Do less, don’t try harder.

So here is a real hard thing to process. People talk to me all the time about doing all the right things and still feeling stuck. You can be practicing all the healthiest things, on repeat, in perfect synchronicity in your life, and still not feel better. Cooking whole foods, meditating, moving mindfully, setting boundaries and on the list goes.

It turns out how we treat ourselves matters.

A massive source of stress that our bodies internalize is pressure we put on ourselves. That can be in work, in how we look, what we eat, how we behave in social settings, whether we ran far enough on the treadmill, yelled at our kids or cleaned up the yard…garage…kitchen.

Healthy behaviors are just things to check off the checklist if they are not coming from an authentic, organic place of genuinely wanting to take care of ourselves. And that actually matters in how effective healthy behaviors are.

If we are living in attunement with our bodies and environment, we give ourselves breaks and nourishment and exposure to healthy relationships. We get activity and also understand when we are not at the energy level to engage in that activity. Our bodies respond to this with feeling safe. When we feel safe, our metabolism responds, our cellular activity responds and even our immune system responds more strongly.

My point is, based on our biology, there is more benefit to listening to our bodies and emotions than there is to checking off the list of healthy things to do. I think you need to do less, not try harder.