Wellbeing Myth-Busting

Wellbeing Myth-Busters explored in today's episode: Your happiness is entirely within your control. It’s not what happens to you, it’s how you make meaning of those events. It’s not a betrayal to move beyond your family story. You’re not destined to be depressed/anxious because it’s in your family. Giving feels better than receiving. What can you give that feels comfortable, easy, and fun? Those sad, negative self-views may not be true. If a thought isn’t helpful, you can replace it with a more uplifting one.

Trigger Warning: This practice may include references to death, dying, and the departed.

Transcript

Hello Wellbeing family,

So nice to be with you again for the podcast.

I'm reflecting on how I've just done what I was talking about on the last podcast episode.

I think it was called It's Completely Free and you know today is a grey old day out there.

It's one of those days where the sun just isn't gonna make an appearance.

It's cold,

It's miserable.

I live in Queensland so we don't really turn on heating during the middle of the day so to get warm you either have to go for a walk or do something and whenever I sit still I just get so cold and the creeping cold starts to enter my bones and it's all a bit miserable.

Anyway so I had to do some work and got very cold and then I could feel myself just slowing down and my mood dropping and everything kind of grinding to a halt on this very grey sad day and I thought right I know what I need to do I need to go and do yoga.

So I've just found this amazing yoga podcast where they just have 15 to 25 minute yoga sequences by lots of different people.

Key here lots of different people so you get lots of different input because I've been doing a home practice for the last couple of months and really enjoying it but I noticed that I always managed to do the same poses,

The ones that I like,

So I thought I better just get a little bit of extra input.

So I opened up this app for the first time and did a 30 minute practice which was really hard and then another 15 minute practice on my shoulders because I've had a bit of pain in my shoulders and now I'm feeling a million percent like this is what I mean about it can be completely free like we have the power to shift our emotional tone and our mood we can be very deliberate about it and we can do it in ways that are absolutely completely free.

So I thought right I'm coming to record this podcast now with this energy on board right of that's shifted from miserable grey cold day with nothing happening and feels like the end of the world and I very stupidly read the news which was just depressing to suddenly feeling energized,

Full of life,

Full of vigor.

It's a completely different feeling and I did it to myself.

So I hope that's a good example and I know that many of you do the same thing.

I know that many of you you go running,

You go walking,

In nature,

You do all kinds of things that do this for you in a similar way but I just really wanted to underline how how you can change your own well-being level right so I would say that if I'd said to myself zero to ten how was I feeling before I went into yoga I'd say I would have been about a two like it was pretty grim I was just like oh should I just go back to bed and now I feel like a 9.

5 like I'm just bursting you can hear it in my voice right and I can feel it energy is just flowing through me so it's just one of the many ways that you can shift your well-being level and today what I want to talk about is some well-being mythbusters so I don't know if these really are mythbusters but they're basically well they are mythbusters I guess and we'll just run through them I'm gonna chat a little bit about them so the first one is exactly this your happiness is entirely within your control oh I can hear the sharp intake of breath and I know that there's lots of things in life that happen to us right that for all of us life happens to us that's the way it is we don't really have much control over that but what we do have control over is how we choose to engage with what happens how I choose to respond and the meaning that I choose to make from the things that happen and I know that when I was younger I chose to make very miserable meaning out of the things that happened you know bad things happen to bad people therefore I must be a bad person there's something wrong with me all of that stuff right I don't do that anymore and I suppose that's what this is about that when you can start to shift your internal meaning-making and I'm not saying this is easy all right this often needs a lot of support and it requires that you work through the emotional baggage that you might be carrying right which is often intergenerational it's often not just yours it can be intergenerational so that's a big ask and that often needs support right but the bottom line is you can make choice and you can choose to get support and ultimately your happiness is entirely within your own control so the second one is it's not what happens to you it's how you make meaning and that's what I was just talking about so difficult things happen to all of us there isn't a person who doesn't experience difficulty in their lives and it's a really beautifully exemplified by the Buddhist story I've forgotten the name of the woman but there was a woman who came to the Buddha and her child had died and she had this dead child in her arms it's heartbreaking and she said to the Buddha bring my child back to life my heart is broken bring my child back to life and he's his response to her was go and find a house when no one has died and when you do that I will bring your child back to life so she went from door to door asking is there a house where no one has died and of course what she discovered is there is no house where no one has died and so it was about her understanding that death is part of life and it is heartbreaking and it happens to all of us at some point at some time and in the story she is supposed to become enlightened but this is you know it's just an example of what I'm saying that it's not what happens it's the meaning making and we need to support with our meaning making often the next one is it's not betrayal to move beyond your family story so I just I just jotted down a few of these myths that I thought would be good and these are things that I often hear in therapy and when I'm doing coaching so that it feels like betrayal to move beyond the level of your family's happiness or outside of your family story you know we're a family of depressives we're an anxious family we are a family who die young we're a family dot dot dot like you know these are the many different stories that we tell and isn't it amazing how the stories that we tell ourselves they never seem to be uplifting and expansive they're always contracting and limiting right so it's not betrayal to move beyond your family story someone has to break free and and often the person who breaks free is the person who can then go back and create ripples of change in the family system for others as well so you're not destined to be depressed or anxious because it's in your family that's the next one and it obviously goes with the previous one so when when you have a parent who experiences particularly depression or anxiety that's very powerful modeling it's extremely powerful modeling and while we know that major types of depression can run in family I'm not talking about that I'm talking about the common reactive depressions that we see that everyone experiences that one in three or four people is experiencing at any time and of course the even more common anxiety disorders so modeling of behavior is a really powerful thing and can affect how you choose to interpret the world but you can unlearn that right we are we are crazy intelligent humans and we can unlearn things that we've learned that are unhelpful but it's not necessarily that you will be anxious or depressed because you had a parent or a sibling who also experienced that what's number five giving feels better than receiving yeah well I know that to be true I certainly know that to be true but here's the interesting thing I think anyway in my own experience that giving and receiving they're two sides of the same coin the two sides of the same coin and we need to be able to receive it's incredibly important to be able to receive whether it's receiving a gift or receiving a compliment but it's important that we allow in the positivity that is coming towards us and giving I think they're also the interesting thing about giving is to really explore why am I giving what what is what is the source of my giving here what is the underlying motive of my giving right if it's giving because you want something back then it's not gonna work out so well but if it's just a really beautiful generous impulse to give which I think everyone experiences and then you find a way to act on that it's incredibly uplifting it's amazingly uplifting to do small things and I know there's a big movement at the moment to what do they call is it called pay it forward where you pay for a coffee for the person behind you or pay the road toll for the person behind you which I think is quite an interesting one what's next ah here's a good one those sad negative self views may not be true they just might not be true so this one's really important because we all experience conditioning as we grow up we find ourselves in situations we're exposed to certain people certain events happen and we make sense of those events and we make sense of those people and the making sense become can become a bit rigidified or can become quite rigidified and settle into very fixed beliefs about the way the world is and often those fixed beliefs are not actually true they just happen to have arisen because you happen to have had certain experiences and I'm going to invite you to think about when you're having a thought and this is the next myth buster if a thought isn't helpful if it's not uplifting if it's not expansive if it's not making you feel good then I would really seriously examine it and decide whether you want to keep it right because you can replace it with a more uplifting one and I've done a I think I did another episode a few weeks back about what are the rules what are your rules for life because I had a lovely experience with a client where we just talked about this and explored it and the deeper we dived into it she was coming up with these rules and thinking oh my god yeah that's the rule in my family but I don't like it I don't want it that doesn't make me feel good and so her homework was to go away and rewrite the rules which was a very uplifting experience and I'm going to invite you all into that exercise that if you sit and reflect about what your rules are what the sad negative stories are you might just want to shift them you might just want to change them now caveat here these beliefs can be extremely deeply ingrained and it can take years for them to really shift but I can tell you because I've done it myself I had deeply held negative miserable views about myself and they have largely they've largely evaporated not completely but largely evaporate I wouldn't be here now recording this if I still believed the stuff I used to believe about myself right you got nothing to offer you're hopeless you're miserable like all those things right the fact that I'm here recording this podcast episode getting visible getting heard shows you that it is possible if I can do it you can do it to move beyond again it takes support and so I urge you to think about the kind of support that you can get to move beyond these myths about well-being and of course the support but the sort of support that I'm in the business of is psychotherapy but there's many different ways you can support yourself physical exercise is fantastic walking in nature music dancing any kind of physical activity really will help eating the right diet has been shown to improve mood so really really urge you to think about your diet replacing the microbiome regularly by eating fermented foods every day has also had a massive effect on mood there's many things sleep getting adequate sleep and of course sleep and exercise are so linked together so I could go on there's a lot of other myth busting things that I've written here I might do a second part to this podcast and because I think we're yeah we're getting to an end so I might finish this next time and we'll talk more about the other myths but I hope this has been helpful and if it has let me know just drop me a comment let me know or if you really think that I'm talking through my heart also let me know I'm always interested to hear from you see you next time

Reviews

Would love part 2!