What do you do when you are bombarded daily by images, news, office chatter, etc. about the latest “bad” news in the world? The daily news has very little, if any, feel good stories. Even the most hardened people are in overflow of emotions.
So, what do we do?
We suppress our emotions. We become “numb”. Fear, Anxiety and Doubt no longer “appear” on our radar screen. But does is really not appear?
When we live a life where we are constantly fighting the lion at the door, something has to give. At the moment, so many people have reached a stage of “I just do not care anymore”. “I have had enough – people must just get out of my life.” That feeling of wanting to run away, wanting to sell everything and disappear into never and nothingness. These are very good signs that you have reached overflow.
We become unavailable for the people we love. Or we over-react. Why do we over-react? Because we are carrying just too much. When we enter a potential problematic situation, we explode with all the pent-up emotion we are storing. Often, unconsciously. We have become masters at “numbness”. We are “desensitized”.
But most of all, we have become unavailable to ourselves. We no longer care about our physical health, our mental health, our emotional health. We sit mindlessly watching a program or playing a game on our phone. We do not exercise. We eat whatever is easiest. We no longer talk to the people we share a space with. And because of that, we are losing connections. We are diagnosed with depression.
Desensitized?
That is what we are told and what we believe. You are a human being. You live your life through your emotions. You cannot become desensitized. What does happen is that you start suppressing your emotions. You cannot stop sensing – you can only start denying. While you experience the beautiful world and life through your senses, and there is nothing wrong with your senses, you cannot not feel. You can only deny the feeling of fear, anxiety, and anger by pushing it so far down that you believe you can no longer feel those emotions. The fact that you reach emotional explosions, is a very good indicator that you have bottled too much emotion. You are not desensitized – you have reached shut-down.
What happens when we live on permanent fight-or-flight?
I am not in danger you might say. How can I be in permanent fight-or-flight?
What you experience through thought, the visions you see on TV or the type of conversations you have, send messages to a part of your brain where hormones will be released, according to the stimuli you receive through your senses. Have you ever watched a movie and had a huge fright? Or you had tears. It is not real, but your subconscious has not perceived it as only an image. It was taken up as real. And depending on what you spend most of your time on, you keep feeding your subconscious to respond in a way that befits a dangerous situation. Even when you know there is no danger. Keeping up the stimuli of danger, fear, and anxiety keeps you in that state of stress. You overload your system, and it shuts down into a permanent fight-or-flight function.
This in turn will limit any hope of you experiencing the beauty around you. Finding solutions to challenges. You will diminish your immune system.
A body in permanent defense has no energy to build other life-giving traits or systems. Creativity disappears – this includes the creativity of problem-solving. Now you become restless, often tired. You sleep badly and you have low energy levels. Maybe you start having an upset tummy. You might loose your appetite or you might eat mindlessly and gain weight. You start withdrawing from daily life. Near everything in your life is an effort – even that which before gave you pleasure.
We have often heard the saying: Stress is a killer. What does that mean?
Prolonged stress shuts the body down. That is when we develop heart problems, some diabetes types, we start the process toward auto-immune problems. Some scientists who specialize in epigenetics talk about disease as a body in dis-ease. A bio-system no longer at ease with the environment it lives in. (The environment you live in is the environment within you – not the outside world.) And this triggers many illnesses. Through epigenetics, scientists now understand that prolonged emotional states hold the power to trigger certain gene-signatures to waken illnesses. Epigenetics explains this “shut-down” all too clearly in how it affects our bodies.
You will hear yourself say things like this is too much, I don’t know how to move forward. What future is there? I am stuck, and I can’t seem to find my way around. I feel powerless, I have lost my mojo. This emotional disempowerment stems a direct link to our inability to feal safe, to feel loved, nurtured, care for, the pleasures and joy of life, and knowing that we are good enough.
I strongly suggest you seek professional advice and guidance if any of the above rings true. There is a bright future ahead of you. We all get stuck from time to time, and we find it difficult to pull ourselves out of the despair. It is important clearing the limiting beliefs and emotions and start focusing on your future.
But for now, here are a few guidelines to start towards a brighter tomorrow.
1. Switch off the TV. We do not realise that even passively sitting in front of the TV, your subconscious still picks up on the outer environment. This unconsciously triggers emotions and beliefs within you. You might often have found yourself busy with one thought and from no-where you jump to another thought that puts your stomach in a knot. If you cannot control your choice of what you watch, unplug your TV for a week. Check in on how you feel. Then for another week and check in again. You will find that very soon you will start feeling lighter and have a clearer mind. Just try it, what do you have to loose?
2. Let go. Just as you are not supposed to suppress your emotions, you should not hang onto them. They only came to make you aware of something imaginary, inner world or outer world. That is all it is. It either tells you here is something I do not like, or hey, this is awesome. Think a moment about “fun”. You notice something that bring in fun. You experience it, or not. You continue with your life. Why do we keep regurgitating negative emotions? We so love to bash ourselves over the head with them. We want to talk about it to friend to ensure they get the picture. Why? The emotion only came to bring your attention to something. You do it because you do not like yourself very much when you keep going at the negative. If you did love yourself, you will not punish yourself.
3. Exercise – family outings. Once you start the downward spiral, you get caught. You feel lousy, you know exercise will make you feel better, but you feel too down to get up and do it. So, you get angry, or you feel disappointed, because you do not do exercise which you know will help. Now you start criticizing yourself because you are not doing exercise, but you still do not have the energy. And here you start the spinning wheel that will only pull you deeper and deeper. Start by going for a walk every evening – only 1 km. Then push it to 2 km. Then 5km. And before you know it, you will start feeling more energized, your mood will lift, you will start seeing opportunities and life will become lighter.
4. Cook Together. Now that the TV has been switched off, why not try out new recipes. If you are alone, what about meeting up with a friend or two every week and take turns to cook? Not only do you start to interact with others, you become creative. You learn about food categories and different tastes to put together. And once it is done, you have a beautiful meal to share with other. It becomes an act of love and nurturing. And we can all do with both of that.
Like with any other addiction, we can become addicted to our misery. The truth is that you hold the power to stay there or to change it. Close your eyes and feel anger, fear, and anxiety on your one hand and love, laughter, and fun on the other. Feel which is lighter and go with that.
Become obsessively focused on creating that in your life.
I know you can do it.
Sue Leppan
Transformation Life Coach
NLP Practitioner
Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SueLeppanLifeCoach/
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