Amy King
Sometimes life doesn't go according to plan, and at any moment you can be reminded of the basic privileges you take for granted on a daily basis or just how easily you can be thrown off track from your good habits or routine.
Such as in my case the last week I had:
👉🏽 A major power & gas outage
👉🏽 Disruptions caused by severe weather events and inconvenience caused by supply chain issues
👉🏽 Multiple whitegoods failure… including a reasonably newish washing machine, hence my hangs at the local laundry mat
👉🏽 Competing work, business and life deadlines &
👉🏽 A minor injury
Most of us are also acutely aware that almost all of us are balancing multiple demands, roles & hats at any one time… text in this area
So, we feel guilty that we don’t seem to be able to cope…
AND then to top it off we are told things such as:
“You need to make time for the right things”
“You should be delegating that shiz” or
“There are people who would love to have your bad days”
So, we don’t create the space to sit with the moment, acknowledge how we feel and then release it… AND
We don’t allow ourselves any self-compassion… because we THINK we don’t deserve to,
OR, we don’t make time because we just have TOO MUCH to get done.
So, we drop some balls in our mad juggling act and also slip on up on our self-care routines, nutrition and exercise habits…t
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BECAUSE SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE RIGHT?
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Which then causes us to further ruminate on our shortfalls, making them bigger than they are and beating ourselves up…
AND
Ironically, we add to our stress and take more time to get things done because we’re tripping over a stumbling block we are pretending is not there.
Not only is this a tough way to live – BUT it does the opposite of what we want.
So, whilst its perfectly normal to self-criticise and hold ourselves to unrelenting standards, gradually replacing these habits with self-compassion practices is more likely to help you achieve your goals.
In fact, practicing a little bit of self-compassion has been shown in neuroscientific and psychologic studies to help us regulate emotions better, manage stress and provide us with a greater capacity to do the things we want to do.
A recent Canadian study for example, revealed that mothers of young children who scored higher on self-compassion tended to also display better eating behaviours, including eating higher quality foods and infrequent bouts of emotional eating.
So, the key takeaways?
Self-compassion can be an enabler to help you prevent negative experiences dragging you down and helps you:
Hence it improves your emotional, social and existential health which in turn influences your physical health.
What is Self-Compassion?
What does it look like?
Let’s use an example of emotional eating, as lots of people beat themselves up after eating chocolate, to demonstrate the 3 pillars of self-compassion:
Mindfulness: “Oh, look at that I’m eating my feelings right now. This doesn’t feel great, but I don’t feel like I can stop.”
Common humanity: “This is an understandable response to what I’m going through. Lots of other people deal with emotional eating when they’re stressed, too.”
Self-kindness: “Alright, shake it off! So, you ate some chocolate… ok, a lot of chocolate. It happens. That doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person.”
Notice here that applying the 3 key pillars of self-compassion (applying mindfulness, empathy & kindness) isn’t an excuse to stress eat. Its purpose is to help remove some of the guilt you might feel about stress eating. Because guilt can lead to more overeating.
Putting it into practice
For me personally, my week of compounding micro-stressors did not lead to emotional eating… it did however cause me to perpetuate some poor sleep hygiene. Look we all have our vices, and for me I do not get a lot of sleep in general… and last week I was sleeping even less than usual (like 4 hours a night). Naturally, this led to me being less resilient than normal, dropping some of my usual mindset habits, feeling overwhelmed at my “to-do” list and then getting even more frustrated at myself.
So, I have been using my time at the laundry mat (my washing machine is not yet fixed) to practice some self-compassion and get back on track with my gratitude habits
This has included so far:
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Amy King is the founder of AKE Fitness & Nutrition. When she’s not serving her clients, she is pursuing her corporate career in mining, bodybuilding and spending time with loved ones. She calls Perth, Western Australia home.
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