How to Stop Filling the Void and Start Resting

This episode navigates through the struggles of overperformance and the significance of taking a break to reconnect with yourself and others. As we learn to set boundaries and prioritize self-healing, we discuss why it's okay to slow down, to rest, and to reduce  external noise that can in turn help us better experience our full range of emotions.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the noise of the world and struggling to find balance? Tune in to see how focusing on mindful consumption has reduced my desire to "fill the void" and numb my mind. Together we'll discuss how identifying our values can help strike a balance between healing, productivity, and rest, while fostering deeper connections with your inner circle. 

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Transcript

Slowing Down, Reconnecting, and Importance

Speaker 1 0:10

Hello , amazing people , friends and listeners . Welcome back to an invitation to share . It's been a minute and by a minute I mean it's been a month since we've had a new episode and I'm so glad we can connect today and just come back together for an episode on healing and hurting and slowing down and just reconnecting reconnecting with ourselves , reconnecting with each other . So where have I been ? I have been disconnected in so many ways disconnected from social media , the podcast , of course , but also kind of disconnected from myself . I was honestly very sick for the past month and I'm still a little bit sick today . I don't know if you can hear it in my voice , but I'm feeling a lot better , thank goodness .

Speaker 1 1:12

And I had to set a very hard boundary for myself to step away and do less , because I really needed to recover physically and mentally and emotionally . Not only was I feeling quite honestly burnt out from social media and podcasting and my day job and my social life , I felt like I was just becoming further and further away from the values that I want to live by . So we're going to get into all of that today as well . But when I was sick over the past month , like for a long time physically couldn't do anything , and I've said this before but if you don't give your body time to rest , your body is going to just pick time for you to rest , either by getting sick or maybe you'll have , I don't know . Something happened where you physically need to slow down and your body is not giving you a choice to , which is kind of what I feel like happened with me . I was pushing through , trying to get a lot done , while simultaneously trying to slow down , telling myself , oh , let me just add this to my list of things to do to heal and reflect and meditate , but I was just hurting myself by trying to give myself all of these things to do . Does that make sense ? Like you can almost overdo everything if you're just trying to overanalyze , intellectualize . So it's really not helping you , it's harming you .

Speaker 1 2:48

And this was a really big , not necessarily a ha moment , but something that was really standing out over the past month , which is why I want to talk about it today as I was feeling disconnected from myself . I was also asking why do I feel so disconnected from everybody ? In my life ? I'm constantly commenting on people social media posts , facetiming , people liking things , making my own content , connecting with my audience , but I was feeling further and further away from everybody at the same time , and what it came down to was because I was not connecting with myself . I was not able to have genuine connections with people , whether it was online or in person or at work or in my personal relationships , because I was distancing myself from essentially doing less I could .

Speaker 1 3:44

I was overcompensating by doing more for other people and with other people , which we all know doing too much can lead to various forms of burnout , which is kind of the wall I think that I hit , and when I wanted to refocus and hopefully just gain more energy towards my passions and creativity again , I knew that meant taking a break . I was avoiding taking a break and taking a step back and doing less and slowing down might seem like the obvious choice to a lot of us , and it's also the hardest choice . This also requires us to be intentional with the actions that we have , the words that we say and the things that we do in our day to day , and that also requires energy , and when I was first kind of contemplating taking a step back from the podcast , my initial thought was oh my gosh , it's not aligned with my values . I'm going to be letting people down . I'm not pursuing my passions and my creativity . I was panicking , and it wasn't until recently . I went back and read just the summary of what this podcast is , and the highlight is sharing mental health in hopes of empowering other people and creating opportunities for intentional healing in our everyday lives .

Speaker 1 5:13

I don't think I myself or we can have intentional healing If we are just bulldozing through our days , feeling every single minute with something that we think is productive . And it was actually aligned with my values to take a break because I'm talking about . It's important to share mental health concepts , it's important to practice mental health concepts and I can talk about that all day long , but if I'm not actually doing it in my life , it's not a value that I am living . This has prompted me to think about . Are there other areas in my life where maybe I'm trying to just overperform or push myself too far because I think that is aligned with my values ? I think maybe growing up , I valued trying to be the best , trying to do my best all of the time , and while I still do value hard work , the idea of productivity has totally changed . I don't view myself as a machine anymore . I honestly this might sound silly , but I used to view myself as a machine . I create things , I do things . I make things instead of I feel things . I am things , I just exist .

Speaker 1 6:39

And part of the scariest thing of deciding to scale it back and slow down and do honestly a little almost like an audit or survey , if you will , of how am I spending my time , is it healing things ? Is it hurting things ? Is it helping me ? Is it harming me ? Taking that context and really looking at yourself .

Speaker 1 7:05

When I did that , one of the scariest things and one of the first things I thought was what is everyone going to think of me ? They're going to think I'm a failure . They're going to think I can't do anything right . They're going to tell me oh , I knew , I never believed in you . This was the story I was telling myself . It's not true . And I couldn't see that it wasn't true until like halfway through this few weeks of a break that I was giving myself . So at the beginning I was like , oh , this is impossible , this is a bad idea . But my body was physically making me come to a stop , so I felt like I didn't have a choice , which isn't great that it took me not having a choice to take a break , which that's how it goes sometimes but getting over that initial fear of everyone's going to view me as a failure because I'm taking a break , that was like a deep rooted negative core belief that I had , that I still have and that I struggle with , and I think a lot of us struggle with that . What if people are going to judge me for having this job or not having this job ? Does somebody think I'm not smart enough to be on my own podcast ? Am I too insecure to be in this relationship ? Let me do all of these things . This is the story we tell ourselves and the story that I tell myself . We're totally in this together .

Speaker 1 8:36

That makes me feel a little bit better , honestly , because , as I've been going through these past few weeks , I have been feeling big emotions and having big conversations with the people that I am closest to , because , for the first time in I don't know how many years , I have held space for that , because I have had space for that due to reprioritizing the values I know I hold and there's a difference between me saying , oh , I really value rest and then people seeing me not resting and then me never resting . None of that was making any sense in my life , and as much as it hurts to let other people down in my life , it hurts just as bad , if not worse , to consistently let myself down by not taking care of myself , by not resting , by not prioritizing mental health . Are there any things in your life that you say you want to prioritize or you feel like this value is so important to me ? But I'm just really struggling to live it out and have that as my number one area of focus , because the first step to living your values , to be more aligned and , in my opinion , doing true healing is just asking yourself where are my own blind spots ? Am I pushing myself too hard ? Or are there things I think I'm doing in my life that I'm hoping are going to bring me more peace of mind and more healing but are actually doing me harm

Balancing Healing, Productivity, and Rest

Speaker 1 10:37

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Speaker 1 10:37

There was a time in my life where I was just hyper fixated on expedited healing . I gave myself a timeline of by X amount of years . I will have all of this sorted out , from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed to even while I was sleeping . I tried to micromanage every minute of my time to incorporate some type of healing , like we're listening to meditations when we're sleeping , we're working out at 5am and we're going to bed at 10pm , and every minute of my day I need to be thinking about what am I doing in my next therapy session ? Is there a type of therapy I haven't tried ? Is there this type of healing out there ? Should I talk to this person ? You get the idea I was overdoing the healing , which was not helping myself at all .

Speaker 1 11:33

And then I've also done the opposite , where I have pushed away every possible window of opportunity to soften into my emotions and just give myself the opportunity to have a break where I will fill every minute of my day with something work related . I'll take up random hobbies , I'll find a project I can do around the house , I'll be on the phone 24-7 , I'll be watching a show 24-7 , listening to something , always doing something , never giving my brain a break or my body a break either . And then , of course , we have the third option of things that I also do , where I totally shut down . Nothing is happening , I'm not thinking , I'm not doing , but I'm feeling bad about all of those things Because for some reason , the world tries to sell us rest as something we have to do , but , oh , like you're gonna feel guilty if you're doing it . You're gonna feel shame because you need to be resting but you also need to be productive . You need to be balanced , but you also need to be prioritizing other people and yourself at the same time . You need to feel your emotions , but not too much .

Speaker 1 12:56

These are the things that , whether it's the external world or people in your life or social media , they feed us , these two opposing truths and they tell us to be both at the same time , and I am 100% someone who advocates for two things being true at once , or multiple things being the right way . However , I have experienced this heavy pressure just from society to overperform , to be a perfectionist , to fill my day with things that are productive and then to prove to other people that I'm doing these things and make them believe it For some reason , and I thought that was , you know , the beginning of the path to success , whereas now I can really see the truth in doing less , because then the things I work on are really , really quality . The people that I have conversations with . Those conversations are so rich and I'm not gonna forget them and I'm fully present for them . The podcast episodes are planned , but they're also intuitive and I feel energized when recording instead of rushing . I mean there are so many podcast episodes that have been recorded very late at night or edited until two in the morning and they go live at 4 am . I don't know if you guys have ever gotten a notification from the podcast coming out at 4 am . Like it's crazy .

Speaker 1 14:40

It's absolutely wild the things we do to push ourselves in a direction that we think is right , and all of these things have served a purpose for me and my life at one point or another . My therapist and I were talking about this actually not too long ago . How I feel like my worst quality is I go 180% in just about everything that I do and it makes me burn out really easily . It makes me tired really easily . It sets the bar way too high for myself and then I can never live up to it . It makes other people think maybe I'm too much sometimes and my therapist was like , well , what if that really served you in a time where you were just doing everything you needed to do to survive ? And what if you can just hold space to like , admire that part of who you are , and you can look at yourself and say I like to put out quality work , I like to care about the work that I do , I like to have meaningful conversations . Those are good things , I would say . So it's that double edged sword .

Speaker 1 15:57

So some tangible things I think we can do today or tomorrow doesn't have to be today Are either think about or write down or have a discussion about what are your top 10 values . So kind of get like a group of things that you're like okay , this is either what I want to do with my life and how I want to live my life , or these are things I currently live by , and then narrow it down to like your top three or five and ask yourself are these the values I want to live by and or are these the values I do live by ? I can share my top few with you guys too , just to kind of get the wheels turning and get thinking . I think one of the last times I did a really big sit down journaling , brainstorming session of what are my values was a long time ago and I can't even find I actually did a worksheet , um , when I was in college and I made a list of what my values are . I'm pretty sure at one point it was hanging up in my dorm and then my first apartment and it was a reminder of .

Speaker 1 17:12

You know , this is what feels important to me and as I have learned and evolved and grown as a person , I would say my values have shifted . I don't really know if I see my values completely doing like a 180 and changing again , but I definitely see them evolving . I don't want to limit myself to anything , however . I want to also stay true to to myself and recognize this is oh , I'm not changing my values like every few weeks , every few months . So my top value is being inclusive . That means trying to be as inclusive as I can with language , experiences , emotions , whether I'm planning something or sharing something . I want to hold space for inclusive conversations .

Speaker 1 18:06

I like to continue to learn about inclusivity , because another top value of mine which I don't know if the word for my value is safety , but I like to create safe spaces for myself and for other people , which ties in with being inclusive , in my opinion , because safety is the number one thing that everybody needs , as just their basic needs need to be met . I think everybody deserves to feel safe and be safe and without that , I feel like it's hard to move forward with progress in a lot of different areas , so that's why it's one of my number one values I also have being open minded . There was many years of my life where I was not open minded . I didn't even know what it meant to be open minded , and I joke that I'm open to learning more about what it means to be open minded . I found I was limiting myself to what I could learn , experience and feel when I was closed minded . I also believe that being open minded creates an even wider opportunity for safety and important conversations and difficult conversations , because I don't ever want to make anybody feel like I'm belittling what they're saying or not believing them . I want to listen and learn and observe and share in times where it's important .

Speaker 1 19:40

After having these conversations with yourself or just sitting with this idea , I think it's also , in my opinion , valuable to find different areas of your life where you can reduce some external noise . This definitely relates to healing and also staying aligned with your values , because if your environment is full of these external noises and voices and situations that are doing the opposite of what you want to do or not supporting you and your progress . I wonder are those things helping you or harming you ? I think it's super great to be in situations where you're with people who disagree with you . I think it's very important to have conversations and be in places where not everyone thinks like you and is like you , because if that's the case , then I don't really know how you're ever going to grow

Diminishing External Noise and Setting Boundaries

Speaker 1 20:43

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Speaker 1 20:43

But what I am saying is , if there are people in your life who are emotionally hurting you or they're toxic or there's any type of energy that's just constantly draining you , that's the type of external noise that I wonder can we dim that down a little bit ? I heard this quote the other day . You can't keep getting mad at people for sucking the life out of you if you keep giving them the straw . And it's so true . If you're constantly feeling like I have no energy because of the people that are in my life or the things that I'm doing or the things that I'm saying , but you keep inviting those circumstances or hurtful people back into your life , it's only a matter of time before they do take away all of your not all of your energy , but some of your energy because you're telling them it's okay .

Speaker 1 21:41

I have said before , if someone in your life is doing something that's either manipulative or toxic and you're in a situation where you just cannot get away from them like maybe I don't know if they're at your job or they're in your family and you still have to hold space for them temporarily if you just keep letting them take away that energy or say things that are hurtful or do things that are hurtful , it's showing them that they can keep doing that , and the really hard thing is to set that boundary , and then the even harder part is to reinforce that boundary . That's where the work really comes in is after . But I want good things for you all , and together I think we can find ways to stand up for ourselves and our values and lower the external noise or the voices of the things and people around us that are not helping us . This was a really big reason I decided to not only take a little bit of time away from the podcast , but completely time off of Instagram and TikTok , specifically because I would log on and I would scroll and it would be two or three posts in and something would just either not that it would even make me feel bad about myself because , like I know I'm responsible for the content that I consume , but it was almost like I kept feeling this overwhelming sense of I'm not doing enough . I'm not enough . Everyone is hurting collectively , like what can I do ? What can we do ? I don't know it . Just it was making me feel disconnected and hurt , which is the opposite of what I want to do .

Speaker 1 23:35

I want to be feeling alive and connecting with people , and when social media starts making me feel disconnected , I'm like this is kind of not doing what I needed to do , and whenever I think , oh , I can't live without social media , like I need to go on every single day , that's when I know I needed to like take a step back . Do you know what I mean ? If I'm ever telling myself like I need this , like I have to have it , I'm like maybe that's the sign that I have been having too much of it , but I'm ready to get back online and start making videos again and just connecting with , like my core group of people . I don't think I'm gonna get back on and just scroll and consume content the way that I used to , because that was the external noise in my life that was really really bringing me down just about every day , if I'm being honest , and of course I get a good laugh and I see inspirational things , but I don't know . I'm just gonna have to find ways to be more mindful and practice ways to do less on social media 101 . And that's just gonna look like making content and then just checking in on , like my friends and the people and the communities I connect with the most , and then logging off .

Speaker 1 24:58

Starting small by setting small boundaries with yourself , I think will then bleed into the other areas of your life and it helps you build that confidence of if I can set these boundaries in my life with things that I do care about , you know , I can have the confidence to do it in other areas as well . And because another value of mine is connection , connection to self and connection to the collective and others , when I feel that value being pushed close towards the edge and almost feeling , like I've been saying , disconnected , like if the connection is not connected , I need to reevaluate . If you're not someone who is super active on social media , are there other things you're consuming in your life that are maybe drowning out some of your own thoughts and feelings ? I know in the past like cause I've done social media breaks before . Well then , I'm just gonna fill that void with Netflix . I'm just gonna fill that void with shopping . I'm just gonna fill that void with consuming different things on Amazon or just trying to I don't know fill the void . And the void sucks you in . You want so hard like , or you want to so badly , just fill it . I know it , I know . I know the feeling of the void . The void is always lurking .

Speaker 1 26:29

I feel like in my life to some degree , and when I let the void of just wanting to numb my mind , if I just let it sit there and if I don't actually act on it , two , three weeks in I'm gonna start feeling some things that I've never felt before in a good way , which is what happened this time around . I thought about what can I do less of ? I thought about what are my values and what am I actually doing . I reduced the noise that was going on in my head and in my life and then I just sat with it and I'm still just sitting with it and it is excruciating and it is enlightening . I'm learning something new about myself every week . I'm crying and laughing every single day . It feels like the capacity of my emotions has just like exploded , everything . I'm feeling so much more deeply and I am just craving like deeper , more intimate connections with everybody in my life and with myself , because I'm not trying to fill the void of , I don't know , maybe it's a loneliness in me , I don't know . Yeah , probably loneliness and just the desire for connection .

Speaker 1 27:52

When I'm feeling that void with a bunch of other things that don't align with what I care about and I'm just trying to distract myself , I'm feeling less human and that's when I get disconnected and disassociated and I know I can bring myself back . But it's just how am I gonna bring myself back ? So I have started telling myself and we can start telling ourselves we don't have to fill every second of our day with something productive and start telling yourself that , no matter how long it takes for you to believe it , you don't have to be doing something productive or consuming something , even if it is just a bunch of different healing modalities , like I don't know . Maybe let's just create some space , sit with the space and then see what happens . It'll be an experiment we can check back in next time and we can all think about did we take space for ourselves ? What did it look like ? How did we get there , what did it feel like ? And finding a way to practice this every so often whether it's every day , we're gonna try to hold space for ourselves , or is it every few months ? Are we going to try to make this more of a routine test the water see how we feel .

Speaker 1 29:20

So I think that sounds like a good idea . I'm going to keep resting and holding space for myself to get better from my sickness and to just heal and give myself time . I encourage you guys to do the same . We know we live in a busy world . There's always gonna be traffic , there's always gonna be new news , there's always gonna be a project to do , something's always gonna be unfinished , and that is okay . Okay , because if we're giving ourselves the space to rest , we can then show up like our full selves and have that genuine energy and interest when we want to do things that we really , really care about . It's been a joy , as always , and an honor to think with you and share with you and feel with you . I cannot wait for the next episode . Thank you guys so much for coming back and listening to the show . If you liked the show , please share an episode with a friend and don't forget to give a five star rating if you liked the show . Love you guys . See you next time . Bye . Starts just shortly off of a show .