Unhealthy or poor self-care leaves you feeling bad. How you feel limits what you can do.
Developing healthy self-care habits <<– listen to the audio here
Hi, this is Jeff Murrah with Affair Recovery Radio. In today’s session we’re going to be talking about developing healthy self-care habits.
I mention this because many times when you’re faced with the problem of an affair it’s easy to let your self-care and your ability to do things for yourself to slide and get bad. When you’re unhealthy and you’re not taking care of yourself, that’s going to leave you feeling bad.
How you feel puts limits on what you can do. It’s going to put limits on what you can do physically, what you can do emotionally, what you can accomplish relationally.
It only makes sense to me that if you’re serious about recovering from the affair you want to be able to be at your best. Being able to be at your best means you’re going to want to expand your boundaries and expand what you’re capable of, rather than limiting it.
By not taking care of yourself you put smaller limits on what you’re capable of doing. You reduce your capacities.
It’s not by accident that the ancient Romans have a saying, “a sound mind and a sound body”. The way that the Latin language is it implies this reciprocal relationship that a healthy mind is related to a healthy body, and a healthy body brings about a healthy mind.
There’s a truism there that I want us to go ahead and build on. They discovered this centuries ago. I want to open your mind up to these ideas.
They will make a difference in terms of your ability to recover from the affair and to get back on track. We’re going to want to take better care of yourself so that you can think clearer and function better.
In terms of the solution, several things that you can do.
- The first being practice daily meditation. And by meditation I’m referring to just sitting down and mentally rehearsing and focusing on one particular thing. By that one particular thing it may be some lines from a song that you like, some poetry, some Scripture, some inspirational writing. At this point I’m not that picky about what it is that you select to put your focus on.
Whatever you select to put your focus on, rehearse that over and over in your mind. Put yourself in a quiet place.
Think about what each of those words mean. And just allow all the noise to be tuned out.
Because part of meditation involves tuning out all the distractions. It’s almost like it is a way to exercise your mind and exercise your ability to focus.
The more you do this, the quieter your mind will get, and the more focused that you will find yourself becoming.
One of the difficulties that people have told me about, that they struggle with after finding out an affair, is all the noise rattling around in their head. This is a way to go ahead and start dealing with that.
2. Start taking better care of yourself. I’m not trying to patronize anybody or talk down. I am getting back to the basics because many times just doing the basics makes all the difference.
Getting sleep. Getting exercise. Eating healthy. These will start you getting yourself back in shape. Get away from the fast food. Try to get fresh veggies, try to get fresh fruit.
Eat more salads as opposed to a lot of the greasy stuff. When you eat a lot of the meats, sweets and the greasy stuff you tend to feel more weighted down and heavier.
You don’t need that during this time. You want to get yourself back into shape in many ways.
It’s going to be important for you to eat and to eat regularly. Because I know another challenge that some of you face is you don’t feel like eating.
Well, whether or not you feel like eating, your brain still needs nutrients, your body still needs nutrients, and you need to give them the right nutrients.
Starving yourself is not the answer here either. That’s why it needs to be healthy eating.
By exercise, even though you might be starting out small by going for short walks, or by doing some stretches in the house, whatever, you need to start doing something to start getting your body in shape. By ‘in shape,’ improving your muscle tone and just getting your body moving.
That will be a start. Bicycling is great. Walking is great. Running is even better, in most cases. But you want to take care of yourself there.
3. Reduce your passive activities. If you’re a person that does tend to spend a lot of time watching TV or just sitting back and vegging, you want to get away from that. Getting your mind out of that passive mode is going to be critical in your recovery.
You want your mind to be active, but not to the point where you have all the excess noise. So you need to stay out of the passive activities as much as possible because when you stay in that passive mode that’s going to make you more vulnerable to being exploited, and more vulnerable to that whole idea of just shutting down.
That’s what you’re wanting to avoid at this point.
Each of these, these are little things that you can start doing today. I encourage you to do so. Because as you start doing these, and these become part of your turnaround program, it will make a difference in terms of your affair recovery.
As you keep these things up day after day after day, you’ll start seeing some changes. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but as you keep it up for the next week and on into a month you will see changes.
I encourage you to go ahead and put these things into place during your affair recovery. You’ve got enough stuff on your plate as it is, and taking good care of yourself is a way to ensure that your body and your mind have what they need to be able to make it through the recovery.
Another action you can do is join the support community at Restored Lifestyle. There you can find tips, direction and support.
Best Regards,
Jeff
