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These three photos were taken within seconds of each other, while playing in the Aegean Sea at a beach on the island of Naxos. The only thing that’s changed here is the lighting and a slight change in my stance. In case the lighting on your screen or external lighting […]
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You know stress is bad for you.
You probably even know you have too much of it. But what you don’t know is that most of your stress doesn’t come from external sources like deadlines, job hunts, and mortgage payments.
Most of the stress that people deal with these days is entirely self-generated and internal.
The stress that most likely affects you day in and day out is based on your mindset, outlook, and mental habits. This is especially true for women, who tend to chronically multi-talk, compare themselves, self-criticize, and put a huge amount of pressure on themselves to be perfect.
Despite being less obvious, the following sneaky internal sources of stress are often the most potent for destroying your health, your happiness, and your peace of mind.
Hating your body, feeling uncomfortable in your body, constantly worrying that people are judging your body, and obsessing over your weight (or diet) are huge areas of non-stop stress for many women.
Many people have been taught to reject, suppress, ignore, or otherwise not deal with their emotions. But emotions are natural and biological, and they need to be felt, and to move through you, in order to appropriately discharge. Dismissed or suppressed feelings also increase exponentially in force and power (like a dam), until you’re living with the constant fear that if/when those floodgate opens, you will surely drown.
Trying to make other people happy is one thing, but trying to make other people happy at the expense of your own happiness is quite another. Chronic people-pleasers tend to feel a lot of pressure to make the people around them happy at any cost. They often take on extra projects, say yes to things they want to say no to, bend over backwards to make other people comfortable, and exhaust themselves or make themselves sick because they spend so little time and attention on their own needs and health.
Self-criticism is anything negative you say about yourself. It can come in the form of bonding with girlfriends by bashing your body, telling self-deprecating stories or jokes, attempting to be modest by rejecting compliments, and saying things like “I suck at this,” and “I’m the worst.” Most people would never say something as mean to someone else as the things they to themselves every day.
This is self-criticism that you say to yourself in your own head, and it’s often significantly more dramatic and unkind than anything you would ever dare say out loud. Negative self-talk gets especially dark because there is nobody there to hear and refute your statement, so you’re more likely to accept it as truth. For example if you miss your friend’s birthday, to your friend you might say “Ugh I’m such a bad friend, but…” while to yourself in your own head you say “I’m a horrible person and this is why nobody will ever love me.”
Pretending to be someone or something you’re not adds a whole other layer of responsibility to your shoulders 24/7, and keeps you from ever being able to let your guard down and live fully in the moment. Being inauthentic also often comes in form of “impostor syndrome,” which is a persistent fear of being found out for not actually being as smart, pretty, or successful as people think you are.
You may think this sounds easier than letting people in, but you actually have to work really hard to create and defend your emotional walls. Also, anyone who has built these kind of walls lives in fear of someone eventually breaking one down or climbing over it. Nobody builds intense emotional walls against other people from a place of peace and serenity.
Comparing yourself to someone else, favorably or unfavorably, creates stress. Trying to determine who is better or who is “winning” reinforces a scarcity mindset in which there is only one “right” way to have a body or be a person, when in fact we are each completely unique and there is no objectively better or right way of being.
When we’re triggered into a flight-or-flight response, we must make quick snap judgements about whether something is “good” or “bad.” This makes sense evolutionarily, because when you’re in danger in the wild, you don’t have time to weigh the options; you have to make snap decisions! But in real life, we should be able to have access to all the nuanced shades of grey in between. Living with black-and-white thinking (or “all-or-nothing” thinking) reinforces scarcity and danger.
Putting stuff off leaves it hanging over your head until it’s done. We usually procrastinate in the hopes of enjoying a break from the activity we’re putting off, as though it was an indulgent behavior of self-care, but it actually creates a significant amount of stress and anxiety. Procrastination can include anything from not answering emails right away, hitting snooze, and putting the gym off til after work. Putting these activities off might seem insignificant, but it causes stress to grow exponentially.
Perfectionists are often extremely hard on themselves with critical self-talk, and they hold themselves to a significantly higher standard than they hold other people. They also fear mistakes, fear the negative results that they’re sure would come if they relaxed their standards even a little, have trouble being flexible, and set themselves up for frequent disappointment with unachievable expectations.
Negotiating with yourself over a decision is draining and stressful. This is similar to procrastination, but is specific to putting of making a choice. Whether that means deciding if you’re gonna take that new job, deciding where to vacation, or deciding what to order for dinner, leaving negotiations open means there is stress hanging over your head until you decide.
Catastrophizing includes both making something out to be a bigger (and more negative) deal than it really is, as well as looking into the future and predicting all the dramatic and negative events that will take place. Some people think that catastrophizing helps them “prepare for the worst,” but more often than not it simply teaches you to imagine, search for, notice, and live in fear of bad things happening.
People tend to “should all over themselves,” essentially adding a sense of urgency and guilt to an activity or behavior they haven’t done and may not do. This keeps them from being present in the moment or enjoying the decision they’ve made, and causes them to feel they deserve punishment before any action is even taken. Many people cling to the idea that by maintaining “shoulds,” they are effectively motivating themselves, but the opposite is usually true.
Having a scarcity mindset means you believe there is a lack of adequate resources to go around, such as a feeling that there is never enough time, money, success, beauty, or love. Scarcity often comes in the form of comparison, like when you see someone who is really successful or beautiful and you start to feel less successful or beautiful, as though her success or beauty somehow detracts from yours because there is a finite amount. The scarcity mindset sees the world as a sum zero game, and therefore it places you in direct competition with everyone, all the time.
Guilt is an emotion that stems from the thought that you have somehow caused someone else’s misfortune, whether or not that is true or even logical. Taking responsibility for something you have done wrong can be very useful and noble, but more often guilt is used simply as a way of self-criticising and punishing yourself with bad feelings, because you feel you “deserve” to be punished. Guilt and “shoulds” are very closely linked.
Being extremely busy is often a matter of pride, despite it being linked to being less productive, less present, less happy, and less healthy. How many times have you answered “so busy!” when someone asked how you are? Busyness is a way of justifying stress, and it makes people feel important. But no matter how busy you actually are, the feeling of stressful urgency and chaos in an inner state, not an outer one.
People on the internet are obsessed with proclaiming their introversion with pride, but many people who identify as introverts are actually just socially anxious. Of course being around people is draining (i.e. the definition of an introvert) when the idea of small talk, messing up social etiquette, or being judged or criticized by others makes you to feel anxious as hell .
Many women hold their bodies in a way that they deem to be “more attractive” or acceptable, for example by holding in their bellies, or sitting and standing in a way that minimized their jiggle and squishiness. Any major muscle holding, tension, or tightness disrupts movement patterns, blood flow, and breathing habits, creating and exacerbating stress and anxiety.
We call fight-or-flight a “response,” but really it’s a cycle. Everyone knows your body evolved to react to a threat by pumping certain hormones and changing blood flow to help you survive. But not everyone knows that after you’ve either killed or escaped your threat, your body is meant to go through the final stages of the cycle: releasing the excess energy, and returning to a fully relaxed baseline to heal, repair, rest, and recover. Due to the chronic nature of most of our modern “threats,” most people skip the final stages of this cycle and therefore neither release the extra energy, nor fully relax and recover.
A meta-emotion is how you feel about your feelings. People have often been taught to view their feelings as crazy, dangerous, or bad. Therefore they feel shame, or anger, or judgement about the existence of their own emotions. They might feel guilty about feeling happy for example, or angry that they feel jealous. This not only adds an extra layer of negativity and stress to those feelings, but it also causes those feelings to seem even bigger and more powerful and dangerous.
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“Self-care” has recently become a buzzword, but what does it actually mean?
I often hear clients say “I know I should do more self-care,” and I ask them what they mean by self-care. Their answers usually start with “Oh umm, I don’t know…” and end with things like “maybe eating healthier,” “probably get more massages,” and “take a vacation.”
Nobody ever says self care might look like sitting in a dark room and grieving for an old version of yourself that you’re letting go of before you start a new chapter of your life.
Nobody ever says self care might look like spending an hour at the shooting range.
Nobody ever says self-care might look screaming into a pillow, or writing an angry letter, or learning Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
But trust me, those are all perfectly legitimate forms of self-care, depending on who you are, what you’re going through, and what you need.
The truth is, your self-care will vary from someone else’s, the same way your “ideal” nutrition plan will vary, and your sense of style will vary.
You’re different people, and you have different needs. Why is that such a foreign concept? Because our consumerist culture is obsessed with telling women what they should want, and then offering them products they can buy to solve all their problems.
Now I’m certainly not suggesting that massages and spa days aren’t relaxing sometimes (for the right people), but I am saying that limiting the scope of female self-care to spa days and massages is complete and total bullshit. Not only is this self-care myth bullshit, but it’s also incredibly damaging, because it keeps women from discovering and pursuing what they really need to let go and relax.
If you’ve been taken in by the consumerist lies about women relaxing, then you might be making this huge mistake when it comes to relaxing.
First of all, let’s talk about the word “relaxing”.
The definition of relaxing is: “to make or become less tense or anxious.”
When we think of relaxing, we usually imagine gentle, calm activities where you have no tension or anxiety. Relaxing however is actually the pathway that gets you to that state, not the state itself. Which means that sometimes relaxing is aggressive and powerful. Oh, but society doesn’t want to encourage women to be aggressive and powerful, now do they? Certainly not, that freaks everyone out!
Women are supposed to be calm, gentle, and nurturing. Which means we should probably just skip the whole “relaxing” part and go straight to being “relaxed,” right? (Because “relaxing” is a pathway reserved for male privilege?)
Wrong. Because that’s not how science works.
Science tells us that when you stimulate the fight-flight-or-freeze response, you begin a hormonal stress-response cycle that needs to be completed in order to return to baseline. This is thanks to our evolutionary ability to handle and survive dangerous threats in our environment, and then switch back into healing and repairing mode only once we’ve escaped the danger.
But the problem is that our physiological stress response is no longer appropriate for our modern environments. The stress you face nowadays most likely isn’t about dangerous predators and threats to your survival (no matter how they feel). Our modern stressors don’t try to kill us and then retreat back into the woods and let us heal our wounds. In fact, especially for women, most of our stressors are inside our own heads, heart, and bodies! Think: guilt, comparison, perfectionism, and negative body image.
Due to the on-going and internally-generated nature of the stress we’re facing, we get stuck in an on-going stress response that was designed to complete quickly and return to baseline while you recover. We never complete the stress response cycle.
What does it look like to complete the stress cycle?
In an animal, after the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response is triggered and the danger escaped, you will see them twitch and shake and go crazy, expending all their excess energy in a frenzy, before returning to normal and taking a long nap. Humans are wired to have a similar reaction in order to complete the stress cycle, but with our uniquely internal stressors (and society’s rules for appropriate conduct), we are completely cut off from our bodies’ wisdom about how to finish our stress cycles.
What all this means is that sometimes the most “relaxing” thing you can do for yourself is to expend all that extra energy.
Completing a stress cycle is often far from calm and gentle. Like the animal who twitches and shakes, we too need to get rid of excess energy. When you trigger a stress response for any reason, your body goes through a ton of (fascinating) changes. It ramps up your available energy by dumping adrenaline into your blood, and preparing your cardiovascular system to run or attack. Your body then has all this extra energy, and since we rarely use that energy to fight off, say, the stress of perfectionism or guilt, you need to do something to get rid of it.
For animals that means twitching and trembling and yowling. For you, it might mean a tough workout, an hour at the shooting range, having sex, an intense cry, writing an angry letter, taking a boxing class, or throwing a proper tantrum of kicking and screaming. This isn’t always easy though.
Our culture is very intolerant of excessive and aggressive displays of emotion, especially from women.
We praise women for being calm, polite, mild, happy, and nice. Finding environments and outlets for you to twitch and yowl can be challenging. This is exactly why “self care” looks so different for everyone. The important thing is that self-care for everyone includes “finding the people, places, and things that help me complete my stress cycles.”
The beautiful thing about this sometimes-violent behavior is that it moves you from the state of stress and anxiety (mid-stress cycle) into the state of relaxation that you’ve been chasing and craving (by returning you to a hormonal baseline). Most people inadvertently try to skip this pathway, going straight from “anxious” to “deeply relaxed” through calm and gentle activities like massage and mediation. And hey, sometimes that’s perfect! But often it just doesn’t work.
That having been said, after you expend your excess energy, it’s completely normal to feel absolute exhaustion, gentleness, and calmness as you move into the last stage of the cycle: recovering and repairing. Listen to your body, and treat yourself with tenderness and kindness as you finish the cycle.
Think about how calm and peaceful you feel after crying to exhaustion, or the way you fall into bed after a long day of physical labor. No matter what people want you to think about the “relaxing” quality of laying around watching tv, surfing Facebook, or online shopping, none of those activities are very likely to help you expend your excess energy. Therefore at the end of that kind of day, you may been drained and unmotivated, but you’re still anxious and wired.
You can’t go from having excess energy (a.k.a. anxiety/stress) to feeling calm and peaceful without letting the energy out first. And once it’s out, you’ll need to rest.
So what does this mean for you as a modern day anxious-and-stressed-out woman? Well first of all, I hope you’ll see that despite what your husband or boss thinks, there is nothing wrong with you just because you “can’t seem to relax.” Of course you can’t relax, you’re skipping a vital step in the relaxation process!
Second of all, I hope you’ll start exploring what it might look like for you to complete your stress cycles by expending and channeling your energy into the right outlets for you, and then honoring the final stage of relaxation and recovery. Your body naturally wants to help you move through the different stages, so becoming aware of where you are in each cycle, and what you need, will help you finally able to relax.
And that is true self-care.
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Things I would rather be doing than trying to have a perfect body, be a perfect mom, run a perfect business, and live a perfect life: Eating Tacos Laughing until my belly hurts (and maybe I even pee a little, don’t judge me) Pull-ups Teaching pull-ups Watching videos of kickass women […]
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I’ve become one of those studio owners, common by now, who has decided to close up shop. In a very few days, I’ll be teaching my last class in a space I put countless hours and effort into creating.
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FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE. And guess what? We can do pull-ups too! Imagine that. Feminism is the radical notion that we women can grow babies inside of us or choose not to do that very same thing because only we get to decide what’s right […]
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