How to Get Unstuck in Your Health

Do you often feel like you're taking 1 step forward and 2 steps back when it comes to your health?

Maybe you’re going to therapy or you’ve been in the past. Maybe you’ve started to read books, listen to podcasts, and do some of your own self-growth work at home, but you can't seem to shake off the old patterns that sent you down this path in the first place.

Here’s a reminder that it’s not just you. You’re not broken. There are reasons we stay stuck in the same place, even when we think we’re doing the work –

1) It feels safe to stay in the same patterns

I know it may sound backward, but staying exactly where you are is the safest thing for your nervous system. It feels safe to know what’s coming, even if our current way of doing things is causing us problems.

Think about it this way: when you've been living the same patterns for most of your life, even if you’ve come to understand that some of those patterns aren’t good for you, it doesn't mean that they're just going to change overnight because you’ve had that realization. 

Logic does not always = change. Action = change.

Oftentimes change feels threatening to our nervous system, even though, logically, we know that it might help us. What’s important to note is that our nervous system reactions are primal. Our nervous system was developed this way for a good reason: to help us survive! Way back when, this would help us run away from dangerous animals. However, at this point in human evolution, we don’t need those same reactions. To heal the nervous system, we need to tell it that we’re safe and don’t need to react that way anymore.

Check out my previous blog for tips on how to calm your nervous system!

2) In order to grow, you have to do things that scare you & push you outside your comfort zone

If you've ever gone through a big transition in life, or you’re going through one now, you might have found it difficult. That’s because it’s a change from your norm.

Even if it's an exciting change, when your nervous system is stuck in a stress response, it might feel like a threat. In order to get out of that stress response, we have to try new things that make us feel uncomfortable. It's not going to feel good all the time to change your nervous system's automatic responses. In fact, it’s going to feel odd at first.

3) You know what you need to do to help yourself on a cognitive (thinking) level, but you don't practice living those things in your body

Calming the nervous system is about learning how it feels to be in your body, instead of bypassing it. Have you ever noticed that when you feel anxious, your body really feels it? That's because anxiety lives within our bodies (not just in our minds).

In order to change negative thoughts and patterns, we need to work with the sensations in the body. Unconscious patterns live in our body’s cells that are not often known or understood. That doesn’t mean we can’t work with them. Healing in our bodies means sitting with those uncomfortable feelings, and allowing them to be there. This is what transforms how we experience our feelings in life.

4) Your self-critical mind takes over, criticizing everything you're doing ‘wrong’ or not doing

The more judgmental you are about your journey, the less progress you will see. If you're constantly criticizing yourself, you're not going to get very far. Judgment and criticism hold us back, they don't help us move forward. Sometimes, it feels like being hard on yourself will help you to change, but it can actually be one of the fastest ways to get stuck.

We need to find resiliency in the hard times. You're never going to be perfect, or have everything go well. It's about how you react to what happens that's important. Can you approach a situation, a hard feeling, or disappointment with curiosity, openness and compassion?

5) The toxic or problematic environment you're trying to change in is staying the same

Last but not least: if you’re still in the same toxic lifestyle, you’ll have an extremely tough time changing. If you're working on your stress and anxiety, but still in the same toxic job that requires you to overwork, it's going to be really hard to find that relaxation response.

It's not just about the internal work, but also your external world. 

Look around you and decide what needs to change, e.g. your relationships, job, or communication patterns. All of these things matter. If you're constantly looking at the news on your phone – how is that making you feel? How is it living in your body? How does it enforce how you perceive the world? Everything and everyone you surround yourself with impacts you, so how can you create an environment that works better for you?

It's natural for your automatic responses to stay the same. It takes effort, support, and compassion to see change. If your self-growth work hasn’t been working, it doesn't mean you're broken, it means you need to take a different approach.

Ready to take a different approach?

I’m Grace, a holistic psychotherapist and nervous system coach, specializing in anxiety, eating disorders, and chronic illness and pain. In 1:1 therapy or coaching sessions, I work with you to get to the root of why you’re feeling stuck in your mental and/or physical health, and teach you the coping tools you need to regulate your nervous system, eliminate pain, and kick-start sustainable change in your life.