What serves you now might not always serve you well. Similarly, what’s good for you might not be for someone else. This is why in therapy, the client is the expert and the therapist is there to guide.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the woods through the trees and that’s how an outside perspective can help to gain clarity.
The gym was once a place where I gained many positives. It was only through talking to a friend that I realised that it was no longer benefitting. The idea had morphed into a ball of stress and I’d spend all of my free time convincing myself to go and no amount of goal setting helped. A contributing factor at the time was being repeatedly run down and never quite recovering.
Positive stress can challenge, inspire and encourage you to be a better version of yourself but negative stress can imprison and stifle progression. The gym had become my prison. Since cancelling, I gained an abundance of physical and mental space and time. Space for activities that were in alignment with my needs eg. socialising and nature (the antithesis of the gym!). I feel surprisingly relieved, liberated, grounded and rekindled my need to be in nature and my love of outdoor running. I was also grateful to have been greeted with frosty sunrises and sherbet sunset skies.
The intent of this post was to a create space for you to consider whether there are any sources of stress in your life. What would you identify as a stressor? When? Where? With whom? Is it positive or negative stress? What impact does it have on your mood, time and energy? Could you modify anything in your life so that it better aligns with your current needs and values to help and not hinder you? What could you do to shake things up and invite more vitality into your life?
