It’s super on-trend right now to be busy. Business-y business types are so busy. A single mom working three jobs is busy. Your retired Aunt Cindy is busy.
How are you? Busy.
You’re not actually that busy. Our single mom with three jobs sure is busy. The rest of us? Not so much.
The average American spends 3.58 hours watching TV each day. If you can binge-watch all seven seasons of Game of Thrones before the Season 8 release, you can get outside and take a hike for an hour on Sunday before you lay down to veg out.
It’s not that you don’t have time. Showing up for your body is just not a priority for you.
The average American spends 3.5 hours on their mobile device each day. Modern technological devices, apps, and algorithms are scientifically designed to maximize your time spent online. Through patterned learning, they stimulate your brain stem,releasing the motivational neurohormone dopamine to keep you taking that action to get more of that feeling. That means, you’re powerfully motivated to pick up your phone and check. Once you DO pick it up, you’re powerfully motivated to stay on it, getting lost in the wormhole of the web, games, porn, and social media.
If you really to want to feel your best and make time for Yoga, use the time limits in your phone’s settings to limit the duration you can use the apps that waste the majority of your time.
You don’t have time to waste with excuses. This is your one life. When you’re diagnosed with Type II diabetes or lying in a bed waiting surgery to put a stent in your heart, you’ll have plenty of time to think about how you wish you’d made your health a priority. All of the work, responsibilities, goals, and priorities have no meaning if you’re not well. In our Burnout Culture, we worship at the altar of busy and it shows in our steadily-increasing prevalence of preventable diseases.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll get tomorrow. Wouldn’t you rather be your kindest self and feel comfortable in your skin so you can make the most of today? Get to work.
You feel like it’s someone else’s responsibility. We’ve been trained to defer to the “expert”when it comes to our health and wellness. You show up at the doctor’s office,get a prescription, and all of your problems should go away. That’s not how it works in the real world. If you want to be health, have tons of energy, feel amazing, and kick butt in life, you have to fight for it. You have to show up in the kitchen, on the mat, in your relationships, with your boundaries, and in your mind. You have to do there search, challenge the status quo, and do the work that makes YOU feel best. There’s no quick fix. There’s no one answer. And nobody’s going to do it for you.
You may not be responsible for the wound, but you are 100% responsible for your recovery.
You haven’t made you a priority. We all love to talk about how much people need us at work, at home, in our community, where we volunteer, the shut-in neighbor we’re bound to help. We talk about how we don’t have time to cook healthy food or get to class. We expose on how much time we have to spend driving our kids around or how much our workload has increased since Nancy was let go. We run around meeting everyone else’s needs and wonder why we feel like garbage. Before we can take care of ourselves, we have to look closely about the story we tell ourselves about our worth, our value, and our responsibilities to others. We have to stand up and believe: I matter! This work isn’t easy, but you deserve every second of it.
When you put YOU on the top of your priority list, there will always be time for what you need.