Good morning,
Good morning,
Kara Bradley here.
Welcome to your daily whisper.
I'm assuming that you are listening to this in the morning for some reason,
Because I guess I often record them in the morning.
Well,
This morning,
It's a Monday morning.
I will tell you,
I'm a little shaky.
And I thought I would turn on my mic because I think it's important for us to all realize that we all go through the highs,
The lows,
The peaks,
The valleys of experience.
I'm not immune.
You're not immune.
It's never going to be all sunshine out there.
But I think it's important for us to recognize this ride that we're on.
And it's completely normal to sometimes feel a little shaky.
In fact,
I think it's really good,
Because it allows us,
Gives us some contrast to the highs to be able to recognize,
Hmm,
This isn't a high.
Well,
Let me explain a little further.
Years ago,
I did a podcast,
I'm going to put it in the show notes on morning dread.
This sense of dread when you wake up sometimes in the early,
Early morning,
And you can't fall back asleep.
All of a sudden,
Your mind is racing.
And all of the things that you need to do,
Can't do,
Should do,
Didn't do,
The relationships that aren't perfect,
And the job that isn't,
You know,
Moving forward,
And where you live and how much money you have,
All that stuff seems to come crashing into your mind all at once.
It's tough,
And a lot of us feel that morning anxiety.
And a few years ago,
I realized,
Because I was waking up sometimes at like three in the morning,
And I'd get up because I just had so much of this messiness in my mind,
I realized a lot of it is neurochemical.
So in the early morning,
Our cortisol levels start to increase.
And cortisol is the neurochemical that gets us into action a lot of times.
And it also,
When it's too high,
Causes us chronic stress.
And so for me,
I had been experiencing adrenal fatigue,
Which is simply another way of saying that my cortisol levels were imbalanced.
That in some respects,
It was peaking too early in the morning,
Crashing early in the afternoon.
So I was just kind of taking on an emotional rollercoaster.
And if you can relate,
This may be some of what you're dealing with as well.
So I've been able to,
Over the last couple of years,
Get this all in check,
Thank goodness,
Through a lot of stuff,
Through all the core practices for building mental fitness,
Including getting my gut-brain connection cleaned up,
Cleared up,
And working properly.
And you know where to find all that information in the show notes,
But there are specific things we can do to help those cortisol levels start to balance out so that they peak later in the early morning,
Not at 3 a.
M.
,
But maybe at 6,
7 a.
M.
And they start to rise,
Rise,
Rise.
And then they fall and start to fall at their lowest levels when we're ready to go to sleep.
So I recognize now,
When I wake up in the morning,
Sometimes like I did this morning on this Monday morning,
With a lot of thinking happening.
What's going to happen here?
Why didn't I do this?
Do I need to do this?
Where should I go?
Who should I connect with today?
You know,
All those thoughts that you may wake up with as well.
I recognize first and foremost,
Okay,
Cortisol is on the rise.
So I don't,
In other words,
I don't take it all so personally.
I'm able to remove myself some from the thought and the thought process.
So this morning,
I just realized,
Okay,
Kara,
You know,
Either you're going to fall back asleep or get up and meditate and allow these,
The thinking mind,
The busy mind to settle.
And so that's what I did.
I got up and I put on a guided meditation because I could not do it alone.
And I allowed myself,
My awareness,
To drop below all of the busy thinking.
Because it's just like a churned up pond,
You know,
The muddy waters.
I knew I wasn't going to make any sense of anything,
Trying to look through the muddy waters.
So I gave myself the time I needed in the room of my own.
And now actually,
I do have a room of my own in my new place.
But I allowed myself a good half hour to drop below,
To get below,
To go down deep beneath the waves and to settle into a clearer,
Calmer way of being,
Which I feel like I'm at right now.
So this is all to say that you are going to wake up with morning dread from time to time.
First recognize that a lot of it is this neurochemical,
Hormonal shift in the early morning that makes us feel awake,
That gets the engine running.
Sometimes it comes in the form of a lot of thinking.
And sometimes it comes in the form of anxiety or anxious thoughts.
And so what you can do right away off the bat is to do something,
Either go for a walk or get yourself into meditation or allow yourself to shift out of the thinking mind and just recognize this is part of the physical.
And it's not to say it's going to all go away,
My friends,
But I'm just trying to give you a different perspective on just labeling everything anxiety.
Because that's not helpful either.
All right,
I hope that my experience this morning is at least shines a little bit of light on what you may be experiencing as well.
