Intuitive Healing with Glenna

I have a client. We’ll call him Bob. Bob got an early high blood pressure diagnosis (we’re talking mid-20’s), and wanted to exhaust his options in lifestyle changes before trying medication. In six months, Bob lost thirty pounds, dropped to metrically perfect blood pressure, gave up energy drinks, diet soda, and nicotine, greatly reduced his alcohol intake, and took up running and hiking. His doctors declared at his sixth month follow up that he had no need for blood pressure medication.

Bob has continued to come in for coaching for twelve additional months, because underneath his heart rate, underneath overworking and sedentary downtime, underneath habits like drinking and smoking, he still has had one major issue to face: negative thoughts.

The link between negative thoughts and health is huge. In the past twenty years, while oncological morbidity has gone down by 27%, death by suicide has increased by 30%. Poor mental health is getting increasingly more deadly. When you look at examples like Bob, who was fast tracked to high blood pressure (linked to the leading cause of death in the U.S., heart disease) by age 25, on account of lifestyle choices spurred by chronic anxiety, you have to wonder if mental health is the culprit behind all so-called ‘lifestyle disease’.

Toward the end of Bob’s first six months of coaching, we were reviewing his many accomplishments in such a short time, and while I was more excited with each addition to the list (six months of no nicotine, a 5k PR under 35 minutes, cooking most of his meals at home) he was not so impressed. When I asked how he felt, he said, “I know I’m doing better, but I don’t feel healthy. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough.”

Look. My entire practice is on self regulation. Intuitive healing is based in self-guided efforts, in the case of my clients, with professional support. I let clients lead; I trust clients to know themselves best. But when someone transforms their life in six months with no medication, statements like “I don’t feel like I’m doing enough” don’t match up.

Enter the affirmation exercise. I asked Bob to write that and any other negative self statement down. Then I asked him to flip that to a positive. The idea was, he could practice those affirmations to redirect his thoughts.

We started with “I don’t feel like I’m doing enough.” The obvious solution to me was simple to cross out “I don’t feel like” and boom, affirmation. What Bob wrote broke my heart a little bit:

I’m not a waste of time.

Shout out to your super cool English teacher with the leather elbow patches and the Shakespearean rap battles: grammar and syntax actually have resounding implications to our well being. Words are deeply woven into the human experience; sheep may bleat but they don’t write songs, spiders weave but they don’t spin sagas. And most importantly of all, how we talk to ourselves matters.

So we are going to be very particular about something: not is literally a negative word. It means ‘no.’ It negates. There are many crucial times when ‘no’ can be empowering (hello, boundaries) – self talk ain’t it.

We do this all the time in speech: how many times have you said “I’m not stupid”? But how many times have you said, “I’m really smart”? If we do make a positive assertion, how often do we preface it with “I’m not trying to brag”? How can we expect strong mental health if the majority of our thoughts and beliefs are inherently negating our self image without even trying?

On the very little flip side: how much of our self talk can change just by swapping out negatives for positives? How powerfully can that impact our mental health statistics?

Bob and I talked about the difference between positive and negative. We are still talking about it a year later. Shifting beliefs and thought patterns is a much more tedious process than changing habits; addressing causes is much more painstaking than rooting symptoms.

Here is why I’m not discouraged remaining hopeful: when he shows up, that is a positive. Each and every time we discuss a negative thought, a positive action is taken.

Show up for yourself today:

Breathe in. Breathe out. Say, I Am Enough.

Repeat as many times as it takes.

(P.S. There is a big difference between my practice and therapy. While I believe breathing and affirmation exercises are for everyone, they do not replace counseling or treatment for self harm, substance abuse, eating disorders, etc. If your gut is telling you to reach out to someone, do it: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-treatment)