how to change your life through healing

**TLDR AT END**

Note: I am not a licensed/medical professional. I am only speaking on what has worked for me, and what I’ve learned through my healing process <3 also I’m not claiming to be a perfect person, I’m still trying to unlearn habits and negative patterns from my past, but acknowledging mistakes is the first step to change and I’m happy to share my experience

TW: mental health disorders/issues;trauma

Last post was written so sloppy I’m sorry, I was way too eager to publish my first blog lol. I’m really open about my past just because if I knew someone that had gone through what I went through growing up I feel like it would’ve helped me so much. That’s my point with this post is to kind of inspire others and to help people understand their power, and that you can overcome anything you set your mind to.

The first step for me in my healing journey was recognizing everything that was hurting me. I started by journaling everything that was upsetting me, and everything that I was still holding onto. This helped me to come face to face with my traumas, and it helped me to gain more insight on what I needed to do to get better. Throughout my childhood and teenage years I became very defiant in my healing. I almost refused to get better because I had so much going on in my personal life that I felt like if I opened up that part of me again, I would’ve just been a mess even more so than I already was. I didn’t start journaling again until I had found a safe environment to live in. Now journaling can be difficult if you are already in an unsafe environment, and I totally understand. I was in that place once too, but if you can just start by recognizing your triggers, and everything that is affecting your life in the present moment, then that’s a great first start. I think healing should always be at your own pace, and you should never force anything you aren’t ready for because I have done this in the past and I ended up re-traumatizing myself. That made it even harder to continue healing, because everything shifted and it was really overwhelming. I recommend taking things step-by step day by day.

When I was experiencing different triggers throughout the day, I would immediately do shadow work in my own head. For example, if I was really upset about something in the moment, I will ask myself why am I mad about this? What is the deeper root cause of how I’m feeling? When was the first time I felt this emotion? and I would just keep asking myself questions to get to the deeper meaning of what I was going through. The point of this is to face your traumas Head on. If you continually push away your trauma, it actually stores in your body and this has been scientifically proven. It’s really interesting to research because the mind/body connection is wild. If you aren’t releasing what you’re upset about even if it’s something you deem as insignificant, it will still affect you physically down the road. Stress raises cortisol levels, and affects the adrenal glands. When your stress hormones are hyper active, everything else in your body is affected by it including your well-being, mental health, sleep, eating habits, etc. If you can start by recognizing what triggers you, and doing shadow work whenever you’re having a trigger, this helps tremendously in lowering your stress levels because you’re not overthinking and you’re almost releasing all of that trapped negative energy.

This next tip is something that I am still struggling with because I have had an ed in the past and sometimes it’s hard for me to do this consistently, but something that helps mental health so much is eating. Eating healthy, whole foods that make you feel nourished. Not foods that would also bring down your health, and your well-being. A great tip I recently learned is if you eat something small every two hours it actually helps your body feel a lot better during the day. The purpose of this is related to how your mind and gut are one. If you’re in a constant state of hunger, your body doesn’t recognize that you can eat whenever you want so it’s automatically going in a fight or flight response. This drastically impacts your mood, and it can make you feel worse. Most of the time you are unaware this is happening, but your nervous system picks up on it and it will affect your physical health. By eating something (even if it’s small) every two hours, it will train your body into feeling more relaxed because it’s not in the state of thinking it needs food. Personally my body tenses up when I’m hungry, and I notice when I try this technique I’m able to think more clearly, and I feel more relaxed. If you research how the mind and body are connected, and how eating can help your mood, those articles might be able to explain it better hahhaha I kinda suck at explaining things but in general eating well will drastically improve your mood. [Along with good sleep :) ]

This next one is really important to me, and I think it made the most drastic difference in my life and that is finding a hobby that you truly enjoy doing. This can be literally anything. In high school I loved to do different sports and I actually had a lot of hobbies that I stopped doing once I got to college. I think my environment impacted my mental health a lot, and I lost track of who I was in a way. I was living in Mankato and I started going to minneapolis a lot. I was trying out different restaurants and I started doing a lot of things alone because my issue was not everyone in my life had the time to hang out, and I was also a pushover so whenever I would get together with people, I would just do whatever they wanted to do. So I started going to all these restaurants and places alone, and I fell in love with it. So your hobby doesn’t have to be a specific set in stone hobby. It can be literally just going out to dinner by yourself, or trying new things trying new foods, and once I started trying all of these different things by myself I took my first solo trip to Cancun. Now I would say traveling is my hobby, because that’s what really feeds my soul. I would say make a list of everything you love and try to come up with ideas on how you can implement that into your daily life. For example, I love to travel, but I can’t always go on a seven day all inclusive vacation whenever I want lol. But making small road trips, or even just going to an event in a new town still feeds my soul, because I’m still making an effort to do the things that I love to do. No matter what your circumstances are like, you can really build from what you love and it opens doors to different opportunities!

I have noticed that when I isolate myself too much I miss out on opportunities, experiences and friendships that could’ve been so amazing. I believe that people should be able to re-charge, because I personally absorb a lot of energies around me so I totally understand isolating. I love the saying that goes too much of something can turn out to be unfavorable in the long run. Because it reminds me to reassess what is holding me back. One way I have helped myself get out of isolation ruts is by pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I actually joined a lot of FB friend groups. I never really used fb like that, but they actually helped me practice how to get out in the world again because I was isolating myself for so long. I also learned that everyone is so in their own world that nobody really cares. It sounds harsh but it’s true. When I started going on solo dates alone I would pretend like someone was coming with me and act like they never showed up because I was so afraid of being judged for eating alone. I eventually stopped that after I kept going on dates with myself, because I realize that nobody cares. Same with the Facebook friend groups. For a whole week I pushed myself into trying one thing to do out of my comfort zone everyday. I have made a lot of new friends, and it was such a great experience. Everyone is human and the more you push yourself out of your comfort zone the more you will surprise yourself with what you can do.

Another important thing to take note of is what you get angry about. For the longest time I was at a point in my journey where I was angry at everything. To be fair I did have a lot of reasons to be angry, but I just recently discovered that being angry all the time and getting mad over little things can affect your stress levels. Something that has really helped me is belly breathing. There’s this cute app called belly bio and when you put it on your stomach and start to do the deep breathing techniques, it plays music from your phone. This is just a cute little tip to help you practice the breathing, but I believe that deep breathing in general does really help. I used to be the person to look down upon breathing just because I thought it was kind of stupid honestly, but it does help to relax your body because when you’re breathing like that, it lets your nervous system know that you’re okay and that you’re not stressed. Like I was talking about before, your body can’t tell the difference of what’s going on in your reality. Even if you’re upset about something small, it can still make you go into fight or flight even if it’s not a threat to your physical danger. This is something I struggle with on a daily basis, especially with road rage. I’ve learned to just keep my health in mind when I get mad about stuff and to work on releasing all of that anger/negativity. The more you let it build up, the more you’re likely to blow up at the people you love over little things. This can lead to worse problems, so just keep yourself in mind the next time you get mad. I like to tell myself “if I wouldn’t care about this in 3 months, then it doesn’t matter”. I heard that somewhere and it really stuck with me!

I’m still working on trying to heal myself, and it’s going to be a very long process, but there are steps that you can do along the way to help ease your state of being so you’re not constantly in a state of fight/flight. My goals right now are to make my life as stress-free as possible, so I can manage my PTSD symptoms that dysregulate my emotions. To work on how I blow up at people in arguments, I am really focusing on lowering my cortisol levels to where I’m in a calm state even if something unfavorable happens throughout my day. Life is life, and things are gonna happen but if try to lower your stress throughout the day, it would really benefit your mental and physical health. Thanks for reading I love u and wishing you the healthiest year!

TLDR: calming your nervous system will benefit your mental/physical health. Start by journaling about your triggers. Ask yourself why your triggers upset you. Implement deep breathing in your daily routine/when having triggers to calm nervous system. Put your health first the next time you get angry as anger raises stress levels. A good tip is to eat something small every 2 hours, this has been proven to help your mental state. Find a hobby you enjoy doing. Pushing yourself to try something new can help with isolation.