Wellness Counseling Tip: Don’t Cheat Your Wellness by Multi-tasking
I’m going to walk you through a scenario. It’s April, and some of the days have started to walk you toward longer hours of sunshine. You relish the sweatiness on the back of your neck, pulling errant weeds in your yard, enjoying the cool/warm breeze that only spring can bring. Feeling eager to put winter behind you, you head inside to your closet and start pulling things out, casting piles onto your bed of items to sort through – keep, donate, sell. The pile on your bed grows. You already feel lighter, more in control of your belongings; you and your smaller “collection” are totally vibing. Cue a needed break for dinner, and a few hours later, you return to the pile that now, somehow, does not look appealing, fresh, or freeing to you. Instead, it’s a pile of sh*t that’s impeding you from laying your body down to rest. Those 7 extra pairs of shoes weren’t that bothersome in the closet, and now they represent one more errand to Goodwill in an already overscheduled week. Dammit!
Wellness Tip: One Thing at a Time
What if we allowed ourselves to be content with little steps to wellness rather than cheating our wellness by multi-tasking? What if we made a tiny space for that one small thing that we’ve wanted to shift in our lives for quite a while? What if our wellness could actually be generated by minuscule thought, habit, and emotional tweaks that make for seismic ripples? I’m here to tell you that they can because there are a few more bits about wellness – what it means, and how we cultivate it.
Wellness is Pandemic; Don’t Cheat Your Wellness by Multi-tasking
How in the hell does one use wellness and pandemic in the same sentence?! If we work on wellness in one facet of our lives, it is undeniable that it will spread to other areas of our well-being. An example goes back to my fine wine reference to last week’s blog in which, at this time of year, I make a conscious choice to remove alcohol from my life. I do this largely for my emotional wellness, but the impact of this slight behavioral change transfers into better physical wellness (sleep, lower caloric intake, less inflammation in my body) and spiritual wellness (access to deeper, existential, non-numbed-out thoughts.) Like in counseling, when one person in a family or relationship decides to really work on issues that they’re having in their life, the ripple effects of the shifts that this person makes extend into the entire relational pool of that person. And that is the kind of pandemic effect that changes lives for the positive. *** Update, on January 6, I gave in and had a drink. And I’m not beating myself up over it. See how this goes? Good.
Wellness is Messy & Not Sexy
I remember deep within my early ‘90’s tv commercial memory bank how completely obsessed I was with the idea of SlimFast Shakes and how they most certainly must have held the key to feeling completely well, fulfilled, and above all, beautiful and able to pose for pictures that would WOW everyone. I now know that wellness looks a lot more like a 9:30 PM bedtime with a large glass of Metamucil before tucking myself under my weighted blanket. It’s not glamorous, sexy, or enviable, but damn if it doesn’t make me feel completely at peace in my body, mind, and spirit, and that’s what it’s all about. Wellness is tuning into the things that you need in your life in order to feel full, complete, and enough.
Consider Why You’re Cheating Your Wellness
When you’re ready for a mental decluttering and a focus on wellness, I offer anxiety counseling to help remove the variables of whatever is getting in your way from moving forward. Additionally, we’re offering a 4 week Winter Wellness series that’s sure to offer you some useful tools for a better 2021.
About the author:
Leah Rockwell, LPC, LCPC is a licensed professional counselor in PA and MD, providing counseling services for women through feminist therapy. She’s a lovingly direct counselor and a co-parenting mom of two daughters, determined to make the world a better place for tomorrow’s girls. In former lives, she was a Spanish teacher, a sex education instructor, a wine vendor, and she is pretty sure she was a mermaid.
