Are you (still) in survival mode?

Photo credit: Ashley Webb via Flickr

While I hope we are at the tail end of this pandemic, so many of us have been in survival mode for so long - and with the Delta variant on the horizon, we may be starting to retreat back in. 

I wanted to share a quick post that with stressful home and work responsibilities, pressures we are facing at work or physically with our health - we need to make time to step back. If you stop to re-charge, you will come to resent these responsibilities. You are not a superwoman, and cannot sustain performance at this level forever. 

A simple exercise for you to do today:

1. Pause the to-do list. Rather than pushing to the next thing and the next thing and thinking completing your to-do list will make you feel better, let's reclaim your time. Feeling stuck in survival mode makes us feel like we can't break free.
2. Identify your self-care. So make sure you are balancing your action with nourishment, in whatever way that looks like for you. Think back to what brings you joy, and how you can grow today: is it movement? Connecting with friends? Reading? Watching Disney movies? Go back to that and reconnect.
3. Build self care into your schedule. Whatever it is, building it into your schedule will balance you out and make you feel empowered. It will leave you feeling confident to navigates the world.

​I'll leave you with this thought, and encourage you to write it down in a place that you'll see when you start getting stressed out this week. Instead of spiraling down a "what if everything goes wrong?" path—which my anxiety has made me all too familiar with—acknowledge it but think this in its place: 

"What if everything is exactly how it should be?" 

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