Care and Feeding of Self

Investing in Your Self

Globally, the diet industry is worth over $200 billion compared with about $38 billion for the self-help industry. While “only” about $76 billion of the diet number is in the US, it’s still twice what people invest in self-help globally. The trouble is, most of those diets don’t work, while investing in self-help, assuming you stick with it, and continue to up your game, is more effective in the long run. Why? Because most diets fail to be all-encompassing; diet, exercise, and lifestyle change.

The diet industry, all too often, focuses on a quick fix which might boost your confidence for a little while, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. When you invest in yourself, be it through books, accountability partners, a therapist, or a life coach, you’re sending a message to your brain that says: “I want to improve myself for the long haul.” It means you understand improving yourself is multi-faceted, and must include your mental and emotional state as well as physical.

Speaking from experience, counting calories, or points, or hyper-focusing on what I’m eating tends to make my brain obsess about food which is exactly what I’m trying to change. Regardless of what so many of the weight loss programs profess, what you eat is only one factor in improving your health. You need to exercise and build muscle in order to help your body burn calories efficiently; not just right now, but for the rest of your life. No amount of calorie counting, stomach stapling, liposuction, or anything else will help keep your weight stable without actually using that body regularly.

Exercise is Key

I’ve invested my fair share in self-help books, and one of the commonalities in most is getting up off the sofa and moving. Whether it’s a 20-minute walk, a regular workout, dancing, tennis, or whatever fits your wants and needs, moving is a panacea for many maladies. One of the commercials for arthritis medication even touts: “a body in motion stays in motion”.

Speaking again from experience, things like dancing and ballet fill my joy meter which keeps me from trying unsuccessfully to fill it with food. Walking gets me out of the house where I get fresh air, exercise, a change of scenery (even if I walk the same route every day), and often lively conversation to boot. Even if my weight doesn’t drop as quickly or regularly as I’d like, my overall health; mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual, receive regular doses of health and vitality.

What baffles me while I’m out walking is how many people I see talking on their phones while walking. It’s especially odd when they’re walking a dog. In my mind, the whole purpose of getting out and walking, or frankly, doing any kind of exercise, is to disconnect from the electronics for a little while. If you’re walking your dog, interact with the dog, not some faceless entity on the other end of your cell phone. Otherwise, interact with the people and animals you meet along the way, enjoy the scenery, or simply let your mind wander where it will.

Move Your Body, Clear Your Head

In fact, that’s the reasoning behind the 20-minute walk recommended in “The Artist’s Way”. Sometimes you just need to let your mind go where it will instead of forcing it to chew on old issues, things you can’t fix right this minute, or people you’re allowing to live in your head rent-free. Even when I’m with my regular walking partner, there are times we’ll have a lively, if odd conversation, and others when we’ll walk in companionable silence, each allowing their mind to wander through whatever real or fantastical world it chooses.

Society these days has two major problems in my opinion:

1. Dependence on electronics to occupy the mind.
2. Belief that self-improvement has to be a quick fix.

In over a year of walking regularly, I’ve come to appreciate the down time when I get to admire the scenery, greet people who’ve grown used to seeing us walking every day, visit with the dogs we meet along the way, and observe the changing of the seasons first hand. I’ve seen improvements, not just in my physical form, but in my stamina, in my patience, and in my strength. When we first started, I could barely walk 1/4 mile without exhausting myself (granted, we started walking 3 days after I’d had major surgery). Now I walk 3 miles in about an hour, and even the inclines which used to leave me panting for breath no longer slow me down.

If I wasn’t disconnecting (although I do carry my cell phone in case of emergency, but it stays in my pocket), I wouldn’t even recognize those improvements, or the fact I’ve managed, on a few days lately, to get below a 20-minute mile…without even trying! I’ve also stopped allowing things like pain and minor injuries to stop me from walking. Yesterday, as I stepped off the porch, my right knee gave way for a second. Instead of sitting down on one of my red, Adirondack chairs and whining about it, I told the knee I’d walk slowly until it caught up.

Moving Through the Pain

Though it responded by sending pain down into my shin and up into my hip, I continued to walk, while allowing everything to ease into the movement. At the moment, I’m not exactly pain-free, given the recurrence of the herniated discs in my neck, but I know just the swinging of my arms, and holding my body erect eases the pain in my left arm and shoulder, and has helped (along with daily stretching and icing) to maintain my regular levels of exercise and movement (12- to 15 thousand steps a day on average).

Of course, you have to be in tune with your own body (another advantage to disconnecting from electronics every day), and only push past the pain safely. I learned how far that is for me, but refrain from offering suggestions to others. I don’t know what you’ve been through, or where your body’s been. I can only say, you can’t listen to yours if you don’t allow yourself to pay attention without distractions.

At any rate, whether you choose to invest in self-help books, accountability partners, life coaches, therapists, or some other form of self-care, the main thing to remind yourself is you deserve to care for yourself first and foremost. Draining your own batteries for the benefit of others will only leave you drained. If you’re waiting around for someone else to improve your life…don’t.

Grateful for Learning to Care for Me

My gratitudes today are:

1. I’m grateful for learning my greatest investment is in myself.
2. I’m grateful for the improvements I’ve made in my life, and continue to make.
3. I’m grateful for all I’ve learned about recharging my own batteries.
4. I’m grateful for learning to ask for help. That, too is self-care.
5. I’m grateful for my walking buddy who’s stuck with me for over a year through all kinds of weather and life challenges.

About the Author

Sheri Conaway is a Holistic Ghostwriter, and an advocate for cats and mental health. Sheri believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. Her mission is to Make Vulnerable Beautiful. In her spare time, she’s also an accountant with extensive experience in Government Contracting.

The Small Stuff Can Make or Break You

Small Wins, Great Improvements

With a little help from a friend, I finally got the LED shop lights in my garage hooked up to the switch on the wall, thanks to an outlet another friend had put in for me a few months ago. The old-fashioned, fluorescent bulb style lights my ex had hard-wired in after trash digging on one of his construction jobs were getting worse and worse. Whenever there’s any dampness in the air, they don’t want to come on, and as they’re the old style of fixture, I can no longer get ballasts or bulbs for them. Eventually, I’ll have to disconnect them, and take them all down, but for now, my garage is as bright as day in all the previously dark corners.

Having my car out of the garage to install the lights meant a couple of other fixes could happen as well. It makes me so happy to flip the switch, and have all the lights come on without the finickiness of the old fluorescents! The small things in life make me so happy! Speaking of small things, I was panicking because SCE had scheduled 2 maintenance outages 10 days apart, and the second was supposed to be on November 30th. To most people, it would be a small inconvenience, but I use the last day of the month, especially when I’m lucky enough to have it fall on a weekend, to prep for monthly billing. Having the power out most of the day would have been a massive inconvenience, to say the least. Fortunately, the powers that be rethought their plan and moved the second outage to December 7th which is much better for me! Another small win for my team!

Internal Setbacks

At the same time, a lot of small stuff has been weighing me down of late; things I know are fleeting, yet have allowed to drag my heart and mind away from what’s important. Even though I know it’s a temporary lapse, it’s wreaked its share of havoc on my life for the last couple of weeks. However, that havoc, and the mindset which sapped my energy and motivation for a time has brought me full circle to where I’m writing daily. In so doing, I get to put things back into perspective, and fan the flame of my spark of hope with each post I write.

As I see it, these mental and emotional setbacks which force me back to basics (e.g. writing regularly) are reminders I’m neglecting myself in some fashion. Just as failing to take care of my physical self leads to an increase in aches and pains, and flare ups of arthritis, neglecting my mental and emotional self creates a plethora of internal aches and pains when the floodgates open, immersing my heart and spirit in old, unhealed traumas and outdated coping mechanisms. Only writing seems to allow me to work through those deep-seated, toxic cesspools.

Stretching the Mind, Body, and Spirit

Just as my body needs to stretch and move every day, so does the body housing all of my emotions, both experienced and withheld. As such, stretching my emotional self through my writing, is as necessary, if not more so, than stretching my body regularly. In both cases, the stretches need to be uncomfortable, if not a little painful in order to be effective. Failing to take the time to air those emotions is the internal equivalent of sitting on my butt all day. In both cases, I get stiff, sore, and need to move things around until they’re loose enough to flow more easily.

Admittedly, it’s usually easier to move my body than the well of unmanaged emotions I’ve bottled up for decades because, all too often, I have to remove another layer of protection to get to the next pit of feelings. I was taught from early childhood how to bottle things up, but not how to work through the pain, express the emotions, and let them go. Although I’ve made significant progress in this second half of my life, old habits still come roaring in when I let my guard down.

This daily writing is doing so much more than simply airing the emotions and preparing them for release. It’s also addressing those coping mechanisms which are all too happy to jump in in a misguided attempt to protect me from harm when instead, they’re doing more harm than good. If I’m ever tempted to give in to them, I have only to look back at my parents and the lives they led. If I am certain of nothing else, it’s the fact I do not want to live my life like they lived theirs. Only now do I see what a cold, lonely, depressing place that would be.

Stop Sweating the Small Shit

Yes, I have my sad, lonely, depressed moments. The difference between me and my parents is I’m able to own those moments, and dig deep inside to release the pressure they only released by drinking excessively. Even then, it was only a temporary release, as they never actually worked through the impacted emotions to free themselves from the relentless grip on their lives. Truth be told, they’d be mortified by the way I air my deepest thoughts and feelings semi-publicly like this. (I don’t delude myself I have a huge following, but the one I have is precious to me)

While I may sweat the small shit for a little while every so often, I’ve learned, and am still learning to write about it, and even talk about it to my few, precious, real friends when I need to, but also to help myself keep healing. I do hope, in being able to drag things out of my psyche, autopsy, and release them into the much wider Universe, I truly am (as some have suggested) helping someone else out there realize old lessons in suppressing emotions were dead wrong. Only by pulling them out, sometimes kicking and screaming, examining them microscopically, and going through the process of feeling them once and for all allows the healing process to proceed.

We are all a huge conglomeration of feelings and experiences, yet all too often we try to deny the feelings. Kindness and compassion aren’t just words on social media. They’re gifts we give, not only to ourselves, but to the Universe itself because we touch every, single soul on this planet in some way, and perhaps elsewhere in the Galaxy as well.

Grateful for Breakthroughs

My gratitudes today are:

1. I’m grateful for friends who offer me new experiences.
2. I’m grateful for my following, even if I’m never going to be an “influencer”. I know what I write isn’t going to resonate with the many, but rather, with the few.
3. I’m grateful for the plethora of ideas which have been filling my head, and spilling out onto the screen the last couple of weeks. May it continue unabated.
4. I’m grateful for the encouragement I’m getting, letting me know my words aren’t falling on deaf ears. I know those who’ve given up on me don’t really matter in the general scheme of things. They weren’t meant to walk my path for long, if at all.
5. I’m grateful for learning to let go of other peoples’ expectations; even if some of those people are blood family.

About the Author

Sheri Conaway is a Holistic Ghostwriter, and an advocate for cats and mental health. Sheri believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. Her mission is to Make Vulnerable Beautiful and help entrepreneurs touch the souls of their readers and clients so they can increase their impact and their income.