Self-care, the answer to remaining calm; we all know this so why are we so bad at it?

I would like to credit this photograph so if you know who made it please let me know.

I used to run on adrenaline all the time, but I had no idea I did, that was, until I started to calm down.

Calming down is not coming easily to me.

My default motorway wide neural connections are to rev up and run. I can pretty easily get tipped into high dramarama with the accompanied adrenal surges, hyper activity and slight mania.

Sometimes it’s all about despair, fear and anxiety but at other times it’s full of energy and excitement, I could take on the world and then some.

Either way it’s not great.

My lovely body very quickly reacts now and shows me just how damaging this is. I get fatigued quickly and if prolonged I can end up feeling mental and emotionally exhausted, and unable to cope.

This is how we burn out.

It has taken me a long time to see the connection between my self-care and my emotional and physical well being with such clarity as I have now. More and more I find myself in a place where I am not willing to do that damage to myself anymore.

We all know, right, self-care matters, it’s harder to cope when we are stressed, tired and strung out? But how many of us are any good at acutally doing much about it?

We play at it, tweaking, having a few early nights, eating a bit better, phoning a friend, but do we actually make a decision to fundamentally change our approach, change our life-style and to prioritise our self-care?

As someone recently said “we always seem to choose the path of least resistance.” It’s easier to do it tomorrow, to start on Monday, after our holiday or New Year. It’s easier to just have a drink, eat some crap, numb out in front of the TV, go shopping, do anything that demands little from us and temporarily appears to “fix” the problem.

The trouble is that although these “fixes” may get us through a sticky patch it does not genuinely works because it never addresses the underlying reasons, the causes of our inability to take good care of ourselves so we can be calm.  Worse still we are forfeiting our future for the present gain. We will pay; we pay with credit card debt, with our health, with a constant gnawing sense of inadequacy as we steadily let ourselves down over and over and over again.

As you probably know by now if you are a regular reader of my blogs, I am after real change, change that lasts, not temporary fixes and botch jobs. I want a fundamental shift in how I live on planet earth. I want something different.

So today I am wondering, how do we make that shift to living in a calmer way most of the time, to approaching life from a more serene and stable place?

I’m not naive enough to think we can learn to sail through every stressful situation in our lives, but I do believe we can be in better charge of ourselves and our reactions. When we are calmer our lives are so much more manageable. We are able to handle the stresses and strains in a more mature, reasonable and sensible way. Our relationships are better, our health is better and more happens with less effort.

We all need this, the world needs this. The more of us who learn how to calm down the better. We can then face the difficulties ahead in a more reasonable way, we will have the capacity to listen better, to be open and learn, to negotiate, to compromise, to be clear, kind and consistent in our thinking and actions.

We already know what to do, don’t we? Meditate, eat well, sleep, exercise, the well worn self-care mantra we all chant.

We’ve heard it a thousand times, so why is it so hard to do? 

Why do we fall by the wayside so often?

Why have we stayed up late again?

Why is that chocolate bar half way down our throats again?

Why are clutching a glass of wine every evening?

Why are we on-line shopping for stuff we don’t need or even particularly want?

Why are we prepared to scream at the kids again dumping our stuff on them?

Why are we willing to run up that debt?

The answers are in each and every one of us.  We know, even if we think we don’t know.

My experience working on myself and with clients is that if we are courageous enough to ask the questions we will find the answers. We can unearth the hidden beliefs about ourselves and our lives which continuoulsy feed our lack of self care, that feed out anxieties, worries and concerns. Once we know these we can do something about them, we can change.

Are you up for the challenge?

Do you want to take better care of yourself?

You can start your journey of self discovery next time you find yourself about to abandon some self-caring and nurturing behaviour, stop for a moment and ask yourself:

What would happen if I did make that change?

What would happen if I did not make that change?

What would not happen if I did make that change?

What would not happen if I did not make that change?

As you answer these questions tap round the EFT points.

Is your mind scrambled yet?

Good, it needs to be so we can help shift ourselves out of our normal unconscious patterns. We need to jiggle it around a bit to help something new emerge.

Keep asking and tapping and write your answers down.

I’d love to hear how you got on:

Did you feel like giving up?

Did your mind feel scrambled?

What answers did you come up with?

Did it help?


If this all feels like too much to do on your own, you’ve tried a thousand times to change and nothing seems to work, you just keep on falling  back into the same of patterns, give me a call. I offer a free consultation to discuss what’s going on, where you’d like to get to and how I might be able to help, what have you got to loose.

You can contact me here.