Today, we are going to talk about how to feel better. I know that is a big promise, but I guarantee there is a step by step formula to feeling better and to make you successful in getting over old traumas, baggage, reacting negatively to situations, and more.
How to feel better:
- Love/Dream
- SMART goals
- Habits, Environment, and Choices
- Practice
Let’s walk through each step.
1) Love/Dream
The first step is the hardest one. What is your love? What is your dream? What is your objective? I mean this in a micro sense of how you actually want to feel better, i.e. happier or more joy or more creativity, but I also mean this from a macro lens. What are you actually here to accomplish? For me, one of the biggest things that matters to me is being a really good father and husband. My dream, goal, and life long love, is to be that for my kid. I did not have a good example of this growing up and one of my biggest fears is to be a bad parent and impart a lot of that same trauma on my daughter. So if I do not have that in mind when I dive into my goals, I might start to create a little bit of change to feel better in the short term for two to three weeks, but then something will happen in my life that will derail me, and I will go back to all of my old habits. It is the same thing that happens in fitness all the time. People say, “I want to lose X number of pounds!” They start going to the gym, get a couple workouts in, and then one of their friends invites them to Vegas, and they do all of the boozy stuff that happens there and suddenly, they are off their goal. If you have a strong enough passion in your life, like for me, being a really good husband and father, then you can set goals around those passions and stick to them. That is the biggest, hardest part.
2) SMART Goals
Now let’s say you identified your love/dream and you set a goal. For example, I want to be a better husband and a father. Well, “better” is relative. How do I measure it? Do I yell one less time a week, a month, a year? Do I put a slightly better smile on my face? No, instead, you want to find measurable ways to track your goals. This is where making some stuff up actually really matters. When my daughter has a tantrum, I have a specific reaction that I want to impart on myself. I want to keep a neutral tone the entire time, not raise my voice, get down to her eye level, have a calm and comfortable environment for her to be in, and I am going to ask myself on a 1-10 scale, How am I doing right now? Well, with tantrums, I used to be at a 2 (being a father to a three year old is a little tricky.) Is it reasonable to go to a 10 in one week? No, but how about if I say, “Ok, right now I’m at a 2, but 2-4 weeks down the road. I want to be able to see this at closer to a 5 or a 6.” That’s pretty realistic and attainable, and I can measure that frequently with a three year old (she gives me plenty of examples every single day to practice this skill.)
3) Habits, Environment, and Choices
Habits
Now, when it comes to step three, we have got to set ourselves up for success. If you am trying to lose weight, then keeping chips and snacks and ice cream around the house is not a great idea. Instead, you should add supportive habits to my life such as meditation, tai chi, qigong, yoga, and exercise. For my goal, I should make sure to have habits that keep my brain in a more calm state, so that when the shit hits the fan from my daughter having a meltdown, I actually have the capability, from a habitual perspective, to handle it how I want to.
Environment
Cleaning up your environment, your home, your office, etc is essential. If my environment is chaotic, my brain is chaotic, and then when I need to control a tantrum, I might be a little bit more chaotic and amped up myself. Better yet, I like to clean up the environment so my daughter has less tantrums to begin with.
Choices
This turns into a lot of different choices that I have to make. I have to decide, if what I am doing, what I am creating in my house and in my environment, the relationship that I am building, are choices that I am consciously making, or if there are unconscious, sub-optimal choices that are going to make the situation worse moving forward.
4) Practice
Finally, the last step to feeling better is practice. This is the next hardest step for a lot of people, because they make a decision, figure out what their love is, get all of their goals in place, set up the environment, and they say, “I’m done! I am never going to screw up again!” No, sorry, you have first got to practice. Understand that from a muscle perspective, when a baby is first born and they are starting to learn how to do things, their brain is a tabula rasa, a completely clean slate with no software installed. So, it only takes them 300-350 reps to learn how to do something before they are on to the next movement pattern. The problem is, when we are adults, our muscles take about 10x that many reps to rewrite a pattern. Meaning, to feel better, whether physical or emotional, we need 3,500 reps until we feel better. We need to let our neural network practice new habits so that our neurons themselves can wire together in a new way to feel better.
Even if you are tight on time, you can create plenty of opportunities to practice. Here is one way: The next time you have to go number-two, do not take your phone with you into the bathroom. Instead, sit there and practice the emotion that you want to feel. Let’s say, it is joyous or happiness. Close your eyes, the body will still do what it is going to do, and then imagine some situation that has made you happy or make one up. Then practice feeling what actually physiologically happens in your body. Most people will feel a happy, tingling, warmness right along their chest or lower in the belly. Put a smile on your face and practice your smile. It is silly at first, but actually getting the muscular system to practice these emotions, to get more confident in your awareness of when you are feeling these happy emotions, really does help quite a bit. You have time, I guarantee it.
And when you find yourself in situations that are going to throw you off track, back to the tantrum situation, before I engage, I take just two seconds to take a breath, put a smile on my face, and then I come to it with that now practiced emotion that I really want to feel. I am so much better after even just a couple months I am much closer to feeling at a 10. I had the thought process of, I want to be this way in the first place. I set the goals for myself and the measurable, specific situations that I wanted to be in. I set myself up for success by controlling the habits, the environment and the choices that I’m making, and then I practice, practice, practice, practice. If you have more than just that five minutes in the toilet. That’s why people meditate. That’s why people do chi, Gong, tai chi, journaling, all of these things to practice, practice, practice.
If you have any trouble with this, if you really do want to feel better, I do have an entire course Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress that hits on all of these points from a physiological perspective and is the perfect way to get started on your journey.
I hope this information is very helpful to you as always, have a happy and healthy rest of your day. Talk to you the next one.