Wellish

This week, I confess the conflicting thoughts and feelings I have about my physical, mental, and emotional wellness. I share how I’m following my “neutral yeses” to decide what to prioritize, and why chasing the feeling of being good enough can keep us dissatisfied. I discuss aligning our actions with our intentions while working through the feelings that come up, rather than waiting to feel ready or confident. I also share the books, journals, and YouTube videos I’ve been exploring. Finally, in Confessions of a Wellish Listener, we discuss wanting to read and journal but struggling to put down the phone.

On today's episode I am breaking down our struggle with boundaries. Using research-based evidence I am breaking down the five reasons we struggle with our priorities the most to bring awareness to the subconscious processes that so many of us automatically fall into. Normalizing why we struggle with our priorities will help to recognize when you are falling into the same patterns so many of do to try and course correct and instead choose the behaviors you want not just the behaviors you're used to. Then I provide an exercise that will actually help you to choose what priorities should be your current focus by using the way our brain's default function of always looking for what's familiar to us to do the work for us. I end the episode with actionable steps for you to actually start prioritizing these things in your life in a very low maintenance not overwhelming way.

On this week's confession episode, I tell you about my years long evolution into a mental rut, how that came to be, what made me realize it, and what I'm doing to start working towards getting out of it. Then I touch on habits I have been implementing to create upward spirals and dial in my internal locus of control in an effort to close my knowledge to skill gap and start taking action on all of the thoughts I have developed and grown over time, After that I tell you about a concept I learned in Daniel Chidiac's Stop Letting Everything Affect You about why our minds cling to emotional pain and how it subconsciously causes you to continue patterns without realizing it. I tell you how this impacts my romantic relationship and my relationship with my wellness. Lastly, I end on a listener question about gratitude journaling and walk you through my morning and night 5-minute gratitude journal.

On today's episode I am talking about the research backed and widely discussed and debated definition of the term wellness, how to create an upward spiral toward becoming well and developing a strong locus of control. I discuss how we mistakenly discuss health and wellness interchangeably and why you don't have to be in a complete state of health in order to experience wellness. Then we discuss how wellness has no end point and it is the constant progression towards personal development. I explain how to create upward spirals in your life and how your locus of control determines your success rate of creating upward spirals. If you are always striving to be well but feel you're constantly falling short this episode is for you.

On this episode I am introducing some new segments into our causal Friday episodes. I start the episode talking about my Wellish confession of the week that I have a god complex when it comes to being a good friend and unpack it right there with you guys to discover tendencies stemming from my good enough wound and self-protection. Then we discuss the real-life application from the week for Monday's episode and how I made my routines more rewarding to get in front of procrastination. After that I ranted about positive psychology, upward spirals, and a strategy to sit through the discomfort of our thoughts and feelings instead of trying to eliminate them unsuccessfully. Lastly, I shared a DM for Confessions of a Wellish Listener about how to give yourself grace but still be consistent without being stuck in the loop of not feeling enough.

If you want to develop any sort of wellness habit let it be physical, mental, emotional etc. you are going to be faced with procrastination, ESPECIALLY if you struggle with perfectionism and/or being hard on yourself. There is so much shame surrounding procrastination, so on today's episode I want to separate you from the shame that you've built up around your procrastination habits that have led you to either avoid it completely or muscle through it with self criticism. I am breaking down what chronic procrastination is, how it happens and my four steps to overcome it. Whether you procrastinate knowingly or unknowingly about big or small things this episode is for you.

I thought the goal was getting rid of the negative overwhelming thoughts, but I've recently learned I've been working my a** off to fix the wrong thing. The real goal is making yourself capable of protecting yourself in the midst of the inevitable thoughts and feelings. On this episode I giving you five of the best ways I have found we can protect ourselves in the face of an emotional storm no matter of big or small the storm is. If you resonate with this, you have likely spent a lot of time inflicting cruelty on yourself creating the shame of powerlessness within you. Between the self-doubt, self-criticism, self-abandonment, comparison (shall I go on?) we are basically laying belly up in a field being annihilated by the emotional storm. After listening to this episode, you will begin to develop the 5 skills that will help you protect yourself to gain mental clarity, resilience, control leading to confidence, and even tools to achieve your habits and goals.

If you have ever tried to engage in basic wellness habits like exercise, drink water, getting better sleep or rest, eating whole foods, putting yourself in spaces to learn new things then you know that the more you engage in these habits the better mentally you feel. And if you don't know this yet, it possible you haven't engaged in the wellness habits consistently enough to recognize the difference but have heard time and time again that doing so will help you. Today's episode I am breaking down why we struggle to do the wellness habits we want to even though we know they will help us feel better. I provide 5 reasons we have these barriors using research-based evidence to help raise your awareness and work towards incorporating these habits into your life in a way that is much more effective than sheer willpower and "trying harder." If you have a goal of feeling better mentally or you just struggle to incorporate basic wellness into your life, and want to, this episode is for you.

The tools we're given to stop anxiety, rumination, anger, sadness insert any negative emotion is causing us to suppress our feelings. When we protect ourselves in that way to stay safe or avoid conflict it keeps our emotions in preventing us from healing which leads to unwanted tension. In this episode we are discussing how you have to let yourself sit in the uncomfortable feelings and simultaneously take action despite them. We discuss why this is the way you will actually get closer to ridding yourself of them completely than taking the short come to become the dream version of yourself you picture in your head, but you always end up falling short. I end the episode with tips to dive deeper and express your feelings, so you can practice this in your everyday life.

I took a week away from Wellish and realized I’d been trying so hard to get the podcast “right” that it stopped feeling like a place to hang out.

In this episode, I’m talking about what changes in Season 5: more honest, less edited conversations about self improvement, without turning every conversation into another list of things you should be doing. I also get into being called “aggressive,” the moment I caught myself wanting to change how I show up so people would like me, and how that fear has kept me at arm’s length from people.

Catching the pattern didn’t instantly make me fearless. But it gave me a chance to stop following it. That’s the kind of conversation I want Wellish to make room for.