Learn How To Let Shit Go That Isn’t Serving You

Welcome to Expand Your Life Podcast. This is Jc Jones, and you’re listening to episode 20. Welcome back everyone. I hope you had a great week.

Today is the last day we’ll be going over the Self Awareness Workbook The questions we’re going to discuss today are question #15 – How good am I at letting things go? And question 16: How do I cope with stress in my life?

Letting Stress Go

I think we’ll talk about that one first. How do you cope with stress? Do you yell, scream, shout, Get impatient? Do you shut everyone out? Give people the cold shoulder? Do you take your stress and frustration out on others? Do you blame others? Do you turn to things that temporarily change how you feel like we discussed in the last episode? Episode 19. How do you deal with stress?

Everyone handles stress differently. I personally internalize it until someone does something stupid that pushes me over the edge. And then, depending on the situation, my reaction could be anything from yelling to just being kind of nasty with how I’m talking.

What Stress Really Is

Let’s look at stress for just a minute. What is it really? It’s a reaction that we’re having to something that is out of our control or something that we feel like is going to affect us but we’re not sure how to fix.

An example might be, stressing out about whether or not you have enough money to pay your bills. But if you really think about it, what does stressing out really solve? Does stressing out give you more money? Does stressing out pay your bill? Does stressing out do anything positive? Not that I can think of.

What about another example? You’re running late for an appointment or running late for work. You’re stressed out rushing around, getting crazier by the minute. But what is that stress actually doing for you? I know for me, it usually makes it even worse because I can’t focus. I can’t find my keys. I can’t get all my stuff together as quickly because I’m stressing out. Besides that, it makes me feel like crap. I hate being late.

What about stressing out about how others are acting? We might stress out or worry about what others think about us. We might stress out when we get treated like crap from someone.

What Does Stress accomplish?

But in all these examples, is there any benefit that you can think of for stress? You know, when I first thought about this, I thought, Wow, why do we stress out? Why do we go through that? It’s like we sit there and we’re torturing ourselves for nothing. Because stress really doesn’t accomplish anything. Stress never fixes any problems. Stress only leads to more problems.

I’ve always considered myself someone who doesn’t stress out easily. But I definitely do stress out from time to time. And I have to remind myself that it is a choice I’m making. It is a habit. I think it’s more of a habit, really, than a conscious choice I’m making at the time. It’s just something that I’ve always done, and so it’s something I still do.

But it’s possible to break that habit. You don’t need stress. Stress is not a requirement.

What Is Creating Your Stress

So let’s look at this a little bit deeper. What actually creates the stress in your life? You might think that it’s a lack of time or a lack of finances, like in the examples we were talking about earlier, but it’s not. The stress is simply caused by the thoughts that you’re having around the lack of finances or the lack of time.

Remember in episode 16 where we talked about how your thoughts create your feelings? Well, if you’re feeling stressed out, check and see what thoughts you’re having that are stressing you out. What thoughts do you habitually think before feeling stressed out?

Let It Go

Does being stressed out serve you? Do the thoughts that create the feeling of being stressed out serve you? If they don’t then simply let Them go. Well, how do you do that? Just say the words. This does not serve me. I’m letting it go.

And if you want to, you can take a deep breath and envision yourself just letting it go. You can use this for any feeling that you’re creating with the thoughts that you’re having. Whether this is anger, hurt anxiety, depression, sadness. Any of these feelings that you’re having are created from the thoughts that you’re thinking.

If those thoughts don’t serve, you just let that shit go.

I don’t know about you, but when I get pissed, sometimes I don’t want to let it go. I want to kind of wallow in it for a bit. And you might find that in some of those feelings that you’re having, whether sadness or anything else. If you want to wallow in those feelings for a bit and feel those feelings. That’s perfectly fine. That’s perfectly healthy.

Our feelings aren’t bad. It’s when we wallow in them for too long and we let it create results in our lives that we don’t want. So find that line for you. Wallow a bit, and then get rid of that crap and start recognizing some of those thoughts that are creating how you feel. If you’re getting stressed out, try to recognize those thoughts.

The more you recognize the thoughts and notice them, name them, get rid of them, the more of a habit it will become for you to notice them. Sometimes it’s hard to even notice them when you’re in the middle of it. But the more of a habit that you create around recognizing your thoughts, the faster you’ll become at noticing that they’re there, and the faster you’ll get at letting those thoughts go before they create those feelings.

Does that make sense? I know it’s helped me an awful lot., Especially with stress and just realizing that stress really doesn’t serve me. It doesn’t change anything except for how I feel, makes it even that much easier to just get rid of it. To just let it go.

Your Focus

And try focusing on what you can control. Try focusing on what does serve you. Focus on the outcome that you do want. Focus on the solution instead of the problem and see how that goes.

Well, that about wraps it up for today. Short and sweet. I guess I could tell you about my day to make this podcast a little bit longer, but I’m sure none of you are really that interested. So we’ll end it here.

Next Week

Next week we’ll be talking about finding your happy. That sounds like a good podcast. Finding you’re happy. So be sure to check back next week where we talk about finding your happy. I just like saying that. It makes me happy.

I was actually saying finding your happy earlier, and about third or fourth time I said it, I thought, man, that sounds like a good book. I wonder if somebody has written a book called that? And I looked it up in there actually is a book called Find Your Happy. There’s also one called Find Your Fucking Happy. I don’t know about that one. There’s also a Find Your Happy daily mantra. Find your happy by Shannon Kaiser. I might have to check that out. If it’s a good one, I’ll let you know.

Anyway, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you’ll get updates and notifications when new episodes or released.

Have a great week. Bye now.