Your brain is only interested in keeping you safe - and that does not include emotional safety

Emotional safety is not as important as knowing when to run away from a tiger.

And safe, often not taking any risks... like trying to do something different.

Even if you may not be enjoying what is going on right now, quite often, trying to do something a different way will feel like a lot of effort.

Or maybe more effort than it is worth.

Or maybe it's not worth starting.

And your brain thinks it is doing you a favour.  When it makes doing things difficult, it knows you are less likely to do them, and then you save some energy.

And that is what your brain wants: to save energy because you never know when you might need it. And that energy is much more likely to be needed for physical things than emotional safety.

Which was very important when we needed to run away from woolly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers, but there are very few of those around these days, so keeping us small and safe and not willing to try new things, like meeting new people or starting a course or learning a new language.  Your brain does not know these things are not intrinsically dangerous; it just labels them as energy sucks, and it tries to convince you it is not with the bother.

So sometimes you have to work against your immediate instinct for opting out to reach your greater goal of something you want to achieve, like perhaps widening your work network, being able to ask for breakfast in Spanish or learning how to manage your time in a new way.  When we focus on the end goal, it is easier to be able to see that our here-and-now decisions are something to be worked into a larger game plan, not just a message or urgency we have to respond to.

Because, in truth, if we want to get different results from the ones we have, we are going to need to do some things differently.

And if you are someone who feels like you are exhausted the whole time, the idea of doing any work on this is going to sound like more thing to do.

But if you look at the potential that taking action now could prevent you from feeling like this for the next few months (and maybe even make the whole Xmas season less strained - becuase you did not feel like you were being stretched so thin) - then it is more likely you will be able to make a choice which is in your favour.

If you'd like to work on feeling less overwhelmed all the time, join us in SelfCareSchool 

And remember, when we align with our bigger desires (like feeling less exhausted), we can begin to move towards them.