Window of Tolerance: A Guide for Highly Sensitive High Achievers
Window of Tolerance: A Guide for Highly Sensitive High Achievers Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music Google Podcasts It usually surprises people when I tell them that meditation and mindfulness can actually be dangerous. Sure, these practices can be largely beneficial. But there are some groups where we have to work on their Window of Tolerance […]
Overcoming All or Nothing Thinking with Chronic Illness
Overcoming All or Nothing Thinking with Chronic Illness Apple Podcasts Spotify Amazon Music Google Podcasts Overcoming All or Nothing Thinking with Chronic Illness. Some days I feel like a science experiment. It’s as if I’m constantly adjusting variables in a grand experiment to discover the magic combination. Which makes life a little easier, a bit […]
How to Say No: Saying No as a Highly Sensitive High Achiever
Saying “no” is hard, especially for us highly sensitive high achievers. We often find ourselves caught between our people-pleasing and our relentless drive to set goals and achieve them. Keyword
Hidden signs of perfectionism
Perfectionism, contrary to popular belief, isn’t a one-size-fits-all trait. There’s actually two different kinds: overt and covert.
Moral Distress, climate change and hummingbirds
I’ve been feeling a lot of moral distress lately with the state of the world, politically, environmentally, humanitarianly, conflict, war, genocide. It’s feeling very overwhelming for me as a highly sensitive person. I think it’s feeling like too much for most of us, really
The Secret Behind Effective Burnout Recovery Strategies
When I first learned about burnout I heard it was a stress management problem. Essentially it was too much stress and not enough coping strategies to deal with all that stress. But after my own epic burnout experience, I realized that way of perceiving burnout was wrong. The truth is, burnout is not a stress management problem. It’s an energy management problem. And that completely changes the way we look at burnout recovery strategies.
The Two Kinds of Self-Care
I wish I could meet the person who first said that you need 30 minutes per day of self-care so that I could shake them and ask “why????”.
Finding a solid 30 minutes to dedicate to yourself is pretty difficult, especially in the lives of highly sensitive high achievers, am I right? Plus, not all self-care is made equal, and there are some things we think are self-care, but are actually not.
Let’s talk about it.
Why one-size-fits-all approaches to wellness may not work for everyone
When you think of meditation, you likely think about someone sitting down on the floor, legs crossed, eyes closed, hands resting on their knees, breathing deeply and looking calm and relaxed.
But what if meditation didn’t have to look that way? What if all of the typical self-care practices could be adapted to what works for you, not what everybody else seems to be doing?
Feeling overwhelmed with stress? Here’s something that works
I never used to be the kind of person that would get anxious or overwhelmed. I used to be proud of that and think it was a skill especially when I was working as an ICU Registered Nurse and things were going sideways that day.
Turns out it was dissociation, aka a coping mechanism from trauma.
What can I say, hindsight’s a jerk sometimes.
Now, the truth is I get very anxious, not just my OCD anxiety disorder, but also just generalized anxiety. I think it’s kind of wild sometimes how creative my anxious brain can be, and how clear it can make the most awful, worst-case what-if scenarios feel so possible and so real.
It’s really easy for the anxious part of me to start drumming up feelings of overwhelm because I can convince myself that I’m not able to cope with whatever my anxious brain or perfectionism have built up. But anxiety is just a friend of mine now, welcome to stay here as long as they need.
Overwhelm, though, that’s a red-flag warning sign for me that I’m heading down the road to burnout.
Ong Namo: How I started decolonizing my yoga practice
Yoga has absolutely changed my life, but not solely from the mat based asana practice. However, when I was first introduced to yoga that’s all I knew it to be! Yoga was where you went to feel calm, stretch and maybe get stronger depending on the class that you signed up for. Only after completing my yoga teacher training and teaching for a while did I encounter the complexities of Westernized yoga, which led me to question my role in perpetuating cultural appropriation. As my beloved practice crashed down around me, I was left to navigate the intersection of spirituality as an atheist, privilege as a disabled white woman, and authenticity in my desire to honor the true essence of yoga. This is a story of evolution, reflection, and the pursuit of truth.