Grace Over Grind: Healthy & Resilient! Relieve Stress & Improve Work-Life Balance

How are stress and work wearing you down? What can you do to restore your energy reserves and feel better? That's our focus for today. With being caught in an almost unending survival mode, stress takes a significant toll on your body. Insomnia, digestive issues, tension, fatigue, moodiness, lack of focus, they're just the beginning.

Long working hours and with self-care being deprioritized and picking food for convenience over nutrition, it depletes your body even faster. Yet you can turn this around. With faith-driven tiny habits, you can find the time and energy to start implementing better for you actions and choices.

Today I'm going to address physical and environmental dimensions of wellness. So you have some ideas for next week as we get back into habit building to being able to promote those areas of well-being. Also, I'll be revisiting your vision of work-life harmony so we can continue to build out your wellness toolbox for stress management.

Let's go ahead and start with prayer. Lord, thank you for bringing my dear friends to listen today. Please help them find the motivation, guidance, strategies, and tactics to reduce stress and improve work-life harmony.

(1:17 - 4:22)

Thank you for designing and creating this wonderful world for us to live in. Help us see how we can modify our environment to better reflect your glory so we can also feel more safe, secure, calming, and pleasant, which will help us relieve stress. I praise how miraculously you designed us, including our physical forms.

I am more than grateful for how you have graced us with these amazing temples to house your Holy Spirit and experience this life before we join you in the everlasting. I feel privileged to have a responsibility to care for these creations of yours. I gratefully fulfill my duty to care for my body and environment in a way that allows your will to be done and reflects my love for you.

I pray all is well with every listener, healthy in body, renewed in mind, and strong in spirit. As they reduce stress and improve work-life balance, may they know your will and your love. In Jesus's name, amen.

In case if we haven't met before, I'm Sharon McCall with Whispering Fields Wellness. Today in Grace Over Grind, I'll be identifying how making a few small changes in your physical health and changes in your environment can help you to reduce stress and improve work-life harmony, allow you to start making those changes to achieve your goals of thriving and flourishing. As I get into physical health, I want to make sure you are aware of my underlying bias and belief.

It's a little bit different than other coaches that are out there. First off, you are bio-individual from your DNA to your mind to your spirit. There is no one else like you.

Physically, even if you had an identical twin with the exact same genetics at the time that you were born, from the life that you've lived, the thoughts that you've had, the experiences and its impact on your epigenetics and microbiome, you would be totally different today than that identical twin. This is how beautifully God designed our bodies is so that we can adapt to whatever is occurring in our lives to being able to have the best likelihood of survival. As a result of this, I firmly believe that God made every single one of us to be unique.

Yeah, there are some common things in regards to what body systems do. My heart, your heart, they work the same way. But within, deeply in terms of who we are as a being, a body, mind, spirit with the Holy Spirit indwelling in us, we are unique and also physically in the temple that we have to the Holy Spirit.

And because you are unique and created to fulfill part of God's plan for you, only you and God know what is truly optimal for you and what is required to heal you. God knew you before you were born and before you decided what faith you wanted to follow. He has put in your cells that inner wisdom of what your body needs to thrive and to flourish.

(4:23 - 5:48)

Think about a paper cut. Your body heals automatically. You don't go tell it, hey, heal that paper cut.

It does. So God has this inner wisdom that's inside of all of us. And then once you make a decision to become Christian, you get that Holy Spirit that's indwelling in you.

But let's just get back to our physical being, our physical temple. So as you think about it, there are things that are in our environment that have been around for centuries. There are some things that are brand new and that are novel exposures that man has created in the last century or so.

So if we take a look, alcohol, dairy, grains, some people can consume them. Some people can't. Their bodies physically can't handle them.

And so this means that even though God designed these foods, they're not necessarily appropriate for some people in the way that he created you. So how can people end up blanketly saying that every single thing that man creates, fallible man, is safe for you to eat? Okay, so there are probably some things that in your foods or that are approved by the FDA, whether you know it or not, that you may have a sensitivity to. There may be things where the combination of the quantities that you've consumed in your lifetime or the combination of different ingredients, they are having an impact on you.

(5:49 - 6:40)

And so this is what I mean by it's up to you to know what's working for you. Only you and God knows truly what's working for you. Because what works for somebody else, that identical twin, it may not work for you.

So just to end up being on the safe side, I always end up advising my clients just to go back to the basics, okay? Foods that we've eaten for generations, that are part of your tradition, your family's traditions and heritage, and the activities that we've done traditionally over time, these are all things that our bodies have adapted to and are more likely to be the right ones that God wants us to eat and to do. And so when in doubt, simplify and see what happens. Use whole foods to being able to address what's ailing you.

(6:41 - 10:06)

So I'm not going to, you can tell I'm super passionate about this, I'm not going to go drag us down into a rabbit hole, but it is fair to let you know. So if you have a particular inclination of, okay, I only want pills, I only end up wanting a shot to being able to solve all my problems, I don't want to do the work, we're going to have some disagreed differences of opinion. So just want to lay it out there before we get going.

So let me get back to the topic for today. So we're continuing our discussion on the eight dimensions of wellness and lifestyle. I've been using SAMHSA's model.

I find that this model, while simple, it's effective for any of my potential clients, but also anybody that I meet in my volunteering to support mental health and substance abuse recovery. So today, we're going to go over physical and environmental. The foundation of physical well-being, I'm pretty sure you can guess at the main pillars, most of us have been given some form of health training through the course of our lives.

It's whatever you ingest, however you ingest it. And I also include in this definition, the preparation of the things that you ingest. For me, for example, cooking is a great hobby and a way to unwind, as well as making sure that I put enough love and care into what I'm nourishing myself and my loved ones with.

Then the second part of physical well-being is all about what you do. It's about physical activity, rest, sleep. And then a third area of this is in regards to preventive care.

So if you have areas of concern, being able to get the care and taking action on it. Some of you may need professional intervention to being able to address what's going on in your life. But just keep in mind, as I said, philosophically, I believe that the more that you focus on what you ingest and what you do and keep it really simple, your body will start healing itself and being able to get you stronger, less stressed as a result of that.

So moving on to the foundation of environmental well-being. It's all about safety and security, having a pleasant and soothing space. And that could be wherever you are at the moment, at work, home, out in the community.

It's your natural environment. Some things to keep in mind for environmental well-being is making sure you get exposed to natural lighting at different times of the day, access to fresh air and water. And just honestly, for me, this is a really big one, enjoying God's beauty and majesty.

Just getting outside, looking out a window, it really can help me shift my perspective from whatever was stressing me out and getting me so tightly wound up. That look out that window, that step outside and a breath of fresh air and a bit of sunshine, it reminds me that there's a much wider world and how small whatever it is that I'm worried about is in the greater, bigger picture. So there's no need for me to create unnecessary suffering for myself by buying into some of these thoughts and beliefs that we've talked about in the prior weeks.

And all of these have an impact on well-being. So just a quick couple of questions. So feel free to pause the video as we go through and answer these.

(10:07 - 11:17)

What does physical health mean to you? Is it a number on a scale, a body image, a test result from the doctor, feeling energized, vibrant, good? What is physical health for you? And if you struggle with this, what does it mean to be unhealthy, to be discomforted, and then flip it all around? So thinking about the environment. So what's your safe place? What helps you relax? What attributes does that safe place have? And how can acknowledging the answers to both of these questions help you relieve stress? What clues are there that can end up guiding you to improve your current stress management plan? I find that most people have a lot of knowledge already on how to make better-for-you choices. It just hasn't been put into application.

We get bombarded across the internet, on the news, in the media, all this advertising. You generally have an idea of what is that next right step for you. So let's talk about a couple of the basic foundational items.

(11:18 - 12:22)

Like, you know if you're getting enough sleep or not. You can tell in the morning, do you wake up rested, energized, able to get on with the day? Or do you need more sleep or a higher quality of sleep, right? For physical activity, you know if you're sitting in your chair all day, too long, not getting enough movement, and you're starting to feel that physical tension build up in your body because you're not moving enough. You can end up feeling it in your muscle tone and your ability to do more physical activities.

You can tell if you're plowing through breaks and not giving your body its chance, middle of the day, to have these moments to recover and to recoup. And you can also tell if you've got safety and security. It's all in the way that you feel.

What is that thing that's next right step for you? You know what that next right step is. Now moving on to food. This is a little bit more complicated because food people have put so many emotional connections on.

And for others, it's just something that people feel that they can control. I physically put this in my mouth. I know I can know exactly what it is.

(12:22 - 13:25)

So if you have a tendency to want to control things, this is often an area that people go after. So when you're a high achiever in a stressful role, you may have tackled some of these things depending on what your interests are. If you're one of these that likes to get into the bio hacks or being able to control your eating, like I said, as part of your micromanagement. You may have done some of this work already. It's hard for me to say where everybody is because they're coming at such a different point. I've met folks across the whole spectrum as I've worked with them.

There's individuals that their next right step is just to cut back on the soda. It's being able to reduce empty energy and the sugar and the caffeine that's just winding them up and then leading to big crashes in the afternoon. To others that are fine tuning sub ingredients and what they have sensitivities to and they're trying to avoid secondary toxins from modern agriculture or animal husbandry practices.

(13:26 - 13:46)

So depending on where you are in your own journey, you know what that right next step is for you. And then on top of this, food also gets really complicated by food philosophy. Some people are animal based, plant based, kind of in between and then a zillion and one different flavors of diet.

(13:46 - 17:31)

So food is highly personalized and unless I'm in a one-on-one conversation with you, I really can't advise in regards to what that next step is. So you need to trust that you know what is the next step in what's better for you. So as you look at what you know from everything from the sleep that I mentioned to the food in regards to what's needed to improve your health and energy, what's the next natural step for you to have more energy and to give your body a chance to repair itself more? As the body repairs itself more, you're going to be able to be in more optimal condition and more resilient.

So we're going to go a little bit deeper as we go into today's exercise. So before we get started though, we're going to end up having you go back and review a couple of the things and pull out some of the items from prior episodes. So hopefully you've gone through those.

If not, it's just a chance for you to go back and look in the catch-up. So first off, it begins with reviewing that Christian identity statement. Remember, identity focus changes are more effective than outcome focus changes.

And so what we're doing is being able to focus on your vision of what work-life harmony means for you and who you are as a person, as who God is calling and created you to be. So you can go from identity to process to outcome. So pull out that statement, whatever it was that you came up with that really resounded with you from based upon a biblical reference.

Then you also want to pull out that vision of work-life harmony. So we had done a Venn diagram type model with body, mind, and spirit. We'd gone through and identified kind of what, where you are acting and behaving and thinking and feeling like the person that you want to be, that God is calling you to be.

And then where you have some opportunity for some growth. So you want to take a look at that Venn diagram because we're going to use that then for reference for today. So you can either use that document or I'll give you an alternative if that was something that you hadn't done or if that was not the right kind of activity for you.

Because I get it, everybody has different ways that they want to express themselves. Another way that we can do this is to, besides using the Venn diagram, is to continue with mind mapping. Some people like mind mapping better than Venn diagrams.

It kind of gives them a little bit of structure to work off of, to build up their ideas and to extrapolate it all out. And when they put it down and then pick it back up a couple days or a week later, they've got better sense of where they had left off. So we're going to go through a vision mapping exercise that's based on the mind map today as the exercise.

So just to describe what mind mapping for your vision of wellness is, is you're going to put at the center that who, what that vision of wellness is. You've got your identity statement at the top and then you want to go through and have a bubble off of that vision, just what your kind of summary statement is of who you want to be. And then kind of go through each of the different dimensions as a spoke coming off of that main one.

And then go through each of the different subcategories and just kind of blow it all out across the things. Again, like I said, you might have a couple of outcomes that pop up, but you can always end up turning them around and refining your identity statement a little bit more and who you want to be based upon as you lay this all out. So for today's exercise, let me tell you a story and I'll show how it works into this example of mind mapping for your vision of wellness.

(17:33 - 17:59)

This lady was a senior manager. Her son had just started middle school and had decided that he really wanted to play Little League. His elementary school friends hadn't really been into it, but now that he's at the new school, his new friends were.

And so this was important for him to build up his skills pretty quickly so he could play with them. So since they'd played for years, he wanted to do a lot of practice at home. So her husband and him were already practicing.

(18:01 - 26:32)

And with him in middle school, she'd recently been realizing, you know, he's growing up so fast. I got to start getting involved. And this was a really good activity for her to join her husband and her son because she had played softball when she was in high school and college.

A lot really rusty because she hadn't done anything really physical in a while. But it was something that she wanted to do and she felt it was really important and this was a timely way to kind of kick it in the butt that God's given in the situation for her to take on her responsibilities as a parent a little bit more. So though the problem was is that she had a high travel schedule and really long work days.

Already her husband and son were practicing while she was usually just at work or on her drive home if it was a time when she was in town. So she really wanted to make this work. So with some thought, her identity statement that she used to drive her habit building and to guide her vision for this phase of her life was based upon Proverbs 17, 6. And she had decided that was pride of her children.

She really wanted to make sure that her son walked away from this time of his life with some great memories, not just the skills, and that she was in those memories. And so as part of her personal meditation, she'd really included 1 Corinthians 9:25-26 for her focus on her personal training and then Proverbs 22:6 on starting children off on the right path. Because this was a kind of a big deal for her son and she was excited to support him through this.

Now that I've shared her story, now it's your turn. So up above you'll see that I have a blank version of a mind map that could be used for any focus on the physical part of well-being. So what, who do you want to be and what do you need to do to being able to become it as it comes to physical well-being? So just like in that last example, she knew that playing baseball and practicing with her son was a key part of her being able to be pride of her children.

That was so important to her. So take a moment and just do a mind mapping exercise in regards to that. So while you do that, I'm going to go ahead and continue on with the story in regards to this lady.

So as we work through this, she decided that if she could run multiple short sprints in a half an hour, then she could keep up with the pace of the practice that her husband and her son had. She'd chase the balls and do whatever was needed. And then with any hitting and throwing, because those were skills that she hadn't used in forever, she would just build those as she played, but she needed to build up that endurance to keep up with the activity.

And for her, physical well-being, it's not weight loss. It's not anything to do with the numbers with the doctors. It's about living fully and being involved with her loved ones.

And I'm sure she did get some other benefits because she lived a pretty sedentary life. We never really talked about those because it was always focused in regards to that work-life balance that she was looking for, that she was striving for. So as you think about your life, how can you break down that what you want to be as from a physical well-being standpoint into specific skills or habits? We'll take all of these and we'll turn these into habits next time, but I want you to go through and do that process.

How do you get from your vision of who you want to be, defining it clearly enough and kind of breaking it down so you can turn it into some of these skills and habits? So if you have any questions on this exercise, please email them to me at Sharon@whisperingfieldswellness.com. If you do take a little bit of time to commit to this exercise, I know you'll find something useful for you to help reduce stress and improve work-life harmony. Small changes that can be done the next time you go to the grocery store might even come up. You may not even need to go through and do a tiny habits approach.

That's the nice thing about the food stuff. Sometimes it's just a swap for something that you already do and it's already embedded in your routine, just switching out for better for you. In next week's episode, as I mentioned, we're going to get deeper into habit building on these dimensions of lifestyle and well-being.

We're going to really focus in on that how to use some geographical types habit building. So if you haven't downloaded the habit guide yet, it's available for you to jump right in. So I'm pretty sure you want to know, so what happened with the lady? Was she able to play baseball with her son and how did her son do? So as it came to work, it took her a little while to figure out how to reduce and change her travel schedule.

So it was a little tough initially at the beginning, not the morning part. So she was really smart on the morning part. She started running in the morning.

So what she decided to do is that instead of checking her work emails as the water was brewing for her tea, she just started doing sprint exercises in the house and then ended up getting on the sneakers and going outside and crisscrossing the backyards. And so it was really sprints and not a long distance run. It wasn't too bad.

So she'd go sprint one way and then walk a little bit and then sprint again. So she really did figure out how to make it kind of start by occupying time that she's already using to do something else. And while she's running, she can still think about whatever it is that she needs to do.

So she was able to just very easily embed the morning part in her routine. The part that was a little bit tougher was in the evening to make sure she got home on time. So it did take doing some things with her work habits and productivity to make those changes until the change in travel came.

Because once the change in travel came, for any of you that have traveled for work, you know how much downtime there is. It's not like you're effective and productive and working through all that time that you're on the road. So it made it so much easier and she was honestly able to pick a couple of extra things up that was part of the deal that she'd made to reduce her travel is that it allowed her more time to be productive and working on things in the office.

So she was able to get what she wanted, which was to have more time with her son and her husband and to form these memories that he's gonna have his entire life of them as a family building these skills and just having the laughter of fly balls and crazy running across the yard to go and chase after a ball. So I'd say that that was a pretty successful story from her standpoint. So to close this out today, let me go over a summary of what I've covered.

I talked about bioindividuality and then talked a little bit about physical and environmental well-being and I hope with those questions you're able to come up with a couple of ideas of what might be something else you can do to add to your stress management plan. What are some of those actions you can take to improve your wellness toolbox and equip you and build your resilience? And the last thing we did was another focus on a work-life harmony exercise continuing on how do you envision who you can become through faith-driven tiny habits. So I really hope you enjoyed today's session.

I am firmly convinced that if you just take any of these small ideas that you've had and being able to put them into place and take action on them, you will reduce your stress and improve work-life harmony. And the more that you lean on your faith, it makes it so much easier. Through God, he can do so many things if you just let him in a little bit of your life, a little bit more than you have been.

Starting to listen to that innate wisdom and to Holy Spirit to guide you on that next step. And then whenever you get stuck and you're in that weakness, just recognize his power and his strength being able to help you to move forward and to move on. So I thank you again for your time today.

If you want to work with me, so you can put these stress recovery tools together better and go deeper, click the services link below. As a stress recovery coach, I'm here to help you explore more of what underlies your stress and imbalance and ensure that you have the motivation and accountability to make the changes you desire in your life. I know you can reduce stress and improve your work-life harmony.

I'll see you next episode. Have a blessed day!