Life hack #1: Responding to the shock to your nervous system
Life hack #1: Responding to the shock to your nervous system
[00:00:00] If you have just gone through a break up, most likely been dumped, you are probably experiencing a shock to your nervous system. Maybe yesterday or today you were normal and then suddenly this thing happens and you don't even know how to stop your own overwhelming feelings. Your own sense of crying, anger, grief, sadness.
How do you get rid of the grief? How do you exist with this looming feeling around you all the time? It can be extremely overwhelming and can cause extreme anxiety in people who even otherwise don't normally have anxiety. The most important thing you need to do in order to heal after a break up or any other traumatic event is calm down.
Why do they say that to people when they're clearly not going to be calm? Because it needs to happen for you to even be able to start working on the healing because you need to get yourself to a place of emotional safety enough that you can calm down and be present in the decisions that you're making instead of making them out of [00:01:00] fear or anxiety or panic.
So there's a lot of ways to do this. Obviously, if it's really serious, go to your doctor, see if you can get something that might help. But I am a firm believer in nature is healing. I would never go sit on the grass every morning, which by the way I do, um, if there wasn't a good reason to, right? Like I do every single morning and sometimes twice a day and I put my bare feet on the ground and I feel differently in my life when I start touching nature every day.
So when you are really lost and even if you don't normally engage with nature, I encourage you to keep an open mind, take off your socks and shoes, walk on grass, walk on the sand of the beach, and just sit and be with yourself in nature. And you will hopefully see that it helps. It helps balance you out.
It helps bring you to a state of present, even if you have an otherwise hard time. I don't meditate very well. I have an ADHD brain. It thinks way too fast for me to try to control it. So far, you know, I'm working on it, but the thing is, it's a [00:02:00] lot. And when you have intrusive thoughts or things that you don't know how to deal with, it can be very overwhelming.
You need to know how to bring yourself back down and calm your nervous system. And one of the ways with the mental chatter is by journaling. So you'll hear a whole episode on journaling because it deserves its own fucking podcast frankly of how effective it is for managing your own emotional volatility.
It is a good way of almost just letting some of that hot air, let that hot air out of a balloon, uh, visual if you will, um, to take the pressure off so that you can just at least exist with what you're dealing with. Another important tool you can use is YouTube or podcast to listen to softening or calming sounds.
There's literally a playlist that you can get that are soft, you know, nature sounds or calming music or a certain hertz of music that is meant to help with, uh, healing. So there's things that you can listen to that will also help calm your brain even at times when you're otherwise struggling. So there's ways to calm your nervous system, right?
Go in nature, journal. [00:03:00] Um, you can also go to the doctor, get something prescribed if it's really serious. But the truth is, like, take care of yourself as if you are sick with the flu. Give yourself time in bed. If you need to call in sick for work, then you fucking do it. Because I have had to go many times after a break up and not go to work for like a few days after because I was a fucking mess. And if you are a mess, then you deserve to be in your safe space. You know, hopefully you can crawl up in a bed with your big covers, watch your favorite movie, do something to bring yourself back to a place of, you know, almost coddling your inner child.
Just give yourself that big metaphorical hug or even physical like wrap your own arms around your own body and try to comfort yourself. These are really important strategies to bring in control and alignment your nervous system because then the rest of the life hacks you're going to hear on this podcast are going to be helpful.
They're going to sink in. But first you got to stop flailing emotionally. And that was the word flailing. Like a visual of somebody drowning is flailing in the water when you're flailing in emotions [00:04:00] it can be hard. You'll grasp onto anything, a substance, something that, you know, alcohol or a drug or casual sex or whatever.
And you might use those things as a way of trying to also fill this need. But I'm going to try and help you choose adaptive and healthy constructive strategies because yeah, those other things might help temporarily or feel like a bandaid, but they are not for your highest good and you deserve to know how to heal on your own.
The rest of these life hacks were really specifically chosen by me because they actually helped my life. So I'm not going to waste your time. These are literally meant to help you not waste your own time and get over the grief as soon as possible because, you know, you have one life to live and you have one heart to be able to go through life and give away, you know, pieces of it to people throughout and you deserve to be able to recover even if you've loved somebody almost too much, right?
Even if you gave too much of yourself away, there is a way that you can come back home to yourself, restore your harmony or equilibrium and build [00:05:00] again. So stick with me, check out the other episodes and together we're going to life hack you through this break up.
