Often, the hardest part of our Wellbeing Equation
When we speak of needing a change in our lives, we generally mean that we are experiencing difficult negative emotions in ways that impacts our ability to function and connect with ourselves in ways we prefer. Further, in relation to negative emotions and the situations in our lives that contribute to them, if they end up feeling overwhelming they have a tendency to affect our ability to make better informed choices and even when we do manage to make the necessary changes that we want they often come with a fair amount of uncertainty and ambiguity thereafter that can be stressful.
Complicating matters, often the change that happens or is required of us isn’t under our control such as the death of a loved one, a deadline at work, a car breaking down, friends or loved ones moving to another state or the lockdown conditions we had to face during covid. However, even if the change that gets put in place is positive and under our control such as becoming a parent, a job promotion, a book publication, a child getting accepted to a university or trade school with the accompanied expenses or getting married there will be aspects of change that end up feeling stressful in ways that we are unable to foresee ahead of time. Thus, to contend with change we usually end up having to focus our attention and energy differently in some fashion and how we respond internally can affect whether or not we end up feeling like our wellbeing is more under our control than not. The implication is that if it feels like our wellbeing isn’t under our control to a large degree that some aspect of the way we respond to change or life itself is likely warranted.
Thus, the question I’m asking us to ponder when it comes to the implementation and the design of our wellbeing is how do we learn to do the work and how do we learn to show up for ourselves on a regular daily basis — and “schedule in our wellbeing” along with all our other to do items in life? In other words, let’s try to be curious about what our daily practices consist of and what anchors and detaches us from our wellbeing. Inherent in this question is another one, what is it that we want to come in contact with within ourselves? Perhaps it’s a peaceful easy feeling, better ability to articulate our thoughts in the midst of emotional irritation and disappointment, to connect with ourselves and those around us in more loving fashion, to roll with the ups and downs in life with less emotional highs and lows or perhaps just enjoy our day to day living with a bit less stress and more energy along the way.
For instance, if we dislike our job and it happens to be of a sedentary or physically demanding job, how we spend our time outside of work is important. If we are one of the lucky ones whose job gives back to us in interest and enjoyment so much the better, however, if we are one of the unlucky ones who finds our job monotonous, tedious, overly stressful or it requires too many long and taxing hours leaving us exhausted post work, life becomes much more challenging to navigate than we might hope. Regardless, it helps if we can learn to cultivate and schedule in those activities that give back to us in regards to positive emotions, energy, mood, outlook and self-esteem in ways that can help temper, and at times offset to the degree possible, difficult stressful endeavors and emotions in our lives.
Here we might ask ourselves whether the model we are using to carry out our living is based on an asset strength based one operating from a place of health and wellness at its core or whether we’re operating from a deficit based and/or trauma focused model in a way in which our negativity bias is given priority and we overly surround ourselves with and focus on negative aspects in our lives to our detriment? In order to navigate life so that we experience more aspects of ourselves in healthy ways that we prefer we want to be able to balance both the positive and negative aspects in our lives and give them each their fair due.
However, many of us need a little help along the way with balancing the two so that we incorporate more of a strength based asset model of living along the way.
This is where, thankfully, we humans are endowed with the ability to reflect and self-observe under certain conditions and thus part of our “work in life” is to learn how to cultivate, be curious about and support these abilities and figure out what the conditions are that help us with their creation so that we can eventually put them to use cultivating and better understand how to create our unique sense of wellbeing — and thus healthy aspects of ourselves.
It should be clear that it takes time, effort and practice to learn how to center ourselves and put our minds toward tackling that which is our wellbeing. Keep in mind that to do so often requires a multi-pronged, long term approach and that the path isn’t singular and entails many truths. In such, it’s not a one size fits all endeavor or something we learn and then never have to spend time tinkering with it, changing or figuring out how to put our minds toward learning new information or applying old truths in new ways related to skills we feel we’ve already mastered. For if science has taught us anything, it’s that new groundbreaking discoveries happen on a regular basis effecting not only older information and knowledge about life, that we took previously to be unequivocally true, but also how we think about ourselves and how the world works and thus how we go about carrying out our lives.
***As a therapist who meets with people everyday I’m generally curious as to what people use to bring their wellbeing into existence.
Thus, if you wouldn’t mind take a moment to convey the Top 3 Ways you practice the art of your wellbeing and how this impacts you positively?
👇Put your answers in the comment section below and let’s explore our Wellbeing Equation together.
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Please find me and sign up for additional stories at my Substack Newsletter: The Wellbeing Equations here: https://broncerice.substack.com/
For more information about me see my website here: https://www.broncerice.com
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