Setting Intentions For the New Year

The beginning of each new year feels like it brings pressure to do something big, to make changes, to be different. Vision boards, resolution lists, intention setting, manifesting… We have so many options to create change. I’m sure there are more.

For the last few years I’ve made a list of new-year intentions. I wrote down things I’d like more of in my life. Last year I also participated in a Best Year Ever class, where I mapped out what I wanted to accomplish over the course of the year. That was very helpful, but I found I tried to do all the things I’d mapped out right away! Then I forgot to go back and see what was left on the list as the year progressed.

In the past, because I’m a business owner, my goals tend to sway towards work rather than personal goals. I ended up feeling overwhelmed by all the things I added to my to-do list. Although my business is very important to me, I’ve recognized this past year that my personal goals get put aside or remain undone because I minimize their importance when I’m deciding how to spend my time and energy.

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”

— Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

It’s important to make yourself a priority

When we put more emphasis on work, or other people’s needs and we don’t honor what we need it can lead to burn-out and us feeling frustrated, exhausted, angry and resentful. Not the best way to spend the first year of a new decade!

When you’ve lived much of your life putting other’s needs first—and that can happen at work as well as at home— it can be hard to do things differently. It definitely takes a bit more effort and a lot of positive self-talk, self-compassion and self-awareness to be mindful of and meet our own needs.

Making yourself a priority can feel selfish, mean, and very uncomfortable, but it’s important. If we’re not paying attention and attending to our needs, who else is going to do it?

It’s also easy to fall back into our old behaviors when we’re stressed. They’re called patterns for a reason! We’ve been taking care of everyone else’s needs for a long time. Change takes time.

I’d love to dedicate this year to the Self, and I hope you’ll join me. Taking care of You and making You a priority doesn’t have to be a grand gesture or enormous shift. It’s small steps, like checking in with yourself a few times a day and asking, “What do I need right now?” The answer might surprise you.

3 tips for taking care of your needs

Here are some other ideas to help you move into the new year with compassion and love for yourself:

• ·Make time to meditate each day.
  Two to three minutes of mindful meditation every day can help you get to know yourself and your body in a deeper way.

• Be in nature.
  Connecting with the natural world helps us feel more grounded and calm. When you’re in a more grounded place it’s easier to tune into You.

• Offer yourself the compassion and kindness you would give to friends.
  We can change our relationship with ourselves if we can find some space for kindness.

No matter how you mark the new year, I hope you’ll take some time for you in 2020!

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If you enjoyed this blog post and would like more insights into living with anxiety, tune into the Woman Worriers podcast. In each weekly 30-minute episode, host Elizabeth Cush, LCPC, and her guests explore living with anxiety, relationships, parenting, surviving trauma and other topics and offer insights into mindfulness, meditation and other helpful resources.

Elizabeth Cush, LCPC is a therapist, blogger,  creator and host of the Woman Worriers podcast, and the owner of Progression Counseling in Annapolis, Md and she’s been featured in these major publications. Elizabeth helps busy, overwhelmed men and women manage their anxiety and stress so they can live their lives with more ease, contentment and purpose. If you'd like to know more about how individual, online and group therapy can help ease anxiety and stress call me 410-339-1979.

Are You A People Pleaser?

I’d like to think that I can say what I need without concern, but the truth is that sometimes I keep quiet because I worry about how others will react. Am I a people pleaser? Sometimes!

Both men and women can be people pleasers but I think that, from an early age, women get subtle and not so subtle messages to put others’ needs first. That taking care of ourselves is selfish.

It’s okay to consider other people’s feelings when making decisions, but if your go-to response is to prioritize other people’s happiness over your own feelings, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

If your own needs weren’t valued or met when you were growing up, you internalize those messages. Maybe you were ignored when you cried or were hungry. Maybe you were told to be quiet or told that you complained too much. Maybe another family member’s needs were always a priority.

When family members struggle with mental health or substance use issues, the children in the family often end up taking care of the parent or sibling who’s struggling. Those kids learn very early that they must meet other people’s needs first in order to have peace and calm in the home. That message can become ingrained in the child’s psyche.

We then bring those early childhood messages into our adult relationships. We work hard at making sure everyone else is “happy” or taken care of and we ignore— or don’t even know—what we need.

What Happens When We
Always Care For Others First

Constantly caring for others’ needs can lead us to feel exhausted, unacknowledged, taken for granted, resentful and confused about why we struggle with anxiety or depression.

It can also create the feeling that we have to be perfect. There’s a part of us that feels if we can just get it all “right”—the house clean, others’ needs taken care of, the work done—then everyone will be happy. We might believe that if everyone is happy, then we can be happy, too.  The reality is we’re probably not very happy if we’re not listening to our own needs.

I definitely struggle with trying to keep everyone else happy.  I continue to work on recognizing when I’m ignoring what I need. The fear of making others angry or hurting their feelings drives my people-pleasing behaviors into high gear. And then the anxiety begins to bubble up….

The tension in my chest and constricted feeling in my throat are my body telling me that I have something that needs to be said. I have needs that parts of me really want me to share.

I know the feeling so well, and yet sometimes I still push it away. I busy myself to try to avoid feeling it until I can’t ignore it any longer because I’m lying awake at night when I’m exhausted and I should be sleeping.

What Happens When We’re Mindful Our Own Needs

I still worry about hurting others, making them angry or being ignored if I do share my feelings. But I’ve learned that tuning in to the parts of me that want to be heard, that need to be heard, helps me express my feelings.

When we give ourselves permission to be heard, we’re reinforcing that we can meet our own needs—that we don’t have to look to others to validate and voice our feelings. We learn that we can find joy, calm and contentment inside ourselves.

If you’ve struggled with figuring out what you need or trusting that you know what you need, therapy can help re-connect you with your Self. It provides a safe, non-judgmental place to look at the messages you internalized growing up. It gives you a space to hear your own voice and build the trust in your Self that might have gotten lost along the way.

Moms are often pushed to meet everyone else’s needs. This week on the Woman Worriers podcast I spoke with Doña Bumgarner, a life coach for moms, about how moms can learn how to meet their own needs while still meeting the needs of their family. You can find the interview here.

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If you enjoyed this blog post and would like more insights into living with anxiety, tune into the Woman Worriers podcast. In each weekly 30-minute episode, host Elizabeth Cush, LCPC, and her guests explore living with anxiety, relationships, parenting, surviving trauma and other topics and offer insights into mindfulness, meditation and other helpful resources.

Elizabeth Cush, LCPC is a therapist, blogger,  creator and host of the Woman Worriers podcast, and the owner of Progression Counseling in Annapolis, Md and she’s been featured in these major publications. Elizabeth helps busy, overwhelmed men and women manage their anxiety and stress so they can live their lives with more ease, contentment and purpose. If you'd like to know more about how individual, online and group therapy can help ease anxiety and stress, contact me!

Perfectionism and Anxiety

Striving For Perfection And Anxiety

Being perfect, never making mistakes or failing, would relieve a lot of stress! You could enter every task or challenge with the knowledge that you would succeed every time. How amazing would it be to be able to let go of all those insecurities, worries and anxieties when new, difficult life events happen? You could live your life with ease.

Unfortunately, if everyone were perfect, life would be pretty boring. We would’t learn or grow, because we’d already know how to do everything. As cliché as it sounds, imperfections make us human and make life more interesting.

Imperfections Can Create Anxieties #youareyourownworstenemy

When we believe that our mistakes reflect poorly on us, and when we feel that other people are constantly judging us for those mistakes or difficulties, it can create a lot of anxiety. You are your own worst enemy, because the perception that we need to be perfect all the time or people will criticize us often sets off a firestorm of critical self-talk:

• I’m so stupid!

• I can’t believe I just made a mistake!

• What is wrong with me? I can’t get this right!

• Now everyone will know I don’t know what I’m doing!

• I shouldn’t have even tried!

• I’ll never do that again!

• I’m an idiot!

I’m pretty sure that you’d never say to others the hurtful things you say to yourself.  But when we feel vulnerable, the parts of us that want to protect us and keep us safe from harm jump in and start yelling. They criticize. They ridicule. Those parts of you believe that if they can get your attention, they’ll save you from making another mistake in the future.

Those self-protective parts think that the self-criticism will keep you on your toes for next time, but they can also encourage you to stop putting yourself out there, to stop you before you make the next mistake. Sadly, instead of making you feel better, fixing what went wrong or helping you learn from your mistakes, the negative self-talk leaves you feeling worthless, less-than and sometimes hopeless.

Soothing Our Critical Parts

So how do we break the cycle of beating ourselves up when we make mistakes? We do it through the practice of self-compassion.

If we can hold ourselves with the same compassion that we show to others, it can reduce stress and anxiety. When we allow ourselves to be imperfect, to embrace our imperfections, we’re able to approach life with more openness and ease.

Here are four steps to help bring more self-compassion into your life:

1. Start paying attention to your negative self-talk. When that negative voice pipes up, ask yourself, with curiosity, what prompted it? Try to identify what that part of you is afraid of or what you are worried about. Sometimes journaling when you’re most critical of yourself can help you identify the things in life that make you feel less-than. We call those things your triggers.

2. Make a note of the negative things you tell yourself and ask, “Would I say these things to a close friend?” If not, then say out loud or write down what you might tell a friend who was struggling with the same thing.

3. As you begin to recognize when you get triggered, and you become more aware of your negative self-talk, pay attention to those moments. When they arise, I want you to try to say to yourself with compassion, “Wow! I just said some really mean things to myself. I was ready to put myself down for not being perfect, and my critical parts jumped in without my noticing! I can be so hard on myself.”

4. Now, bring to mind the things you’d say to a close friend who was struggling and try to say them to yourself. If you’ve been hard on yourself for a long time, this takes a lot of practice. You might start by imagining what your good friend might say to you if they knew you were having a hard time.

When times are tough, it can help to remember that everyone struggles from time to time. It’s a part of the human experience. When you’re feeling overwhelmed or when that critical voice wants to berate and minimize your difficulties, try saying to yourself, “I’m struggling right now. We all struggle once in a while.” You can also place your hand on your heart and recite these phrases: “May I be peaceful. May I be safe. May I be healthy and may I live my life with ease.”

I hope these steps help you quiet your inner critic and bring more self-compassion into your life.

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Elizabeth Cush, LCPC is a therapist, blogger,  creator and host of the Woman Worriers podcast, and the owner of Progression Counseling in Annapolis, Md. She helps busy, overwhelmed men and women manage their anxiety and stress so they can live their lives with more ease, contentment and purpose. If you'd like to know more about how individual and group therapy can help ease anxiety and stress call me 410-339-1979. 

Photo by SHINE TANG & by Joshua Rawson-Harris on Unsplash