Reset your nervous system FAST when you are feeling overwhelmed (173)

Hello, hello, creative souls. I am so excited to be here with you today.

It is bright and early in the morning. It is freezing outside. It's quite crazy, actually, that Florida can get this cold, but I am staying snuggled before I gotta go leave for my appointments. And this morning I was minding my own business when I got this intuitive hit and I knew I needed to record an episode before I go about the rest of my day. So today I want to give you real tangible ways to rise above adversity.

Whether you're staring at a ton of setbacks, okay, or dealing with heartbreak or feeling like you've hit rock bottom, I really want you guys to walk away today with some things that you can do now to help shift your mind around what's going on in your life. That being said, welcome, welcome if you haven't been here before. My name is Aubrey Barr. I'm a photographer. I'm in Tampa.

I love, love, love creative people. And I made this podcast to create a space for artists and writers and photographers just like me to be able to get your daily mindset shift, to be able to dig into what your blocks are, why you feel like you have not been inspired lately, all of the things that are going on in your life. So this spot is for you.

If you're new here, please subscribe so that way you get notifications when a new episode drops, because I am kind of spontaneous and might just drop them here and there. I do at least one episode a week. So welcome, welcome. One of the coolest things I've learned about my human design and my astrology is that some of the biggest things that I experienced early on in my life have been the catalyst for the most beautiful things in the future.

Now, yes, you can also say that without even knowing your charts, but my point is, is that. A lot of us were created to be able to make changes in our world. We're created to be able to inspire others, to lead others through adversity, through all of the things that happens in life. I mean, nobody is living a life that they are 100% completely happy all the time, right? But we have control over our mindset. You really, really do.

I was actually reading a post the other day where someone said, my husband makes me depressed. And I was like, I can't even read the rest of that because in reality, no one can make you something else. He cannot make you depressed, okay? You are choosing to be depressed. Now, there's more to the story there, but I'm just telling you right now that regardless of the crazy things that people are doing around you, and I'm not defending anybody or anything like that.

But in the end, at the end of the day, when you lay your head on your pillow and you get to go to sleep for a few hours, remember that you're choosing what to focus on. You are choosing how mad you're gonna be at the world. You are choosing how sad you're gonna be at the world or a person. You get to choose that, okay? We forget sometimes when we allow other people to dictate how we feel and we give them that permission by blaming it on them.

We take away our ability to overcome challenges. We take away our ability to also grow our emotional intelligence, okay? And when you halt that kind of growth, you will be stuck in the same part of your life over and over and over. That is a choice. You choose to be a victim or you can choose to be your own kind of hero, okay?

So wherever you're at right now, I want you to know that there are ways that you can shift this in your own life, because I know it's easy to hear it from someone who's a mindset coach, who works with people on this particular topic, who works on getting rid of traumas in the body.

That's what my specialty is. And I'm so good at it, but it's only because I've experienced so much that have led me on this healing journey, So what I want you to do right now is to acknowledge that your setbacks are often a natural part of growth. Those reveal areas in which you need to learn. You need to have more patience. You need to be redirected. Places where you're feeling too much frustration or overwhelm or feeling stuck.

Those setbacks are meant to shift your life. So you can choose to look at it, right? But if we blame it on someone else, we won't take responsibility for how we can change it ourselves. So really try to put that into perspective and work on reframing your setbacks, okay? It's not a failure. A hundred percent, if I could list all of the things I thought were failures in my life, okay? I mean, it would be an entire book, which I probably should write at some point.

But those are not failures. Those are opportunities to grow. It's only a failure if you have to go through that lesson again because you didn't learn. So let's take responsibility for what our setbacks are and see how we can shift those in our own lives.

Let's get into some tangible strategies you guys can use. First off, my number one thing is to ground myself in the present moment, okay? When a challenge hits, right, we get that hit of anxiety. It pulls us into a spiral of what ifs and we're overthinking and we're doing all these things because it's hard for us to deal with that problem in that moment. What I want you to do right away is to try the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding method.

This is not my method. I did not make this up, but I do think it helps very well, okay? So name five things you see. Then four things you can touch, okay? Three things you hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you taste, okay? The only reason, I know this sounds so bizarre, okay? But the reason why this works is because it calms the mind. It helps you focus on what you can control. It helps you focus on what's in your peripheral right now. What is right here?

Oftentimes I teach people visualization to help them visualize their energy grounding to the earth, even if you're not able to go outside and put your feet in the dirt and the grass. That really helps you to connect, but some people are so upset and so overwhelmed, their nervous system is going crazy that they can't even do that visualization. So this is really a great first step, okay?

Once you get really good at this, And also once you get your nervous system regulated, it will be a lot easier to use visualization and to literally use your energy to ground yourself, okay? But this is really a first step for that. Another thing that I think would be very, very useful, I have a lot of clients that end up in burnout phases. I have a lot of clients that get overwhelmed.

And I think that a huge difference they can make in their lives is by scheduling something on your calendar that is actually 20 to 30 minutes for a recharge, okay? So literally putting it in your calendar, in your phone, in your planner, wherever you do that at, where it's 20 to 30 minutes of daily activity that would recharge you. Let's put a walk in there. Let's put journaling. Let's put reading. Instead of filling your time up with scrolling Instagram or TikTok or whatever you're into.

How about taking 20 minutes and just writing something or just meditating? Okay. My favorite thing I talk about all the time, Insight Timer, because you can pull up a meditation. You could do search and you could say, okay, I have 10 minutes and I'm feeling a little anxiety and it will pull up different meditations you can do that are only 10 minutes long and will help with anxiety. Okay. So literally though, put that in your calendar, put it in there.

Because what happens to so many people is that if we don't put it in there, we're. We don't prioritize it. We end up in a situation where we're just running on empty nonstop. And that becomes a serious problem because once you get down that rabbit hole and you stay in your nervous system dysregulation, guess what?

You're not coming out of that without some serious work. So instead of putting in 20 minutes a day in the front end, you're putting in, well, you've got to take off for weeks at a time. You have to recharge your body where you have to go on vacation for however long in order to get your head in a good spot so you can carry on. So be really mindful about scheduling a break in your day. It is really not that difficult. I know for me, having ADHD and being multi-passionate, I will absolutely just

fill up my day with, okay, what's next? What do I feel like doing now? You know, and it will be jumpy. It'll move from one thing to the next and it'll be, you know, it'll be quite crazy, okay? You don't understand what's going on in my head, but it's all over the place.

And if I don't put time in my day to kind of do that recharge, I don't say, okay, I'm not going to open my phone for a little bit because I really need this moment just to kind of breathe or reassess something, or sometimes it's even reading for pleasure, right? Something that's very interesting to me that I would consider more of a personal thing instead of a business thing, right? So just set it aside, put it in your calendar and make sure you follow through with it. Learn to trust yourself.

Say, I'm putting this in my calendar. I'm going to do it. I'm going to build my trust in myself while also recharging.

I think that's a beautiful way to look at it. And another thing I want to talk about real quickly is that words matter, right? The way that you look at your situation, yes, right now it's a response. It's like, okay, I feel angry because this happened to me or this person did this to me or whatever.

But as you retrain your mind and you rephrase your words, you're able to believe that you do have control over certain things or that through critical thinking and allowing yourself to process things, you can come up with your own solutions. That's another thing that we forget sometimes. Okay. So when you reframe something, it's going to be a little weird at first, but it will start to become like almost a trigger thing that you do.

So instead of saying like, this is impossible, or I don't have any options, say, this is tough, but I've handled hard things before. Right. I love, oh my gosh, I saw it on a Facebook post like 10 years ago. And I still remember because I think it's the greatest thing ever. It says, my track record of getting back up is 100%. How true is that? My gosh, none of us are sitting here having never experienced a challenge. Yeah, but you're still sitting here. You're still listening to this podcast.

You still have the opportunity to listen and the mindset to understand that there might be something on here for you. And so would you really think about it? You do get back up. And that's proof. That is social proof. That is physical proof that you can overcome things. And I want you to remember that when you're dealing with these setbacks. Focus on what you can control in your current situation instead of worrying about all of these other things.

Identify something that you can take action on. You can't control market trends in your business, but you can adapt your offerings to meet demand, can't you? Of course you can. So when you're feeling that kind of roadblock, you just have to rephrase it.

Practice self-compassion. Holy cow. We speak to ourselves worse than we would speak to our children, okay? You would never say to your kid, well, you better just give up now because what you did is just a horrible thing and that's it. You're never, ever going to be able to get back up from this. That just sucks. So you gotta live with it, right? I feel like we talk to ourselves like that. And it's horrible.

I mean, when you really think about it, I try to remember and mimic how I would talk to my daughter. I love and cherish her so much. And I want her to grow through her experiences. And so I hold space for her to process those emotions. And I just wait and I kind of lead her along. Well, you know, how do you feel now? Or can you name that feeling? What does it feel like? And that really helps her to kind of come up with her own words and say what she's thinking.

And then I just allow for her to come to her own conclusion because guess what? She always does. We're always trying to find a conclusion, a way to make us feel better. And when we are in a situation where we just ignore those feelings or we put ourselves down so much, like we literally have nothing left to give. And so I challenge you to talk to yourself like you would your child or a close friend or even a parent, if you're someone who's really close with your parents.

Know that we're not perfect. None of us are perfect. Allow yourself to have space to take in the lesson, process it, and change the way that you make decisions in the future. Listen, you don't have to solve everything today, okay? Resilience is built in the small steps that you take every day. I mean, they're intentional, they're thought-provoking, they allow you to grow in the way that you need to.

So I challenge you to just choose one of the strategies we talked about today and start applying it today, even if it means you're just gonna try the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 to see how that actually works, even though you're not freaking out right now. Allow that to solidify in your brain so that it's now a technique that you will go to when you need it, okay?

And lastly, hey, listen, none of us are avoiding adversity or problems, okay? But it's about how you choose to rise through it. And I 100% know that you are stronger than you think. And I just wanna leave that with you today. So have a beautiful day, friends. If you enjoyed this, please leave me a review so that Apple knows to suggest this podcast for other people or share it with your friends if this is a message you think that they can use.

All right, friends, we'll see you later. Have a beautiful day.