217. Navigating the Path to Mental Wellness with Practical Mindset Tools Artwork

Feelings Fitness Podcast

Raising a family can be emotionally overwhelming. Managing the logistics of a household can be such a grind. Life in general can be extremely exhausting. Can you relate? Many families feel overwhelmed by the fast pace of family life. Enter yoga and mindfulness. Let The Feelings Fitness Podcast be your guide to understanding what yoga and mindfulness is and how it can help your family. Allow Feelings Fitness to show you how simple yoga sequences, yogic philosophy, and mindfulness practices can help on the home front. By using The Feelings Fitness hacks you can create a peace living space and a calm mindset for your family. Each week we will dive into how to make your home life more functional. You will learn how to use these yoga and mindfulness practices to guide you through the seasons of life. After listening to each episode, you will walk away with yoga and mindfulness tools and lots of inspiration. You will be all set to move through the fast pace of family life with intention and ease.Your host, Suzanne Bazarko, is a registered yoga teacher, licensed professional counselor, certified mindfulness practitioner, and mom of two. She created Feelings Fitness as a vehicle to share with you what she has learned from raising her own family and how yoga and mindfulness has helped along the way.

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Feelings Fitness Podcast

217. Navigating the Path to Mental Wellness with Practical Mindset Tools

February 14, 2024 • Suzanne Bazarko

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Have you ever felt overwhelmed by stress and wished there was a simple, effective way to manage it? Join us on a journey back to the powerful strategies we explored in our 52-week road trip for mind, body, and spirit fitness. This week, we're honing in on mental wellness and the positive habits that can transform your mind. We'll walk you through mindfulness practices like stream of consciousness writing, which can unearth and address the roots of your stress, and loving-kindness meditation, a science-backed method for cultivating peace and well-being.

Our discussion delves into the intricate workings of the brain, shining a light on the role of the amygdala in emotional responses and how breathwork techniques can be your secret weapon against emotional spirals. Whether you're revisiting these strategies or discovering them for the first time, this episode is crafted to provide you with a toolkit for emotional regulation and a healthier mindset. You'll leave with practical tips to train your brain to focus on the positive and problem-solving aspects of life, ensuring that your journey towards mental fitness is as engaging as it is enlightening.

Speaker 0: 0:00

Welcome to the Feelings Fitness Podcast. Let's flash back to 2023, when we took a 52 week road trip together to discuss home health, happiness and habits. We created a road trip to work towards feeling fit mind, body and spirit. Now we'll revisit those 52 weeks in just 52 days. There are many more adventures in store for 2024, but let's look back on how far we've come and set ourselves up for more success. Welcome to week number 45 of this road trip through 2023 together.

Speaker 0: 0:38

We've just begun November, which means we are shifting gears from home habits to health habits. Essentially, we will be looking back and reiterating ideas that were presented in Q2, april through June, episodes 116 through 128. And this will be a three part health series part one, mind, part two, body and part three spirit. Keeping in mind, these are simply healthy habits suggestions. I'm not a doctor. I don't know your particular set of circumstances, so please be mindful of your own needs and seek additional support if necessary. All that being said, let's look back at episodes 116 through 119, focused on the mind and remind ourselves of some healthy habits that we can implement, if we haven't already. But first, perhaps, consider doing some stream of consciousness writing, also known as writing without editing, writing without filtering thoughts, writing without judgment. And write about your health, what is going well, what could be improved upon, how are you feeling overall? Spend maybe 10 or 20 minutes on this task. When you're finished, start by finding the good stuff. Give yourself some praise for this. Then find what isn't going well, instead of giving yourself a hard time about it. Cross these items out and write how you could make some changes. This is the first step towards feeling better. Remember it's always mind over matter. Train your brain to be a problem solver. Train your brain to find the good in tough situations. There's that saying where the mind goes, the energy flows. So let's think about a mindfulness practice.

Speaker 0: 2:25

A mindfulness practice really is not necessarily a formal practice. It's just this idea of staying present without judgment, because really harshly judging yourself is never going to be helpful. And a mindfulness practice, this idea of just staying present, accepting things as they come to you, whether you like them or not, not really judging them, because when we judge too strongly, we create stress, and stress in turn can present as physical manifestations. So by just being mindful, by just staying present, we can alleviate some of the stress and therefore alleviate any potential physical manifestations. Another idea might be utilizing a loving kindness practice. Now this is a little bit more of a formal practice. It is science-backed. There's lots of research showing that it works.

Speaker 0: 3:24

But the idea here if you wanna actually go through and do this practice with me episode 117, actually go through the meditation. But in general, what it is is starting with yourself. You sit and do the meditation and you say to yourself may I be happy, may I be peaceful, may I be well. And then you spread this loving kindness out to others, starting with those close to you and then expanding it even as far as to the people who have wronged you or to a particular person who has wronged you, and you will say may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be well. So perhaps test this out for a week, use it daily, see how you feel. It really is a powerful and proven practice.

Speaker 0: 4:15

Then we've also talked about the amygdala a lot. The amygdala you've got two almond-shaped clusters in the cerebral hemisphere of your brain. It's part of the limbic system. This regulates the emotions. If you get triggered, it triggers this amygdala and it can send you into an emotional spiral. So, using things like just an informal mindfulness practice or a formal loving-kindness meditation practice. These can help you stay away from having this amygdala triggered and keep you away from this emotional spiral. Another way to regulate the amygdala as well breathwork.

Speaker 0: 5:04

I've talked time and time again about the power of breathwork. There's breathwork that can energize you, calm you and even create focus for you. So, testing out these different styles of breathwork if you're not super familiar with breathwork, do a search online. There's so many different YouTube, so many different articles that can explain these different styles of breathing to bring you this calm, to bring you this focus, to bring you this energy.

Speaker 0: 5:38

And one cool thing about breathwork, too, is it can also bring down the cortisol level, which is the stress hormone, and remember, stress creates all these negative things, and so, by using the breath, lower that cortisol level and it really can have a very positive impact on your overall well-being, especially your mental health. So your task for this week is really just to spend some time focusing on your mental health. I hope you're enjoying 52 weeks and 52 days a compact version of the transformational road trip we took through 2023. We're revisiting those 52 episodes and it's a review of home health, happiness and the habits that guide the way to feeling fit mind, body and spirit. It's also a food for thought for how you want to feel.