Is it time to assess your relationships?

May 15, 2018 | Focus on Positive Thinking, Health Tips, How to Videos

Healthy Relationships= Healthy, Happy you!

In these health tips, my focus is to help create awareness around all of the different areas of life that can contribute or take away vitality, joy and health. I mostly talk about food, exercise, yoga and meditation to help support health. Something I’m focusing on more lately is creating healthy relationships for myself and my clients.

I’m going to ask you to take a moment and do a 20 second ‘check-in’ to assess how your body feels.

Close your eyes and scan your body for any areas of tension.
Check in with the muscle tension in your shoulders, face, stomach, legs, lower back, check your pulse rate. Note all of this down on some paper.
Now take think of a person in your life who you love very much and enjoy their company. Assess those same areas. Does your stomach relax? Your facial muscles feel a little softer? How is your pulse rate?
Next, think of someone that you don’t feel so good with. How does your body feel? Assess your pulse rate again. Feel your stomach. Notice the muscle tension.
My guess is that you’re feeling some increase in tension and pulse rate? If that’s a ‘yes’, read on….I may have some support for you!

3 Things you can do Right Now to Change how you feel in any given situation

This is a HUGE area of health and I’m not even going to try tackling this topic in my little post here, BUT I’d like to offer a few insights that may be helpful for you with challenging relationships. While we can’t always change our situation or the people we’re interacting with we DO have power over how we feel and respond.
If there is someone in your life that you’re feeling stressed about, I’d like to invite you to start experiencing how that feels in your body. Doing this helps to increase your awareness of what’s happening to your physiology.
Is this a person that you can avoid as much as possible? If not, here are some tools that you can try to help relax around them:
  • Practice Long Deep Breathing. This is my absolute favorite go-to. You can do this anywhere, anytime. It helps to decrease pulse rate and blood pressure and relax your muscles.
  • Practice Emotional Freedom Technique once you can take a quick break from the interaction. I love, love, love this technique and use it throughout my day anytime I’m feeling anxious or stressed about ANYTHING.
  • Can you talk to this person about a particular interaction that makes you uncomfortable? There are ways to express your feelings by using ‘I’ statements such as…. ‘when you say_______, I feel _____’. This is a good way of approaching challenges so that the other person doesn’t feel attacked but you can express yourself through how you’re feeling, which no one can fault you for. 

My short-ish video talking more about this (because I was having a REALLY hard time writing this content that I wanted to share with you)

My Challenge to You: 

  1. Go through the above exercise so that you can start self-assessing….and you can do this for ANY situation, whether it be a person or an experience.
  2. Practice 1 of the above-mentioned techniques either while you’re in the middle of the situation or right after.
  3. Assess how you’re feeling about the person or situation after you’ve tried one of these techniques.

And just so you know, there are limitless tools available for you to use to help support you through tough emotional situations. These are just a few that I use and wanted to share with you.

And while I’m by no stretch of the imagination an expert at this, I’m in the beginning stages of standing up for myself and setting boundaries around situations that are no longer serving me. This is incredibly uncomfortable for me, as I know it is for most people. But, as my friend said last night, “This is a new muscle that needs to be strengthened’. The more we do this, the easier it becomes (or so I’ve heard 😉

 I’d love to hear from you and what you use to help transmute unpleasant interactions into something more uplifting and positive for yourself and those around you!

Love and hugs, Dr. Arjan