It’s Monday morning, you hit ‘snooze’ 3 times before getting up, feeling rubbish.
You’re so tired you could go back to bed, but you have a busy day of meetings ahead of you. 
You get downstairs, realise there is no milk, bread or anything for breakfast, the kids come running down screaming ‘I’m starving’ and you glance at the radiator to see the school uniforms still sitting there needing an iron, you’re just not prepared for the chaos that is now your start to the day.
You see your weekend was spent out drinking, eating lots of food and enjoying fun with your favourite people, which is wonderful, until Sunday turns into a day of dying on the sofa with a hangover eating rubbish, zero motivation and so your plans to get sorted for the week ahead go totally out of the window.
Does this sound familiar?
Over my 15 years of coaching clients, I have heard this so many times.
This is common behaviour when our lives are controlling us, instead of us controlling them, believe me, I’ve been there and it’s such a stressful place to be.
You see, when life becomes too busy and we lose a sense of control, then we lose our ability to see rationally and maintain balance.
When stress is high, we look for things to relieve it, without recognising that the very things we are choosing as stress management are actually adding to our stress, due to our actions and behaviours that are driven by those choices.
I’m sure many of these will be familiar to you:
What about the wine after a long stressful day, because ‘you deserve it’ yet leaves you with poor sleep and felling awful the next day.
The take away meal, because you can’t face cooking after such a stressful day, but that leaves you feeling guilty and ashamed of yourself for making an unhealthy meal choice yet again.
The hours spent scowling through social media as a distraction, but that leave you feeling wired, tired and very often anxious, inadequate or searching to be something you’re not, because of the ‘perfect’ picture you’ve seen of someone else’s online life.
All of these are so common and things every single one of us has done.
I call this ‘me my stress and I‘ and this is exactly what I based my TEDx Talk on back last year.
You can check this out HERE, if you haven’t already done so and please feel free to pop a like on here or TEDx main site, I’d be very very grateful.
From years of my own personal experience with stress and coaching hundreds of people, I believe that we very often cause a lot of our own stress, there are so many stressors that we can control in our every day life, which would make daily life so much easier, but we don’t.
I’ve learnt that AWARENESS is key to everything in life, and if we gain awareness over our lifestyle, daily habits etc, then we can control our stress better and stop turning to poor choices and using them as a crutch.
So here’s where you can start:
- Identify what habits you currently hold that are not serving you positively.
- Look at each area of your life, to see what’s not working well for you, work, home, relationship, health.
- Be honest with yourself and instead of making excuses for the choices you make, make a note of how often you do it and what’s triggered that choice.
Starting here will really help you start to gain clarity on your whole life, you can then establish your goals and start creating a plan to bridge the gap from where you are now, to where you want to be.
Or, once you’ve identified what’s not working for you, you may decide you need a coach to help you with the rest, and guess what? I can help with that bit.
So, if you feel that life isn’t going the way you want it to, if you know it’s not meant to be this hard and that something has to change or your health and happiness is going to continue to suffer, then now is the time for you to start.
Remember, it’s never too late to change your story.
Have a fantastic week.
Keep fit, happy and healthy. Invest in yourself, remember health is wealth.
Emma Jay xx