Tag Archives: stress

How to take back control of your life

It’s 10.59pm and I’ve been staring at my computer on what to write because I got caught up with blogging the “right way” and went into a big rabbit hole of self-doubt.

Can you relate?

Well this is my blog, so I can blog anyway I like and so I’ll just keep typing and hope for the best!

But it does bring me back to one of the regrets of the dying explored more deeply in a book written by Bronnie Ware, where they wished they had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life that others expected of them.

So imagine, you’ve come face to face with the knowing that you’re on your last days on earth and you hear yourself say “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

I want you to take a moment, close your eyes and imagine this scenario clearly.

Say these words out loud to really feel the gravity of these words.

Then come back.

Life, at least the way I know it is chaotic and busy with two little kids. It’s so easy for me to get swept away with the day to day life that the year can feel like it flew by. My mind constantly somewhere else other than right here in this moment.

That’s why bringing my attention to the breath, my senses, what I can see, feel, smell and hear helps bring me back to the here and now. Incorporating mindfulness helps me stay true to my compass.

Being mindful can give space in our day to get present to areas of our life that we want to honour.

What are our dreams, desires and aspirations that are deep within that has been supressed because we’re too consumed about what others might say or think?

Maybe you’re in a job that is literately destroying your soul but you stay because of the money, you could be in a toxic relationship but preserve because it’s not the “right time” to leave or you find yourself late at night loading your body with all the stuff that’s triggering you to have major health problems but stress is to debilitating that you need the quick fix just get through it.

You’re waiting for the right time to change, whether that time comes, who knows.

I don’t have the answers for you and that’s the most powerful thing about this because only you can create a life that is true to yourself.

How do you know when you’re not in control?

It just feels icky because everything is hard and not in flow.

I’m actually thinking about my client who told me last week that she’s feeling like she’s found her frequency! You can read more about her recent testimony she wrote half way through her health coaching program with me.

So coming back to reading this sentence again, “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me” I really get that no one can live my life except me.

Who knows maybe in the future, we can transport our consciousness into another body but right now as far as I know, this mind, body and spirit has me at its command.

Exercise:

So I dare you to just explore perhaps in a journal this week, is to imagine yourself at the end of your life and start writing just a few things you regretted not doing on the left hand side.

Then on the right hand side of your journal, pick one and write small actionable steps to making some of those things a reality for you.

For example, maybe you always wanted to learn to speak Spanish, play the piano, write a book, get a tattoo, be on stage at a TEDx talk, go to uni in your 30’s or live in a tiny house.

What’s one thing you could do tomorrow that brings you that one step closer to making it a reality for you?

For more support on how you can use mindfulness to help you overcome the overwhelm and get present to designing a life without regret, join my 5 day challenge click here.

How to move forward when you’re overcome by fear

Today I had to get an x-ray for a tooth extraction. I had to remove any jewellery and wear a protective belt around my waist. 

The lady was really nice but I was so nervous about a machine radiating these energy wavelengths around my head that my mind started thinking about things like what if she makes a mistake and blows my head off!

Immediately I pressed the pause button, said “cancel” in my head and started to do some breathwork to calm myself down. It’s one of the five strategies I shared in my recent blog post about detoxing the mind for cultivating a happier and positive outlook when it comes to balancing hormones holistically.

Fear can be so debilitating that we can stunt our own personal growth if we’re not diligent in monitoring our thoughts.

So how do we evolve when we feel frozen by fear?

It’s about viewing fear as a state of transition.

The word transition evokes the feeling of progress, it’s letting go of the past and reaching out for the unknown.

It’s where transformation happens.

So how do we embrace this space called transition?

Expect that it’s going to be hard. When we know this, we can prepare ourselves and surrender to what is.

I read a wonderful analogy that transitions is very much like the act of swinging from one trapeze swing bar to another whilst soaring through the air, it’s that moment where we are still holding onto the bar of the past and reaching for the bar ahead when we finally let go.

How exhilarating would life be if we were swinging from one bar to the next, feeling the fear and doing it anyway!

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

l’m running a free online course that launches on Thursday 2nd of July 2020 that explores the the Power of Mindfulness to Decrease Stress as a tool you can use to help you conquer fear.

5 Mental Health Detoxing Tips for Balancing Hormones

I took my two boys out for lunch and we had sushi. My 3 year old always get the mini tuna sushi rolls but he also enjoys trying new varieties from my plate.

Today he said “mummy I want to try that one” whilst pointing at a plate on the conveyor belt and I grabbed it off without looking exactly what it was. He took one bite and gave me a disapproving look and said “no mummy, I don’t want this anymore.”

After closer inspection, I realised it was eel. Last time I had eel, I was a tween at home with my parents and had an all body reaction. I was covered in hives and I was itchy for days.

I was torn. Do I encourage my son to try something new by trying it myself and risk getting hives or do I just let him get off the hook and miss an opportunity to teach him the consequences of food wastage.

So I ate it and realised after an uncomfortable wait for about 20 – 30 minutes I had grown out of the allergy but not the fear until that moment.

Have you ever held onto fear, guilt or anger Which has been holding you back in life?

Through my experience coaching women with hormonal health issues, sometimes the cause of a lot of their problems has been as a result of disharmony in the area of self-love, relationships, career and finances.

Cultivating a happier and positive outlook can help with boosting mood but also has a healing effect on hormones by reducing tension, stress and fortifying the mental strength to juggle the complexities of life for the modern woman.

So here are 5 mental health detoxing tips for balancing hormones:

Negative Self Talk

Set yourself a challenge to avoid saying anything negative to yourself for 48 hours. Most of the times we are so unaware of the internal dialogue of negative self-talk, we don’t realised the accumulative toll it has on our health.

If you catch yourself starting to say something negative, hit the pause button and say “stop” then try again. Reframing and choosing more empowering words will leave you feeling lighter.

Reassessing Outdated Beliefs

Reassess beliefs that you are holding and start questioning if they’re serving you still. For a long time I held the belief that I’m terrible writer and people wouldn’t want to read my posts so I never blogged until now!

Next time you say I can’t do something, ask yourself why? Then break apart your why and see if that belief is still relevant.

THE COMPARISON TRAP

Avoid getting into the comparison trap because when we compare we let go of what’s going great. We look at someone and see what we don’t have. There is a clear distinction between admiration and comparison.

Admiration is about reflecting on what we want more for ourselves without needing to compare what we don’t have. Admiration has no judgement therefore it’s a force that propels us forward rather than holds us back.

RESISTING CHANGE

When we make the decision to change, often we encounter resistance because it’s something new, it requires stepping outside of our comfort zone and doing something we may have never had to do before. People find change scary but choosing to stay stagnant in our circumstances is still change, we’re just changing backwards.

Making small incremental changes, consistently adds up and you’d be surprise what can happen in a year.

BUT I’M RIGHT!

Whether your right or wrong, our ego can get in the way of us feeling happy. We’ve heard the saying, it’s better to choose your battles and I really never understood this until I got married.

Sometimes it’s better to choose to be peaceful than to be right (all the time).

Share with me your thoughts

I hope you found these tips useful and would love to know what other tips have helped you.

To support you on your journey to balance your hormones naturally, you can download my free 7 day hormone cleanse click here.

What to do when you feel overwhelmed and stressed

In the past week, I have been feeling so overwhelmed with what is going in my life right now that I haven’t been present when I’m with my children. As I was breastfeeding my son to sleep at 7pm at night, my mind was racing when I should have been just enjoying the quiet peaceful moment of the two of us as he drifted off to sleep.

When I was pregnant with my second son approaching his due date, I was still working on the phone and attending the meeting with clients whilst wrangling a 2-year-old toddler. People would question when I was going on maternity leave and I would say I was going to work right until I popped. I had always been a good multi-tasker. I thrive best working under pressure. With my firstborn I figured since I was able to study, work, start a new business and raise a breastfeeding baby without the need to pump, I could do pretty much anything. There lies my biggest problem. The illusion that just because I could do everything, doesn’t mean I should do everything.

So leading up to the birth of my second son, I was doing just that, everything. Little did I know I had internalised a lot of my frustrations and anger, it would then erupt out of nowhere mostly directed at my husband, who was apparently supposed to be able to read my mind all the time! It was then my midwife gently said that sometimes the baby doesn’t come until the mother is ready. Here I was just doing my thang until the baby came. At no point did I consider maybe the baby is waiting for me. I know of other mums who took at least a week off, even up to a month to get into the nesting spirit and although that sounded wonderful, in reality, I think I’d rearranged the furniture a trillion times before the day was up.

Often when we are excellent masters of time, we often assume that we have everything handled even when we don’t. I had been terribly moody, getting very cranky at hubby for not seeing the obvious such as washing the dirty dishes. At the time, I had the hugest belly, so I was finding extremely difficult to lean over and wash the dishes but again, I never explicitly told him to help me even though he does our laundry and everything else, I just assumed he’d know about the dishes.

So what did I do?

I set my last day of work that Friday and took a big breath and wrote down a list of all the things that were floating in my head. Now you’re probably thinking, oh Merly a “To Do” list? Well not exactly. What you want to do is take away the mental load that is taking too much space and causing stress and anxiety because it’s just getting too heavy.

The thing with each item you write down, some might be something as simple as setting up your out of office email response, bulk cooking for the week or buying more bin bags to bigger stuff like paying the overdue mortgage repayments, getting the carpets cleaned before baby arriving or booking flights for Christmas. Regardless, how trivial or major the items are, they all weigh the same when their floating in your mind, hence the mental load can be overwhelming and stressful.

Writing a list is a great way to just dump the junk on paper so that you don’t have the pressure of having to remember. Even remembering the points is a mental load in itself! For me having a hubby who can’t read my mind, during our in-home date night over a cup of tea while our son was asleep, I’d run through the mental load list and delegate tasks that he was happy to do. It was wonderful because he had no idea that I had a trillion things on my mind and as a soon to be dad-of-2, he felt useful that he could do something to ease the pressure.

The following Wednesday, I gave birth to baby Axel.

Coming back to now, I realised as my baby boy started to snore, I did a commando crawl off the bed and went downstairs to write down my list.

When we feel overwhelmed and stress, this has a direct impact not only on hormones but also our immune system. With what is currently happening around the world, with many of us couped up at home, we need to do as much as we can to keep our immune system strong and healthy.

For more tips to start balancing your hormones, you can download my free 7 Day Hormone Cleanse here.