Emotional Self Care

Emotional self-care is feeling and being okay with all of life’s emotions. Having and feeling all the emotions life has to offer is a great way to increase joy. In order for us to feel positive emotions, we need to be able to contrast them with the unwanted negative ones; and when we make a choice to do so, instead ignoring or pushing them down, we’re capable of achieving any goal. Listen in to discover how you can learn to balance your emotions and how to get better at feeling every emotion, becoming a more JOYFUL YOU in the process.

You won’t want to miss this episode!

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TRANSCRIPT:

I’m Rachael Collins at the Joyful You Podcast; this is episode 64: Emotional Self-Care

Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.  On this show I talk all about living a joyful life on purpose so you can be live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self. Let’s do this.

When I was a young mom and had 3 little ones under the age of 3, my husband, who at the time was working long late hours, offered to get kids up and fed while I did something I wanted to do in the mornings – go for a walk, read something, whatever.

I know he was trying to do something serve me, but I felt guilty. I felt guilty because I had belief that I wasn’t doing a “good job” as a mother if I wasn’t there 24/7 for my kids.

Yet I was burnt out and exhausted and often acting like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street.

I was constantly going going going like the Energizer Bunny but my batteries were pretty much dead.

I know my husband was sensing this, and being the awesome guy he is, he insisted that it was okay for me to take some time to recharge.

Which I reluctantly did at first, but then I actually began to enjoy my hour of me time and because of it, I was able to show up as a better mom for my kids, a better wife, a better daughter, a better friend, a better everything because I took some time for myself.

I have a 14-year-old daughter now, and I often have the privilege of being her and her friends’ Uber driver. And as I’m driving these cute teenagers around, I started noticing a trend. Every time I drive them, at least one or two of her friends are whipping out a charging cord and plugging in their phones.

They are so smart!!! They know that if they want their phone to work, it needs to be charged because if it’s not charged or the battery gets too low, the phone either isn’t going to work properly or it’s going to completely die and they’ll have no way of contacting me, their Uber driver, to come pick them back up.

This was me! I was just like this phone battery. I was running all my best apps, full speed ahead. I was doing some awesome and amazing things just like a smart phone, but my battery was draining and I wasn’t taking the time to recharge it. I was having to go into power-saving mode, and all of you know that power saving mode stinks. Your phone doesn’t function very well in power saving mode. You can only do the basics of the basics. That was me. And when this happens to me, I don’t function at my best and even there for a while, I was hardly functioning at all.

I was so busy saying yes to everybody and everything but myself. I had this belief again that good moms do this, good neighbors do this, good Church members do this, my list of to-do’s was long and I was constantly running around trying to do it all. I was making dinners, delivering dinners, volunteering at Church and at my kids’ school, I was running my household, and trying to be a good friend, all the things. I was taking care of everyone else’s needs but myself. I wasn’t taking the time to care for myself or to slow down and my body found a way to force me to. I started not feeling very well and it led to hormonal imbalances, depression, fibromyalgia, weight gain, major fatigue and constant headaches. I could barely function.

It wasn’t until I started taking the time to nourish my own self and to meet my own needs that I slowly, and I mean slowly, began to heal. I learned a huge lesson about self-care. It was necessary. I learned that I didn’t need to feel guilty about it. I learned that self-care grounds me and connects me not only to myself, but it allows me to slow down enough and take the time to plug into the SOURCE of it all, Jesus Christ. When I take the time to recharge our battery, just like a fully charged phone, I’m able to serve better. I show up better and I’m able to do all the things so much better.

We just got back from a trip. Every time we fly, we hear flight attendants sharing some variation of the Oxygen Mask Rule: “Should the cabin lose pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead area. Please place the mask over your own mouth and nose before assisting others.”

Why do they say this? What’s wrong with helping others first? Why not help your kids first before you put on your own oxygen mask? Because without our oxygen mask on, we will quickly lose consciousness and then we won’t be able to help anyone at all!

Yes, we may willingly and lovingly choose to sacrifice ourselves on behalf of our kids, our coworkers, our Church assignment, whatever, but our choice may come at the expense of our own physical, mental, emotional, and even spiritual health. We experience burnout and then we’re not able to function at our best.

To avoid burnout and your battery getting dangerously low, self-care is key!

The thing about self-care is that it’s going to look different for everyone. It’s personal. What fills up my battery, may drain yours, so it’s important that you do what feels best to you. It’s about meeting your own individual needs so you can be physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy. You want to find things that light you up, that energize you, that make you feel whole again.  That is what you are looking for.

On last week’s show, I shared that self-talk is a form of self-care. Today I want to share another form of self-care that I find really helpful is feeling and being okay with all of life’s emotions. I got really good at pushing down and ignoring the stress, the disappointment, the frustration, the sadness, the anger, all the unwanted emotions that I didn’t like feeling. I think I was hoping they’d just go away and I wouldn’t have to feel them or deal with them. I was under the impression that if I feel bad feelings, then I’m bad. Good moms feel happy and loving all of the time! Boy! Was I delusional!

That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Good moms have all the emotions and they feel them. You’ve got to feel it to heal it. When we don’t allow our feelings and we pretend they don’t exist, like we’ve talked about before, they grow and get stronger until suddenly they either cause us to get sick, like was my case, or they eventually bubble up and we explode, which I’ve often done a lot!

I recently heard an awesome analogy for this last week at a conference I attended from a woman named Jessica. Sorry Jessica, I didn’t get your last name.

She said, pretend your unwanted feelings are vegetables. Every time we don’t deal with them, they get shoved into a backpack that you carry around. The carrot of Stress goes into the backpack, a potato of shame goes into the backpack, etc. We think they’re safe inside the backpack and we’ll never have to deal with them again. Wrong!

Soon they begin to rot. Have you ever smelt a bad potato? It’s one of the grossest smells ever! All the feeling vegetables inside our backpack, start to get gross and moldy and smelly. Maybe some of them start to bleed and ooze rotting juices out of the backpack and onto us. They’re still affecting us. And maybe because of the rotting there are gasses building up that eventually combust! And out of the blue, we explode! Or maybe these gases have the opposite effect and they instead of exploding they gas us into fatigue, health issues, and anxiety or depression or both.

When it comes to feelings, they’re not good or bad, they just are. We decide if they’re good or bad with our thoughts. But we spend so much time trying to control them. What if instead we allowed them to be part of us? What if we sat with them, we let them do their job, and we let them move through us and move on when they’re ready to, not when we decide we want them gone? When we deal with them, we’re not stuffing them into our backpacks and letting them rot and explode. They become more like a wave. They come in really strong some of them stronger than others, and then they wash out.

We have a waterpark not too far from our house and one of the attractions at this park is the wave pool. My kids love this pool! They love getting up into  the waves as they peak and then mellow out into still water again. When it comes to emotions, let’s be like my kids. “OOOH here comes the wave of shame. Hey shame!” And within about 90 seconds, it’s gone and we’ve returned to still water again.

The more you allow and feel all emotions, the more you’re able to meet your own needs, the more you’re able to nourish yourself and in turn the more you’re able to help meet the needs of others. Remember, you got to feel it to heal it! Take the time to recharge your battery. Plug in and don’t forget to choose joy because happiness isn’t enough.