and/or body shut down because you just can’t do any more than you’re already doing?

If this is you, listen to this episode for five things you can do right now to begin taking care of yourself. 

You don’t need to take an expensive vacation, go shopping, or get a massage (unless you really want to!). What you really need when it’s been a hard week, is to do a different type of self-care. This is the kind you can do to take care of yourself every day. And these five things will help you increase your capacity to handle the stress of life.

Tina Gosney is a certified life and relationship coach. She helps her clients move past contention in their homes and move into connection. It all begins with you and that's the best news ever, because that's the only person you have control over. You can be the person who directs your family to a new way of relating.

Tina is a positivity practitioner and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information

Transcript

Tina Gosney: 0:05

Welcome to the coaching your family relationships podcast, where we work on you. My name is Tina Gosney, your host, as well as your family relationship coach, and positive relationship strategist. When we make peace with what's happening inside of you, you'll begin to find the peace you're looking for and your family relationships. Let's get started. I was recently texting an old friend just to catch up and see how she and her family were doing. I was asking her about her son. And I really didn't think the answer that she gave me was very out of the ordinary. I knew that her son had been struggling with some things. And I was just checking up on her and on him. And after we just texted forth, back and forth a couple of times, she said, Sorry, if I sound heartless, it's been a really draining week at work, and I'm having a hard time. I didn't even notice, I didn't think she sounded heartless. But in her mind, she was being heartless. I think we can all relate to my friend. And sometimes we feel heartless. Sometimes it's been a really draining week. And we're having a hard time. When was the last time that you had a difficult week, and you didn't feel like you had the emotional or physical bandwidth to handle anything or anyone except the things that were right in front of you. And maybe you didn't even have the bandwidth to handle what was right in front of you. Have you ever had a hard day, a hard week, month or even a year? I've had a hard year and think I've had actually several hard years in a row? Have you ever had those and you end up taking out your difficulties, your emotions, on the people around you? I have usually the people closest to us are our family. When we're struggling and life feels too much. We ended up taking out on people that are right there in our families right there. So how do we handle this in a healthier way? Or at least a non destructive way to ourselves or to other people? How do you take care of yourself in a way that really lets you recharge and build your strength backup. I don't know how my friend handled her hard week, I don't know if she took care of herself or if something else happened. She is one of the kindest people that I know. And I really love and admire her. But I'm recording this podcast because I think we can all relate to what she said in that text and that situation that she was in. What I'm talking about today is self care. And I know that self care has some negative connotations to a lot of people. It's kind of a buzzword these days online. But what we usually refer to with self care are things like, let's take a vacation and relax on the beach somewhere or get a massage or a pedicure, or indulgent a pint of ice cream. Now, I'm not going to talk about those things, you can do those things if you want to. That's not how I define self care. Those are things that let you escape your life. But they don't really expand your capacity to handle difficult situations. So that you don't need to escape your life. They don't usually help you do that. Usually your stressful life is waiting for you, when you come back from vacation. Or when you get home from the massage or you have really pretty nails. Like all of those things, these problems are still waiting for you if you haven't handled your ability to expand your capacity to handle them. So I want to talk about this today, in a way self care in a way that actually nourishes your soul and rejuvenates you and expands your capacity to handle stress of life. But first, what happens if you don't do this? If you don't take care of yourself? Well, what usually happens is that you will take your emotions out on yourself and on other people. Because we are very quick to get very unkind to ourselves and others when we are feeling overwhelmed, and stressed and overworked and exhausted. And this could very quickly damage our relationships with our family and with ourselves. We're not thinking clearly when we get into those states. We want to make sure that we are doing things that help us to start thinking more clearly. And the things that I'm going to give you today are going to help you do that. I have five things for you today to take care of yourself. But before we get into those five things, the first thing to ask yourself is what do I really need right now. And when you ask yourself that quite question I want you to listen to your body, we are very bad at listening to the wisdom of our own bodies. Did you know your body is so wise it's communicating to you all the time. But we get so distracted, we get so busy, we are so disconnected from our bodies that we fail to listen. So getting familiar with what your body is trying to tell you. And then honoring whatever that is, is a really powerful tool that you can use. I want you to be aware of some things that we call buffers. And these are things that do not rejuvenate you, they will deplete you do you have like a hard floor on your house, maybe a tile or hardwood, and then you have some furniture sitting on that, on that hard floor, maybe a furniture that's not on top of a rug, right. So you don't want the furniture to scratch the floor. So on the bottom legs of the furniture, you put those little felt pads, you know, those little sticky felt pads. That's what these buffers do to us. They are a buffer in between ourselves and our emotions, so that we don't have to feel them. Because our emotions sometimes are so overwhelming and overpowering to us that we don't feel like we can handle them. So we go to these buffers instead. Here are just a few buffers. And this is by far not a complete list. But these are really common buffers. binging on social media, binging on food, especially food that is not healthy nourishing food. Keeping yourself really busy overworking yourself, that's a good one. Service. No service, sometimes is a buffer, and sometimes is not how do we know when service is a buffer. When we're doing it in an attempt to avoid something, a situation a person a feeling, it can be a buffer, it can be rejuvenating, when we're doing it because we want to. And it's a choice not when it's done out of obligation or distraction. Some other common buffers are alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling, shopping, binge watching any of these things, when done to excess, they're at an effort to distract you from your own life. So you don't have to face reality. And when we use these things in that way, they are not rejuvenating, they will deplete you further. And you'll feel worse after you do them than before you did them. I want you to be aware of the buffers that are keeping you from truly living and experiencing your life and your emotions. Your emotions are a part of that very wise body that you're being carried around in. Most people are not willing to feel difficult emotions. They're very disconnected from the wisdom of their own bodies. Are you one of those people? Here's the first thing you can do to start taking care of yourself. And that is spend some time in silence, I want you to turn off everything. Let your brain rest, no phone, computer, music, any other device, no other people to look at or to communicate with. Just be still and be with yourself. There's a reason that the great thinkers in so many generations past and today, they talk about meditating or quieting our minds. Our minds are going all day long. Their main job is to keep us safe and alive as long as possible. And to do that they have to alert us to every possible danger. Even if there aren't immediate dangers, or brain is going to make up one. We need to learn how to quiet this part of our mind. What I'm talking about here really is meditation. And I know that can be a scary word for a lot of people. So please hear me out here. I know that meditation can be very uncomfortable at first. That is normal. If you've tried it before, and you were like that did not work for me. I'm just gonna ask you to maybe give it another chance. There's a book called The Power of Stillness, that I really like this quote I took from that book. And they said, "Staying present in the midst of whatever feelings and thoughts arise is the point of meditation. The intent is not to purge oneself from these or any other sensations in order to reach a state of calm, but rather to observe the full spectrum interactivity of the mind and body from a place of acceptance and stillness." And I think that last part is key from a place of acceptance and stillness. Because as soon as we sit still while we become aware of what's going on in our mind and in our body, and it can be very frustrating to us, because our brain will go crazy. It goes nuts, oh, with thoughts as soon as you're trying to slow down and sit in silence. And if you have experienced this, then you are completely normal. When we get silent, then we have slowed down long enough for our inner critic to have a voice, right. So we start to notice the thoughts that we have inside of our own brains. And a lot of those thoughts are not very nice to ourselves, we have a very harsh inner critic. If you notice this, again, you are normal. And I want you to practice maybe saying something like this."Wow, my inner critic is really active right now, it's just because I stopped long enough to notice it. That's totally normal. And just because I'm thinking something does not make it true." Now you can say that you can take my my words, word for word Here's number two, do a brain dump. If you're trying to sit in silence, but your inner critic is just too loud, try doing a brain dump. Our brains are working over time when we are struggling, you might think that your brain is like shutting down if you want to. But try to make it in your own voice, something like it's just so full, it's shutting down. But I promise you it's not it's just working in the background. And it's exhausting you. Did you know that your brain has over 60,000 thoughts every single day. When I look at that number, just thinking about 60,000 thoughts, that alone is exhausting. And I want you to realize that whatever you are thinking you are creating in your life. So whatever your brain is thinking, even if you're not aware of it, your brain is like oh, okay, that's what we're going to do. And it's making that come true in your life. So if you're thinking about problems, then your brain is going to show you more problems. If you're thinking about how many things you have to do, and going through your checklist, and you're feeling really overwhelmed, your brain is going that sounds normal for you. Just like any other skill, you can to show you even more things that you air quotes should be doing. Even though they might not even have been on your original to do list. If you're thinking about what your spouse said to you last night, that was a little hurtful, then you're going to spin around and around and around in that conversation, replaying it over and over again in your mind. And as you do this, it's going to get more elaborate, and you're going to be hurt even more. So let's do a brain dump. Let's get out a piece of paper and a pen. Get out a timer. set that timer for 10 minutes and start writing write everything that comes into your brain. Don't stop for any reason until that timer goes off. Don't edit anything. Don't erase anything, don't correct anything including spelling. And most of all, don't judge anything that you write on get better at meditating and sitting still, if you're willing that piece of paper, just dump it out. It doesn't matter what you do with this paper. When you're done. You can rip it up. You can save it you can do whatever you want with it. But just getting those thoughts out onto a piece of paper is going to free them up in your mind. Here's number three. Breathe. Now you might say Tina, I'm already breathing. What are you talking about? Yes, if you're listening to this, you're alive and you're breathing. But how are you breathing? Is your breathing really shallow? Is it quick and fast? If you get upset do you hold your breath. So many of us are holding our breath very often and we don't even know it. So let's slow down our breath. Your breath is the quickest way for you to calm your body down and begin to feel to put in some time to learn it. benefits increase exponentially better. When you can calm your body. Your perspective begins to change. Life doesn't seem so overwhelming. You can start to think more clearly. You'll start to become more aware of what's in your control and what isn't in your control. And that alone can be very freeing. So think about slowing your breath down. Fill your belly with air, and then slowly exhale, letting it all out. Do that 10 times, and you'll begin to feel a lot better. Number four, get out into nature put your feet on the ground, and putting your bare feet onto the grass or soil can be very calming and grounding. We all need to spend more time getting grounded back into our bodies every single day. In modern Western culture, we are very cognitive thought head driven. We let our minds and our thoughts rule our lives. But our over time when we do this. But there has to be repeated brains were not meant to do that much work. And our brains love to ruminate about the past, remind us about all the ways the things that have gone wrong, and the ways that we have failed, or the ways that other people have failed us. And they like to worry about what's going to happen in the future. Like we're trying to predict the future all the time. When we get grounded inside ourselves, we bring ourselves back into the present moment, you can become aware of what's happening inside your body, and that can be very calming, we only have control and power over the present moment, we don't have control of the past, we don't have control of the future. Putting your bare feet on the ground for just a few minutes will help you sleep better too. It has great health benefits. practice in order to reach that point. But with that being said, Now, if doing that is not an option for you. There are other things that you can do to get grounded. So a quick Google search will help you find some of those. And maybe someday I'll do an episode on grounding. But that's not today. So if getting out into nature, and putting your feet on the bare ground is not doable for you and you want to try getting grounded, do so do a Google search and find something else. Here's number five, connect with one of your top two relationships. Maybe top three, if that will rejuvenate you. And here's what I mean. We have five top key relationships in our lives. Number one is with our Creator. Number two is with ourselves. Number three is our family. And that includes in this order, spouse, children, extended family, number four you can gain benefits of sitting in still quiet mindfulness for other people. And number five are things. So we're going to focus on the first two of those today in this podcast, which is your Creator, and yourself. I'm not here to convince you to believe the same about God that I do. I have a firm faith in my Creator. And maybe you do too, with your Creator, the universe, your spirituality, whatever your beliefs are about, about a higher power, I want you to go towards that. Take time to connect to this higher power and your spirituality, and strengthen that relationship. Whatever feels good and right to you here. It is important. Don't discount it go strengthen that within yourself. The second relationship with yourself, most people don't even realize that they have a relationship with themselves. just a few minutes. If even if you've never done it before. Remember how I was talking about the harsh inner critic before? Like that, of course, you have a relationship with yourself, you talk to yourself all the time, you treat yourself a certain way all the time. You might be really nice to someone else, and then talk to yourself like you hate yourself. No wonder you're feeling depleted if this is the case. So how can you be kind to you? If you're going to be kind to yourself? Like you're a very important person? What would you be thinking about yourself? How would you feel about yourself? Would you be doing anything differently than you're doing right now. Take time to strengthen that relationship with yourself. Now, if it's rejuvenating, we can go into relationship number three, which is your family, your spouse, your children, or extended family. If you get rejuvenation and connection from and if it feels appropriate to help you to deal with your hard week, then go into strengthening one of those relationships too. I've just given you five ways to take care of yourself when you're having a hard week. You don't have to do all five, just pick one. And if you pick one originally that isn't working, then just drop it and try a different one. These things are here to work for you. You're not here to work for them. Pick something that is matching the energy that you're feeling. And if you're feeling angry, that's a lot of energy. Maybe you want to get outside and put your feet in the grass and throw a ball for your kid or your dog. Or maybe you just want to throw something. If you're feeling sad, a brain dump would be a great place to start. So start exploring those thoughts that you have inside your head. Just get them out onto a piece of paper. start releasing them out of your own head. Or maybe if you're feeling overwhelmed and overworked. Try sitting in silence For a minute, if a minute is too long to do 30 seconds. If a minute isn't long enough, then do five or 10. Just try to match the activity that you're doing with your present energy and emotion. Now go take care of yourself because your family will thank you. Hey, if you are finding value here on this podcast, please consider hopping on to Apple podcasts or Spotify and leave a rating maybe even a review your ratings and reviews help other people to find this podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this and for your support.