Welcome to You're Not Crazy, a podcast for the adult children of parents with narcissistic and unmanaged borderline personality disorder. I'm your host, Tori Wicksell, a therapist with over a decade of experience in the mental health field. I also happen to grow up with a narcissist mom who had a lot of BPD traits, and I know a thing or two about how crazy making these types of relationships can be. I'm so excited to show you what it actually means to break the cycle of dysfunction that we grew up in and help you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks for joining me. Now let's jump into the show. Welcome back to this episode of the You're Not Crazy Podcast. I am so excited to be back talking with you again today. And today I want to go back to the basics. What do I mean by that? Let's talk about the things we do on a day-to-day basis to take care of our mental and emotional well-being. It's so funny because it is so common when someone has really committed to working on themselves, to working on their healing journey, to working on their mental health, that they get really into it. They go hard, they read, they go to therapy, they do the work in between therapy sessions. And so often, while we're really trying to go deep, it is really easy to forget about some of the very basic things that truly impact our mental health tremendously. The things that have a massive impact on our mental health, but they're not flashy things, they're not really complicated things, and they're easy to forget how important they are. So the reason why I'm bringing this up at all is if you see me recently on social media, you might have, or if you're someone who has encountered me in real life or working with me one-on-one, you may have noticed that I started drinking out of this insanely large pink water bottle in the last couple of weeks. And it's huge. Like I know that, you know, the water bottles were a thing like a few years ago. I know that they were like super popular. Everyone was getting, I forget what the brand was because I obviously didn't jump on that back then. But this water bottle is really freakishly big. And the reason that I got it was that I noticed that I was getting dehydrated and that I wasn't drinking enough water throughout the day. And I know that this sounds so basic, right? It sounds so non-impressive. It's not this like super complicated concept that we have to break down. But so often we forget or we don't prioritize taking care of our basic needs. And this actually matters a lot. And I am going to get into the nuance and the detail about why this is so incredibly important and why it's so easy for us cycle breakers to really overlook our basic needs and taking care of them and deprioritize them. So I noticed I was getting really dehydrated. I always have several beverages with me at all times, usually a coffee or a diet coke or a diet Dr. Pepper, and then a water. Anyways, I have many beverages with me at all times, one of which is always water. But what I noticed is on work days, when I'm going through the workday, I was not getting up to refill my glass of water nearly enough. And I started bringing in like a big water bottle, like as a pitcher that I could use to refill it. But I wasn't refilling it nearly enough, even though they were both on my desk. Like it wasn't a resistance thing. It was just one of those things where if you've ever had one of those days where you go through the entire day and you're like, oh my gosh, I forgot to eat lunch. I was so busy. I didn't even step away from my desk. It was that type of thing. And that type of thing is so common in general. It's so easy to get sucked into what we're doing and to forget to make that like intentional effort to refill your water cup, even if you have a jug or a pitcher or a refill water bottle like sitting right there. It's so easy to forget that. But it really impacts us like massively. On the days that I drink enough water, I physically feel so much better. I feel more alert and more awake. I feel more focused. It is wild how my body reacts to being dehydrated, but that makes sense because I'm a human being and being dehydrated is an actual thing, right? The same is true for the days where I don't eat enough during the day. I luckily am now at the point where I am very intentional about making sure I eat lunch every single day. And I usually have a couple of snacks throughout the day, just depending on my hunger levels. But there have been many a point in my life where just like forgetting, not prioritizing, drinking enough water, eating lunch, getting food throughout the day has just really fallen off my radar. It has been deprioritized, it has not happened. And those days, it is so easy to tell yourself the story of I'm too busy, I don't have time to step away. But the reality is the way that we function when we're dehydrated, the way that we function when we're hungry, the way that we function when we're sleep deprived, when we're not prioritizing our sleep, the way that we function when we're not moving our bodies is nowhere near how well we function when we are doing those basic things. And it is really tricky to prioritize those basic needs. And so you get caught in this cycle where you're not feeling great, you're stressed out, you're overwhelmed, you're not functioning as well as you know that you could, that you normally do to your full capacity. But it's also really hard to prioritize those things back into your schedule. And I think this is uniquely challenging for cycle breakers because growing up, our needs were not the priority, right? And that doesn't mean that you didn't have food in your house. That doesn't mean that you didn't have a roof over your head. But what mattered more was what was going to keep your parent regulated. What mattered more, what was going to keep your parent happy, to keep yourself in their good graces. The things that mattered more than what you were thinking and feeling were the things that were going to keep your world peaceful and keep it safe. And so growing up, you learn to start ignoring your needs. And that can extend to your basic needs. And as an adult, when you struggle with boundaries in general, right? Which I think is true for all of us cycle breakers, and we can learn how to set boundaries, but it's something we have to work at. Even for me now, right? Like a boundary for me now that I clearly am struggling with being dehydrated is making sure to prioritize that I have my basic needs met during the day, that I'm setting myself up to stay hydrated throughout the day, that I'm making sure to prioritize, that I am checking in with myself when I'm feeling icky and asking myself, when's the last time I ate? When's the last time I drank some water? When's the last time I got up and moved my body? Asking myself these questions. How much am I sleeping? Which right now is in limited control of mine with being a toddler mom, but that's an aside. So with these things, with these basic needs, it is, you know, complicated for us because it's not just about us being busy. It's about us needing boundaries that support us in prioritizing taking care of ourselves. We need boundaries that support us having the emotional capacity, the physical capacity to take care of our basic needs, to take care of our mental and emotional well-being, to take care of ourselves in so many aspects. And I think, you know, surprised me that we're at over a hundred episodes of the podcast. And this being such an important topic for everyone's mental health, but especially for those of us that are so quick to sacrifice ourselves and our own needs and our own wants in order to prioritize the people that we care about and prioritize other people's comfort and what they expect from us over ourselves. We really need an episode of this podcast devoted to taking care of our basic needs and prioritizing them and taking care of ourselves and understanding why it is often such an intentional thing that we have to do as cycle breakers because we're working against what we had to do growing up, that survival, that coping skill, which is neglecting the things that don't absolutely have to be done in order to keep us safe. And it's so funny because, you know, healing in general is so nuanced. It's so complicated. There's so many aspects of it. There's the family situation that we grew up in, there's the current relationship stressors that we have, our current relationship issues with our parent, with our family, with a romantic partner, with friends, with colleagues, with our job in general. Like there are just so many complicated aspects of our day-to-day life that impact our mental health. And then there are these things that we're biologically predisposed to: depression, anxiety, OCD, panic. There are so many things there. There are so many things that all mesh together and impact how we move through life on a day-to-day basis. But what is true for every human? And this is one of those things where it's a great thing to talk about because it's not as nuanced as some of this other stuff, is that prioritizing our basic needs is a must if we want to be an emotionally and mentally healthy person. We have to make sure that we're staying hydrated throughout the day. We have to make sure that we're feeding ourselves throughout the day. We have to make sure that we're resting and getting sleep. We have to make sure that we are moving our body. Those things are not luxuries, although they often get treated as luxuries. And something that I didn't even mention, but very much goes in there is hygiene stuff too, making sure you're prioritizing showering and taking care of yourself physically. Those are things that get pushed to the side when we are struggling, when we're overwhelmed, when we are stressed out. And you might not notice that all of those things get pushed to the side for you. Maybe you're not someone who struggles with prioritizing their hygiene, or maybe you're not someone who struggles with sleep, or maybe you're not someone who struggles with remembering to eat or remembering to stay hydrated. But these things come up frequently, and at least some of them come up for most people. And I would say all of them come up for a lot of people. So if you're like, um, all of them are a struggle for me when I'm not in a good mental place, then like you're definitely not alone. These are things that so frequently get overlooked, how important they are to our overall functioning level. But if we're not feeding ourselves enough, our brain physically can't function to the extent that we need it to throughout the day. Our body can't function. If we're not hydrated, like that is physically going to slow us down. It's going to impact us and our ability to like focus and pay attention and retain information. All of these things do impact us a lot. So little did I know that going out and buying my freakishly large water bottle would inspire an episode of the podcast. But I'm really glad that it did because I cannot emphasize enough. I cannot over-emphasize how important it is to meet our basic needs if we want to be emotionally well, if we want to be mentally well, if we want to have the energy that we need in order to work through and process some of this heavy stuff that we deal with growing up in dysfunctional families. I cannot overemphasize the importance of meeting our basic needs if we want to try to learn and implement new skills, like responding to our own emotions in more effective ways. If we are not taking care of our basic needs, those things are like already hard if we are taking care of our basic needs. But if we're not taking care of our basic needs, those things oftentimes feel impossible. They feel so much harder than they need to. And so I think it's going back to the basics and setting ourselves up for success and not underestimating the impact that doing these small things throughout the day has and like reminding ourselves that of course it makes sense if we're neglecting some of these things because we learned to do that growing up. We learned that as a survival mechanism to discount the importance of our own needs, to prioritize other people's comfort and needs over our own. These are all things that we learned that make it really easy to overlook and neglect our own basic needs. But once we bring our attention to the fact that these things are important, these things are a priority, it actually doesn't typically take that much intention or effort to integrate them into our lives. And like some easier said than others, right? If you're someone who's feeling really depressed and you're struggling with your hygiene, that's a different thing than overlooking your basic needs, overlooking, you know, deprioritizing eating throughout the day, deprioritizing drinking, deprioritizing getting up and moving your body. Those things are different. Those are things that can quite easily be achieved if we are aware that they're happening and if we're aware of the importance and the significance of making sure that they are priorities and that they do get incorporated into our day-to-day basis. It doesn't have to look impressive. It can look as simple as a massively huge pink water bottle or getting up and walking around your house or your block or your office for 10 minutes a day. It could be walking back and forth to like the bathroom, like a couple of times during the day when you normally sit at your desk all day. These things don't have to be hugely impressive. They don't have to be you running a marathon. They don't have to be you cooking a gourmet meal. It could be you buying some yogurts at the store and string cheese and like nuts to make sure that you're feeding yourself throughout the day. Sometimes we set the bar so high that it feels like, well, if I'm gonna do it at all, I need to do it perfectly. And that is the furthest thing from the truth. The furthest thing from the truth is that it's better to neglect ourselves than to take care of ourselves in an imperfect way. So on that note, I will leave you with this gentle reminder to be mindful of where you are as far as taking care of your basic needs throughout the week and challenge you to start reprioritizing some of the ways that you might be neglecting them. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. If you are loving this podcast and find it valuable to your healing journey, I would so appreciate you sharing it with someone, sharing it on social media, sharing it with a friend you think might like it, leaving a five-star review, leaving a kind comment. All of that helps so much when it comes to the growth of our podcast and people finding the show. So thank you to everyone who has already done that. Thank you to all of our new listeners for joining us this week. And until next week, take care of yourself. I'll see you then. Bye. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the You're Not Crazy podcast. If you like the show, please leave a five star review to help other cycle breakers find it. And make sure to check the show notes for other ways I can help. Thanks again for joining me. I'll see you next week.