The Next Time You Fall

Remind and Accept

Falling is necessary.

Life’s lows add texture and contrast to your experience.

When you fall, accept it, please.

Don’t fight the fall; just let it happen. Resisting your emotions only makes the emotions bigger, adding to your pain.

Remember, You NEED these moments; these times when everything feels like too much and you have no motivation to do anything. The low moments are some of the most important times for growth and discovery.

Feeling like you are stuck, anxious, melancholy, etc, are natural and normal emotions. You must experience unpleasant emotions to some degree, usually often.

Check-in and Diagnose

Ask yourself what is your body trying to tell you?

Your body has given you error codes, what are they trying to tell you now?

What have you been doing that has signaled that you are falling or already on the ground?

Actions like mindless scrolling, overthinking, and binge eating are examples of things you may do before a “fall” or during.

Mindless scrolling like a tire pressure light tells you that you’re feeling a bit empty and need to fill up!

Scrolling is compensation for something more rewarding.

Before you can begin to recover from this fall you must identify what inputs (thoughts, action, emotions) are causing this fall.

Only after you’ve diagnosed the problem can you begin to reconnect with your light and climb out of the hole.

Reconnect

You have to fall back on to the the things and people that give you strength. You need strength in the moments when you fall and this can be found in your anchors. Whether your anchor is religion, family, friends, or an activity you must treat it like “base” in a game of tag.

If you’ve spent anytime building Baseline Habits to fall back on, then these moments when you fall is the perfect time to solely focus on those habits.

Return to Energizing music, gentle stretching, slow activities, and spend 5 intentional minutes in nature reflecting.

Remove

Emotional falls are the same as physical falls. Like a physical injury you can jump right back up and “walk it off,” but if the fall is great enough, the effects will linger and, if not properly tended to, will worsen over time( especially if ignored).

You’ve heard that more than one priority means you have none. So, despite what the entire world tells you about productivity and the like, doing too much will always lead to doing nothing (Burnout).

Though it may feel counterintuitive to put a pause on your current life, your entire being is screaming at you to slow down and recover. You need listen to it.

Cut-out or Cut-back on as much as you can without jeopardizing work, rent, debt, and close relationships.

You are allowed to ask for space from ANYONE while you recovering.

Search Relentlessly For Your Glimmers

Now that we’ve cleaned our plates, we can start to build ourselves back up.

Start by reprogramming your mind for what you need. Hopefully, you got an idea of what you need in the diagnosis phase, so now it’s time for remedies.

GLIMMERS: “small moments that spark joy or peace, which can help cue our nervous system to feel safe or calm.”

A glimmer is a positive Trigger. Intentionally seeking out the glimmers in life will start to reprogram/remind your brain to recognize the parts of life that trigger joy. Look relentlessly for your glimmers to combat the non-beneficial thoughts that always seem to lurk around.

Voice Memo and Vent

The feeling that caused your fall needs to leave your body, emotions should not be held in your body. Venting out your emotions is a great way to unpack them outside of your body.

1. Sit in your car, closet, or park bench by yourself and start a voice memo.

2. In this voice memo, you’re going to play therapist and the therapied.

3. Ask yourself these questions out loud and answer them. Allow yourself to go off tangents, discover new ideas, rant, and vent.

Once you’re finished, you can listen to the recording in time or delete it altogether. All that matters is you turn the emotions and thoughts into words, allowing them to leave you.

Self Care

You must start viewing your falls as injuries that you need to recover from. Just as you would rehab and stretch an injury, you should do the same with your inner injuries.

Rehabbing your emotional life can look like going outside for a walk or sitting in a park.

It can be taking showers to regulate or creating a cozy space to read with a cup of tea.

Look at the Danish practice of Hygee. Hygee is a practice of cultivating spaces and activities for yourself that make you feel content and comfortable. The Danish use Hygee to combat the negative emotional effects of harsh depressing winters. We can adopt this practice when we fall to intentionally feel comfy.

Remove More Stuff From Your Plate.

I saw you hide something in your pocket 👀

By this point, you feel a little bit better and want to start adding to your hectic life, or you have already done so.

Just because you’ve started feeling better doesn’t mean you’re done recovering. We still need to fortify ourselves so the next time we fall (there will be a next time), we can recover even faster.

So go ahead and remove all the unnecessary ones again.

Start to track/map your fall symptoms and triggers

Let’s now make sure we are better prepared for the fall next time.

Expect to fall. You have to. It is a very real and necessary part of life; however, how long we spend learning the lessons of the fall depends on how prepared and ready we are to learn.

First, we will list the most common symptoms of an impending fall or current one.

( bingeing, seeking validation, dramatic changes to plans)

We can even take it further and identify and label what “NEED” each symptom relates to.

Shopping/Bingeing = lonely, unfulfilled

Seeking validation = insecure, lacking confidence

Now that we have a breakdown of our symptoms, we can add the remedies we discovered to alleviate each symptom.

Now, you have a database of your symptoms and remedies.

None of the previously mentioned tools will make you better immediately, but they will intellectualize your feelings into tangible steps to start on your journey back up the mountain.

You are now consciously aware of your symptoms, so when they pop up, you can at least know that you can recover from them.

Plan for the fall; add to your plate very slowly

Expect the fall; build space into your life for periods of recovery

Welcome it: know that the falls are a part of life; they add contrast, and the falls will help strengthen you over time.

Return slowly

Slowly and intentionally add back the things that add value to your life.

Don’t pile them back on all at once to make up for lost time, but rather take them in tiny little pieces.

Consistency is more powerful than speed.

Use the Kaizen method of small steps to build yourself up each day. Slow and steady.

There’s nothing wrong with working hard, but you must make sure you are doing the right work and doing it correctly.

Moving fast, blurs the image and you can’t see the details.

Do it slow. Master SLOW before you increase speed and load.