Are You Making More Deposits Than Withdrawals With Your Health?

I’ve been taking huge withdrawals from my health lately with added stress, wayyyy to much on my already full plate, not enough sleep, lingering cravings from being off my nutrition game over the holidays, sporadic workouts since my toddler gave me every virus known to man since the fall.

If you get my weekly emails, you know. Over the past six months I’ve shared in those writings how tough that last stretch of 2018 was and the tools I used to navigate it (HINT: it was the 5 Pillars and 12 Tangible Tools from my upcoming book HANGRY which you can pre-order NOW! Out June 4, 2019). I know last year was a doozy for many people and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as unbalanced as I did starting 2019! Sound familiar?

When we go through a stretch of time like where we’re unbalanced and out of our normal healthier routine we often feel really, really guilty – like we know better so we should’ve been doing better! We often see only two options: to be perfectly on plan or beating ourselves up for being off track.

A less judgemental framework that keeps you more inline with being your best friend as I say is to let go of the on track or off track idea which breeds guilt, shame and frustration and simply ask yourself:

Am I making more deposits than withdrawals into my health and happiness?

Life isn’t static and it isn’t always easy and darn if it isn’t exhausting trying to constantly get back on that imaginary wagon all the time.

Instead try being mindful each day of are you doing more right than wrong for yourselves, giving more to your health and happiness or taking too much away.

Ways we make deposits into our healthy and happiness:

• Exercise that works for us
• Food that works for us
• Adequate restful sleep and plenty of down time for recovery
• Drinking enough water and staying hydrated
• Kind, nurturing self-talk
• Expressing our truth in a loving way
• Making time for play, ensuring we are joyful

Keeping up with our doctors appointments, teeth cleaning and massage appointments. The things we do to keep up our physical body cared for.

For me also it means doing adequate recovery from exercise including yoga, foam rolling and all my PT exercises (those ones I often “don’t’ have time” to do and always pay the price for neglecting.)

Most of these sound pretty simple right? It’s that #realselfcare Sarah and I talk about all the time on the podcast. They are simple in theory but not always in practice as often the things that take withdrawals from our reserves seem benign and creep in more often than we realize.

Ways we make withdrawals from our health and happiness:

• Not exercising or not exercising in away that works for us, meaning we’re under-doing doing the right stuff or overdoing the stuff that drives us further into the ground.
• Eating food that doesn’t work for us, that makes us bloated, tired, inflamed, agitate our skin in some way or makes us have more cravings.
• Harboring resentment instead of having tough conversations.
• Being critical of ourselves.
• Working too much and not playing enough.
• Drinking too much alcohol
• Not getting enough quality sleep.
• Not doing things that bring us joy!
• Not tending to stressors that may be hormonal or mental/emotional but instead we brush them off or we think there will be more time for dealing with them later.

We do this with people too…

We lose our temper, get lazy about reaching out on the phone or in person (I’m so guilty of this one!) and we fail appreciate the people that matter to us. Just like we dip into reserves of health we’ve built up over time, these things make little withdrawals from our relationships as well.

Like with your health, it’s so helpful to look at your relationship balance sheet as well: are you putting enough back into the relationships that matter? And if you took a big withdrawal (i.e. lost your sh*t with your partner, parents or kids), did you make a big deposit full of thought and love afterwards?

This mindset stuff can seem a little fluffy which is why for our book HANGRY we took great care to distill this fluff down into tangible tools you can easily practice and incorporate into your life. While we didn’t have this deposit-withdrawal model in mind when we wrote the book the mindset tools and even our 5 Habits fit this idea perfectly.

We all have so much to do so we wanted to provide simple frameworks to help you do what matters most with less stress and more ease. With that in mind the 5 Habits was born and it’s all right here:

Now, while HANGRY is a book about how to use diet, exercise and lifestyle habits to heal your hormonal imbalance be they adrenal, thyroid or estrogen:progesterone related a huge part of th book is teaching a mindset framework to make those hormone balancing habits easier. Here’s what we call our 5 Pillars to keep you engage in #realselfcare and again, make it all feel less stressful:

So yes, even I, the hormone and mindset expert had a stretch of time where I made way more withdrawals than deposits into my health.

It’s not ideal, but it happens sometimes even to the experts, no one is exempt from life getting to be too much! However, because I’ve lived these five pillars for many years I was able to both not let myself get overdrawn completely and get back to putting in those deposit sooner rather than later.

In years past I’d have let three months turn into a year easily! I’d have pushed past my limits, thinking there would be time to undo the hormone haywire later.

I hope this idea of being mindful you’re making more deposits than withdrawals on a daily basis AND if you do make a big withdrawal that you quickly put in an even bigger deposit.

As we get better about this balance we overdraw our health and happiness less often.

And when you do find yourself overdrawn there is no sense beating yourself up over it, but wise to be mindful of where you’re at with your steals and gives to your health and happiness and give back more as soon as you feel you’ve been dipping into your reserves too often.