Hanna:
Hello and welcome to episode number 14, and the 5th episode of a ten episode focus on Love, Sex & Relationships because that’s what people wanna talk to me about like all the time. Relationship. And I love talking about relationships too. Navigating them. Creating them. Honoring them. So here, we are jamming on dirty relationship thoughts. That sounds like you’re in for some super kinky, fantasy pod-sex…like phone sex but podcast. And unfortunately for you, and for me, that is not the theme of this podcast…but I be you there is a podcast or two out there that talk real dirty so go find those and report back.
No the dirty relationship thoughts we discuss on this show are the thoughts that might not serve us very well in relationships. So thoughts like “relationships are hard” “What if this doesn’t work out?” “I just wanna make you happy” …which are all thoughts we covered on previous episodes by the way so go check those out… and today’s dirty little thought which is “That was a waste of my time”.
Today we’re talking about regret. The feeling of regret, which shows up in relationships in some form somehow no matter who you are.
So if you thought I was going to be talking about fetishes or role play you’re in the wrong show, but I still think you should stay tuned because there is something for everyone here and you never know…learning about how thoughts create your relationship life could help you when it comes to your fetishes too.
Ok so have you ever thought this before? “That was a waste of my time.” Think about the last time you thought you wasted your time on someone. On some act in a relationship. On love. Maybe you are thinking about a relationship that ended. And you’re like well, that was a huge waste of time. Waste of energy. Waste of my love.
I used to think this thought a lot. After breakups. After something in my relationship didn’t go as planned. I’d use my past against my future. That’s what happens when we think that something was a waste of our time. We use what already happened against our future time, energy and love.
Let me show you how incredibly skilled your brain is at trying to keep you safe. Because remember that the thoughts we have always serve some purpose…a lot of times it’s your primitive brain’s purpose, not your higher human passion purpose. But when we identify thoughts we’re having it can be really beneficial to notice not only what that thought is creating in your life now (which I’ll get to in a second) but where that thought might have come from or why it’s taken up residence in your brain.
In this case you experience something that you perceive as negative, right? Your brain looks at a breakup, for example, and on a scale from zero to total universal catastrophe it’s nearly there. And your brain goes “well, we don’t want to ever go there again…so here’s a thought: “that relationship was a waste of your time”. And then your evolved human brain comes along and goes, you know what, you’re right. I am so evolved and beyond that nonsense that happened that I know that it was totally not me to be in that relationship and give my energy there and it was just a total waste of my brilliance. Sounds nice right? Sounds kinda empowering.
But what has happened is that your primal brain, in its effort to keep you safe, has successfully kept you OUT of your brilliance. By forming neural connections between relationship and the thought “waste of time” you are fueling a self concept that doesn’t show up for future relationships.
When you think “that was a waste of my time” your self concept actually suffers. It doesn’t make you stronger to think that because it teaches your brain that you waste time. So you shouldn’t do that again. You shouldn’t love again. You shouldn’t expend energy in connection with another person again. You shouldn’t have a relationship again.
And maybe that’s extreme for some of you right? But think about it with respect to something inside your relationships now.
That conversation was a waste of my time…bc it didn’t go how I wanted. Trying to initiate sex with my partner was a waste of my time because we didn’t have sex. Making that meal for him was a waste of time because he didn’t say thank you or enjoy it. Taking that road trip with my lover was a waste of time because we fought about the directions.
It doesn’t matter what the situation is, thinking “that was a waste of my time” creates regret. And when we regret we beat ourselves up and we don’t try again. The other thing we don’t do when we feel regret about how we used our time…we don’t use the time we have now for growth.
Hear that again because I think this is the meaty part that we all could use some more clarity on:
When you think I wasted my time, nothing happens to change how you spent time in the past, but it changes how you’ll spend your time in the future.
Think about this like with the example of initiating sex with your partner. You light a bunch of candles, make a meal that doesn’t give you gas, haha am I the only person who thinks like that, I’m like okay if I’m bloated I just can’t though. Haha just another thought I’m working on overcoming, but I digress. So you like set the mood or whatever and you make a move on your person and they aren’t interested in intimacy tonight. So you had this plan in your head and you are wearing fancy underwear that may or may not be on backwards but it doesn’t make much difference, and your partner doesn’t reciprocate the desire for sex. And you think “well that was a total waste of time”.
And you feel probably a little disappointed but mostly regret I think comes from that thought. You regret having done what you did. You wasted time. Regrettable. And when you regret making the big show and initiating intimacy you probably have some self-diminishing thoughts and beat yourself up a bit but you don’t try again. You try to return the lingerie but there is a no return policy on intimates so you just double down on the belief that that was a waste. Of time and money now! And you go back to Mac n cheese for dinner and sweatpants and Netflix and actually chill. And as a result you continue to use your time to NOT initiate sex.
Now, what if you couldn’t waste your time? Or your love? What if it wasn’t possible to do that? Can we entertain this idea for just a tick?
You can’t waste your time. You can’t waste your love. You can’t waste your energy.
You know I personally think that it’s a waste of your thoughts to think that any of those things were a “waste”.
But what could be true of your time if it was never a waste?
If this wasn’t a waste, what was it?
I like to ask myself that. If I couldn’t possibly have wasted one second of my life, if every second was here for something, what?
And that’s something we will have to answer individually based on what exactly you thought was a waste of time. Or love. Love is the easier one honestly for me to believe this about. Because if you subscribe to the same belief about love as I do, you know that feeling love is for you. Loving feelings are never wasted ON someone because when you feel love for someone you feel that in your body. “I love you” is a thought. And it generates loving feelings in your own body. I love you isn’t a way to bestow a feeling on someone else’s body. It’s a sentiment we use to express our own emotions through words to someone else. And I know this is like me being an anti romantic right now and I promise I love love and love romance and appreciate and cherish love and thing it’s magical and universe altering more than probably most people you know but let me just say this. When we said “I love you” to somebody else or say “I’m in love with you”, it’s literally just you saying guess what I am feeling right now! Wanna know what I get to feel in this moment?! I feel love and it’s fuckin awesome. Lemme tell you about it.
Maybe not romantic sounding when I say it this way but honestly what could ever ever be a waste about that? I don’t care who you told I love you, that was and always will be an expression of how good you felt. Feeling love in your body was never a waste. Because it brought more love to the human collective experience in those moments, plus there in an infinite amount of love available to you and to everyone, so you didn’t like “use it up” ok?
Now time is a little tougher to get on board with not being able to waste I understand because our brains are like but time is not infinite. We will die at some point and we don’t get to have more. If that’s what you believe. Ok but here are some other options that serve the time we have now, better than thinking that whatever we did was a waste.
What looks like a waste to you could also look like a time filled with emotions, learning, failing forward, leaning in and experiencing hurt. That is valuable.
What looks like a waste to you could be a failure, a flail, a funk…all of those things hold immense value. Failure. The ultimate opportunity to grow self confidnce. Right? What a blessing it is to fail. I think sometimes that’s the synonym people have in their minds when they say “waste”. If I failed, that was a waste of time. Girl, please. If you failed you got the chance of a lifetime. To feel failure and live. To take failure with you. To have your own back even when it looks like a loss to everyone else, it could look like a necessary part of your evolution to you. Failure offers us an opportunity to strengthen our self concept. Lot’s of people use failure as an excuse to shit on themselves and their self concept is that of “a failure”, a time waster.
Women, listen. We need to fail more. We need to get really really good at it. Because we live in a world where we are set up to fail. To make less, to have less, to do less than our male counterparts and so when we can get good at failing, when we can eliminate the fear and come back again with more understanding than before to do it again, bolder, better, plus our natural strengths of compassion and nurturing turned inward, and we shift the internal dialogue away from time wasted and toward KNOWLEDGE POWER CURIOSITY CREATIVITY SELF ASSUREDNESS SELF TRUST GAINED, we will have the world by the balls.
One of my clients was talking about how she wastes time being sad about a relationship that ended. So that’s like the double stuff oreo version of this thought about time-wasting. Right? I wasted my time in this relationship, and now I’m wasting my time being sad about it. Double time-wasting thoughts. Double stuffed with regret.
Listen, you can only waste time on feeling if you believe that you can. Super annoying statement but goddess is it the truth. People ask me al the time how do I eliminate my anxiety? How do I eliminate my negative feelings? How do I stop feeling sad? And they hate it when I say that you gotta get really good at feeling those things first. Feeling isn’t a waste of time.
And what I mean by that is getting good at feeling, without reacting or acting out or beating yourself up or resisting. Or thinking that it is a waste of your time to feel those feelings! Feelings are our superpower. Girls. Feeling feelings is our superpower. We aren’t afraid to talk about feelings but we’re still believing it’s a waste to feel them. Let’s make this jump together ok.
It is an honor to feel feelings. I feel like I should do like a repeat after me. Haha. Put your hand over your heart. Or your brain.
Feelings are the driver of my action and inaction.
The more I feel, the less I fear. The less I fear the more I do.
So here’s the deal with wasting time feeling. Can’t do it. People that think it’s a waste of time to feel and process feelings have a glass ceiling on their life. We’ve got enough of those built for us in society already.
So, if it was a waste of time, what then? Let’s go there.
People think that when they chalk experiences up to a waste of time that they get to feel better about having made a decision or been a part of an experience that didn’t go the way you wanted. But you really don’t do you? You just feel bad about yourself for making the “wrong” decision.
How many of you have phoned a friend on this one?
I’ve done it. Call your girlfriends or your mom and you’re like OMG Do you think I wasted my time with him? Do you think I am wasting my time by having that conversation? Totally wasn’t worth my time right, taking her on that trip? By getting my hair and makeup done for this date and he didn’t even notice?
I wish that every friend was required to answer their friend’s question with another question. Like, do you think it’s a waste of time to have that conversation or is it actually something that feels important? Do you want to think you wasted your time with him or would it be better for you to see it another way? Did you want to go on that trip, then good for you for going! Was it fun to get your hair and makeup done?
Like I know we just want our friends advice and I am not saying stop asking your friends for or giving your friends advice, that’s part of the relationship that is beautiful but I also think we can like consciously reel it in a little bit as far as asking other people who aren’t you to weigh in on how you chose to use your time.
What if they say yes? Yeah that was a total waste. What will that mean? That you should hop in your time capsule and go back and just throw on some simple mascara instead of getting a full face and a blow out? No. Because you can’t do that. AND you own your time looking like a fierce queen all fancy with hair so big and full of secrets and that shit was for YOU. You chose that. Own that. Like stop belittling your choices. I don’t care what someone else did with your choices. If your husband didn’t notice that you got your hair done that is what HE did with HIS time. He spent his time not noticing your hair. Your choice was to get your hair done and you paid for that with your money and you looked hot. You did all that with your time and that can be a precious precious use of your time, if you choose to see it that way.
Make your time mean something precious for you. Make it mean you learned. Make it mean you wanted to do what you did at the time and that’s totally acceptable and badass. Make it mean whatever you want but definitely do not ask other people what they think of your time spent and then try to find dating and relationship rules in what they say.
Any Survivor fans here? That was a conversational hard left. Let’s talk about survivor. I just started watching Survivor for the first time during the Pandemic because a friend of mine told me that I should apply to be on the show and I was like well I don’t even know what that show is. And now I have admittedly watched every season (of which there are now 41) in the past two years. And honestly this podcast could be retitled Thought Work, As Depicted on Survivor because I truly find so many golden examples of human behavior and neurophysiology within the context of that show that I could literally use a survivor reference during every Episode of this podcast. I just think Survivor is the psycho analysts wet dream. Take evolved humans and strip them of their modern day comforts, throw them into an arena where they must live with and compete against other humans, form bonds and relationships, navigate a social strategy that includes winning out over other players but knowing that ultimately the outcome of the game is determined by the people you’ve had a hand in voting out. Like, talk about a mind fuck. I feel like a mad scientist every time I watch. People’s raw emotion motivating then to act or retreat, historical and social conditioning at play within the game, how people use their own knowledge of human psychology to their advantage, the visceral reacttivity. All of it… just get’s me giddy.
Anyways, the thing that I wanted to bring to the arena today with respect to survivor…haha I think I’m going to just start sneaking in survivor references each episode for my fellow fans…but with respect to this thought “that was a waste of time” I was thinking like how many times I’ve noticed players in the game say “I wish I would have known that, that didn’t go as planned and what a waste of time ….to build an alliance with her or to go through the trouble of finding that immunity idiot only to have it stolen, or to vote for that person when I could have voted for someone different and saved myself….like SO MANY regrets within the game of survivor. And the part that made me really start to think is the fact that lot’s of those players who had major regrets went on to win the game. And take home a million dollars. They didn’t win the game of survivor by harboring the thought “that was a waste”. They had to let go of regret and move on with MORE intuition, knowledge, understanding, self trust, self assuredness, self trust, right? Those were the feelings that got them to the end of the game.
What would happen if someone who was like, well that was a huge waste of time to build an alliance with this guy, because now he’s gone and kept that thought for the remainder of the game? That player would be stuck in a sinkhole of regret, disappointment and self doubt and he would be so hung up on the time wasted building an alliance that’s now gone, that he would miss the opportunity to use the time he has now to pivot, take some new insights and run with them, go build another alliance, and figure out a new strategy to win the game.
The players that win Survivor, a lot of times, are the ones who use the things that didn’t go the way they’d planned instead of being so tied to how they thought it was going to go that they lose all momentum.
So If you wanna win Survivor, don’t be surprised when things don’t go exactly how you planned AND don’t ever try to use the thought “that was a waste” to fuel you. Because it won’t.
So if you can’t waste your time. And you can’t waste your love. Then what do you want to choose to think about your time and love instead? I’m going to leave you with that today. I hope you enjoyed. Don’t forget to follow me on instagram @Hannakokovai for more, and get on my email list to get monthly coaching love letters sent right to your inbox. You can join my mailing list through the link in my instagram bio OR by visiting my website hannakokovai.com