Environmental detox

Hey guys, welcome back to the Made for More Podcast!

Today, we’re talking all about our environments and how they impact us.  The noises, the voices, the visuals, the people, and all the things around us that can influence how we feel, think, and show up in our everyday lives.

Because sometimes, we forget that we have a choice. We have an opportunity every single day to decide what we allow in, what we absorb, and what we give our attention to.

Maybe it’s time for an environmental detox.

Maybe there’s a friendship that’s draining you. Maybe it’s the noise you’re constantly consuming. Maybe it’s something you’re following online, a space you’re spending too much time in, or even a job that’s taking more from you than it’s giving back.

Whatever it is, I want you to remember that you are allowed to create an environment that supports you,  and taking care of yourself sometimes means unfollowing, removing, distancing, or simply deciding, “I don’t have to absorb this.”

So today, let’s take a look at what’s around us, what we’re allowing into us, and whether it’s actually helping us become the person we’re trying to grow into.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey guys, welcome back to the Made for More podcast. How are you? How's your week going? How's the start to your week? Are you checking in with yourself? So I've had a few questions. People have said, is the podcast back? And I just want to say, like, I'm just recording when the messages feel like they flow, when it doesn't feel like pressure, when it feels like it fits into my life, and honestly, when I feel like I have a message of value to share. But yeah, we are so back, baby. We are so back. Again, I don't know if I'll record weekly or when I will produce things, but just be checking in with the downloads. But I think it'll be more active than you think. You know, I keep saying to myself and to those around me who do life with me that I just feel like I'm in this shedding period of life. Like I'm in this releasing period of life. It kind of feels like it's been there, but I'm really in that like transition of it all. So that may be like a theme that you may notice with different podcast topics or subjects or things that I'm going to share and talk about. And really something that I want to say today, I think goes really hand in hand with the shedding process or the releasing process of things that do not align within our lives and just how to like recognize when maybe it's time to shed something or put something down, or that maybe you too are in a transition. I think that we are just really busy people, right? And we are so consumed and so absorbed with so much. And I think that we often forget that at any given moment within our life, we can completely change our lives. We can like pick something up again, we can put something down, and we can change our lives for the better. Like, we do not have to stay on autopilot just doing the same things and accepting the same things and accepting the same relationships or patterns or just responsibilities. Like maybe it's time for you to do a little well check with yourself. A check engine light might be on, it might be time to address something, and maybe it's time to just do an environment check with yourself, and maybe you too feel that maybe you're being called to shed something, or you're just feeling different lately, or maybe it's time to just recognize that maybe you need to shed something, or maybe even detox or pull away from something for a little while. And I just feel really clear right now. I just came back inside from a couple mile walk. I went on an outdoor walk. I'm a big advocate. You've probably heard me mention this um through the podcast some, but I'm a big advocate for a silent walk. And what I mean by that is like going outside, going on a walk, and going silent. Don't scroll on your phone, don't listen to anything in your ear, no music, no podcast. Just go be silent. Move your body, be in silence with yourself. Notice the sounds around you. Notice what you see. You're gonna be a lot more observant when you're going on a silent walk. Like I just feel like I noticed every single leaf that was falling. I almost felt like on my route, like half the loop that I was doing, it felt like summer, and it felt very like warm because the sun was hitting, and then the other half of the loop was really shaded and breezy, and I noticed every leaf that was falling, and I was like, okay, it feels like fall is coming. And it was just very reflective to the shedding process. But I think sometimes when we often turn down the sound of life and turn down our distractions, we get alone with our thoughts, and our thoughts are constantly there, right? They're trying to tell us things, but we're very consumed, we're very busy, we're very distracted. So I knew that my body needed that. I think we forget how badly we really need fresh air and sunlight on our skin. And I forget what the exact importance is, but there is something important and valuable about getting outside and getting your eyes into the light. We spend our days indoors, we spend our days inside of our houses, inside of our uh businesses, workplaces, maybe we're on screens, there's lots of blue light, and how often are we just getting some fresh air and being intentional about it? So I really want to encourage you with that. You know, it doesn't have to be crazy long, just go outside for 10 minutes and just walk, see what rises up for you, see what thoughts maybe you need to think about or address. And I felt so just almost zenful when I came back in, and I just felt at peace, and I think that's really important for our bodies is to know when to recognize how and when to turn down the sound of life. And I think that goes hand in hand with just doing like an environmental check, an environmental detox, because we forget that we do have control over these things. We wonder why we're such anxious people, why we have so much anxiety and depression, and just we're consumed by anxious thoughts and our culture. And it's just like we have a lot being thrown at us. Like give ourselves some credit. We have a lot being thrown at us, but we also are very much in control. We just need to recognize where our control is and understand when and how to stop consuming something, to change something, to change a pattern, um, to choose to absorb something better for our mindset and for our health. You know, just think about everything that you absorb on a daily basis. Like the things that you read, whether that be intentionally reading a book or reading something that's like a news article or reading social media, who you are around most often, a lot of those times it's gonna be people that you work with, right? You're spending a lot of time with your coworkers. Who are those people? What are the voices in their what are the voices that are speaking over your life? Who's your friend group? Who's the parents on your kids' soccer team? Like, what are those influences like around you? And what are they representing to you? Who do you follow on social media? Are you following people just because it's the popular person to follow? Are you following them because you aspire to be like them? Like, why do you follow them? Have you ever asked yourself that when you're scrolling? Are you are you ever like mindfully aware of like, do I even like this person? Or do I even feel like we have anything in common? Why am I even following them? And maybe it's time for a healthy unfollow or a healthy mute. I don't think a lot of people know this, but you can mute people on social media, on Instagram. It is like such a beautiful, helpful tool if you're in a position where you can't really unfollow somebody because maybe it would ruin like I don't know if I'd say ruin, but maybe it would cause friction in like a family dynamic or a coworker dynamic. But you go to their page, you click following, and you can like slide a little bar and you can mute their stories. If they're driving you crazy or if they're constantly negative or making you feel bad about your own life or something, go mute them for a little bit. It's really healthy for your body. Again, it's a environmental uh check for you, so that's important. What do you listen to? What is catching your ears' attention? What podcast are you into? Are you into straight up murder mysteries? Are you into documentaries? Are you into self-help? Are you feeding yourself spiritually through what you're listening to? What about the music? Like what has your ears' attention? It really does affect you. And maybe you need to add something more positive and uplifting and maybe turn down the noise of some of those murder documentaries. You wonder why you're anxious. Um, who do you hang out with? Who are the closest people that you are hanging out with? Who is it that you text when you want a friend to meet up with you for coffee? Who is with you on the weekends? What does life look like when you're with them? Do you feel like you leave the conversation or the dynamic or the hangout? And you do you feel refreshed and like so glad that you were around them and it brought you energy and happiness, or do you feel absolutely drained because of who they are and the influence that they have on your life? You know, all of these things that I just named, I'm sure things came to mind for you, right? Those things all have influence over your life and impact over your life, whether you realize it or not. I think we are so, again, consumed and absorbed by things that we don't even realize, and we have very short attention spans lately. It's just how fast the world is moving and how fast the world is spinning and what is being thrown at us. We're very impatient people. So we just have short attention spans, and so we're absorbing, absorbing, absorbing so much that we don't even really slow down to realize whether it had a positive or a negative impact. And I think if you don't stop and do that for you, who will? You have control, it's so, so important. So all these things are influencing us. Um, you know, I think about like family members. Who in your family that's either an immediate family member or an outside family member, maybe it's an in-law. Who in your family is maybe somebody that's like a draining negative source of energy? Maybe they overstep and they tell you how to parent or what you're doing wrong or how you should be doing this in your marriage. I think that we have also become so conditioned to be people who believe that just because someone is family, or maybe even full-blooded related to you, that equals a full pass to you and a full excuse, no matter how they act or what they do. And maybe it's time to limit their access to you with your boundaries in mind. Maybe it's time to distance yourself. You can put a loving distance in place, or you can put a permanent like you have to know these things, but just because someone's family, I really don't believe just because someone's family that it's just an excuse to act however, be however, say whatever, and they just get to keep running over you, and then you live in a result where every time you know you have to see them, hear from them, sit at a table with them, you're anxious and uncomfortable. Like just you can mute people in real life too, family or not. Like, you don't even have to tell people or have a conversation with them, whether it's family, friends, coworkers, the person you're gonna follow on social media, you don't have to even like make an announcement, right? Like you can just find little ways to protect your peace and limit people's access to you and your world and your peace. I think there is nothing more sacred than protecting your peace now of days, and you need to do whatever you need to do. And you know, another thing is if you are in a business or in a workplace, maybe similar to mine, um, hairstylist here, but where you take on clients, and maybe the amount of sales or the amount of clients that you take really reflect and depend on the dollar that you make, the income that you make. Hear me when I say this not every client is worth taking. Not every person's dollar is worth taking. The person that drains you, that client that you see on your book, that person you have to have the meeting with, or make the phone call to, if it is draining the living life out of you, you have every right to be like, I just, I don't think this is a client I want to take anymore. And honestly, you need to be very mindfully aware that when you feel like a person or people, client, person you're trying to sell to, maybe it's a dynamic where it's a work dynamic where you're trying to get their business. If God has highlighted that person or that company or those individuals, and he's shown you how exhausting this is to you and how much this is costing your soul, their dollar is not worth it, and you've got to you've got to find a way to get rid of them. You need to really be mindfully aware to listen to those cues and again limit your interactions with them. Maybe pass them to a coworker who can deal with them. And maybe that's a way that your business that you work for keeps their sales. But let me just say, not all business is good business. It's really, really not, and their dollar is not worth it if it drains you that bad. And if they're that much of a liability or that much of a stressor where you're thinking about them before they come in and have the interaction with you, thinking about it that whole day, and then later that night, like it when it takes up like three of your work days, like, no, that's not even worth it. And I know it's scary because when things come to your income, especially because a lot of people are in positions where they need clients or sales and that reflects your income. But I can promise you that your peace and your state of mind and your well-being and your nervous system outweighs whatever dollar any person or any sales or any business relationship can ever bring you. So maybe it's time to do a little detox of your clientele. That one's gonna be hard, and you're gonna have to pray about how you need to do that. I did that this year, and there were certain people I knew I needed to let go. And you can do that in such a soft way and a casual way, and just yeah, I mean, I I think when you know, you know. And you can even do this without them even knowing that they're the source of the problem. You have to take care of yourself. Think about what is close to you, like what is all around you? The people, the voices that are in your life. Where is your time spent? Like, do you have hobbies? What are those hobbies? What do you enjoy doing? You know? Do you even know yourself to know what you enjoy doing? Maybe it's time to turn down the noise of life so that you know who you are and what you enjoy and what brings you joy. Because life is like already so loud from the minute we wake up to the minute we go to sleep. Probably like the last thing your nervous system and your mind needs, if you're already living a life that feels just overconsumption and like a lot thrown at you, probably the last thing you need is like really busy weekends. I'll be honest with you. You know, I know that people go out and do things, people want to go to restaurants, and maybe you have friends or you want a date night, maybe it's at like a pub or a bar. Like that's like the maybe the last place you need to be. Maybe the last place you need to be is at a concert. I'm not saying never. I think there's times and places for things, but I think I've become so much of a person who understands that my life at home is so sacred to me because of how loud I feel like life has been. And my nervous system, my body needs to turn the sound off and turn the pressure off. And I don't want to feel overstimulated at a restaurant, and I don't want to feel like just exhausted from conversations and pouring out. I love friends, I love plans, I love life, I love doing things, having experiences in the right, tasteful mannerisms, but I'm a person that I cannot have plans most weekends. We already have like plans like soccer or just something, and I don't want to have a lot of plans. I just want to stay at home. We eat at home because I don't want to go out and about and hear all the noises and do all the interactions with the servers and stuff. That's just my personal preference. But if you're feeling like life is loud, if you're feeling anxious and out of breath, if you're feeling overconsumed and overexerted from all these places that we're extending our energy, maybe it's time to turn this sound down and spend our weekends a little bit more quieter and a little bit more at peace and a little bit more at home. Okay, we're going to talk about social media. We all have it, we all love it, right? We're all very consumed by it. If you don't believe you're consumed by it, go to your screen time on your phone, look at your social media. I'm sure that that will tell you just how much time you have on your hands and just how consumed you are. Now, listen, I'm going to say something and it's just my personal opinion. I'm just learning not to go with the things that are just popular or trusting the things that are just popular, like really asking myself when I'm looking at content or when I'm choosing to follow someone or continue to follow someone, is this adding value to my life? Do I look at their page and feel like, you know, fed by it in a positive way? Do I feel drained? Does it feel too polished and out of touch for me? I can't follow people who are constantly using filters and constantly apologizing for their messy background. That to me is a trigger for me and teaches my brain that I have to be perfect and polished to show up. And so I have to be very mindfully careful about who and what I follow. Now, I follow a ton of um people who are in the personal development world. I I personally that's like a hobby of mine. It's what I enjoy. I like consuming that kind of stuff, that kind of content where it's about mindset or quotes. I love reading quotes, but let me just tell you something. And again, this is might go into the unpopular category. And this is no shade, no hate. It's just something that I was mindfully aware about in my perspective. But I'm going to talk about Mel Robbins. Okay, we all know her, we all have loved her. I think that she has brought a lot of value into my life in a lot of ways throughout the seasons. However, I have to say this, and this is just my personal perspective on something that I have realized within the last year. I've had to completely pull back from the Mel Robbins train. I have her page completely muted right now. I think she means tremendously well. I think her growth is phenomenally impressive. But over the last year, for me, through my lens and the way I view life, I feel like her content feels very much like it was teaching, or what I was what I was absorbing from her teaching was that everybody else is the problem. We are victims, people owe us everything. And honestly, there was just a lot that felt very AI, very chat GBT curated content with her words and even just with her podcast. So I just had to pull away. Um, maybe she's being 100% authentic to herself, and if she is, kudos, great. But for me personally, I was just feeling like when I was reading or listening to her, I was starting to think, yeah, everybody's the problem, and I'm the victim, and everybody owes me something. And to me, personal development is supposed to be something that makes you take an inward look at why we are the way that we are, you know, and be very reflective. And so I just felt like when I listened, I was just hearing like very fluffy stuff, you know, like it almost felt too good, too pat you on the back type of vibes. I felt like I was hearing what I wanted to hear instead of hearing things that really make you reflect and go, hmm, do I need to do a self-check on myself? Do I need to work on myself? And it's like having a friend around that only tells you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear. So for me personally, I had to be mindful of that, right? Like I was like, I don't know, this might not be a voice I need to listen to in this season of life. Not to say never. I think she's had amazing points and amazing topics, but just for right now, I just had to really pull back to her. And I I am definitely by no means saying. Don't listen to her. I think she has great deliveries, but again, as someone who is encouraging you to just do an environmental check, you have to ask yourself, like, what is this teaching me? What am I getting out of it? How does this make me feel? Is this the right thing for me? And you have to be aware of what you're absorbing and how it impacts you and makes you think. And maybe it's time to detect detox uh content for a season, even if it's popular content that's out there. So I just think these are really great ways to check in with yourself to figure out like, where in life do you need to do like a little check-in? Where in life do you need to turn down the sound? Where in life do you need to distance? What can you add in? What can you add in that would be healthy? Sometimes it's not always about just like the turning down of all these other things, but maybe what you could add in. Maybe throw in a personal development style podcast, maybe throw in a church sermon, maybe work out to worship music. And I get it, that is very hard to do. And I've done that here and there, but there's sometimes when my my soul, even during a workout, even when I'm trying to find self-motivation, my soul is like crying on the inside, and I need to hear truth. I need to hear spiritual truth that feeds my soul. Maybe it's time to distance a friendship, but maybe it's time to text a friend that you know is really good for you. But maybe that friend says something sometimes that maybe it's a little tough love, and maybe you don't always want to hear it, but maybe you're like, she's really good to have in my corner. Maybe it's time to meet her for coffee or something, or go on a walk with her, or meet up at the park with her. So I'm just asking you, maybe like me, are you going through a shedding period? Are you like just releasing things that just feel like out of alignment? Are you feeling like life is loud and busy and fast paced? And do you feel like maybe you need to do an environmental detox? Maybe even it's a social media break. I I think now I've realized naturally that quarterly I do a social media break. And it might be a week, it might be two, I've had longer, but I think sometimes those things are good just to turn down the noise, to be with your own thoughts, to be intentional with what you need. How often are you slowing down and asking yourself, what do I really need? As people who most likely, I'm assuming in your world is similar to my world, your whole day is thought around other people. Whose lunch needs to be packed? Who needs to be taken where? Did you text back this person? Did you pick up the groceries? Did you clean this? Did you call and make your dog the groomer appointment? Like you're taking care of all of these roles. How often have you said, what do I need? How can I serve myself? How can I honor myself? What do I need? What do I not need? So I'm encouraging a big environmental check-in. Maybe your check engine light is on like mine. Maybe it's time to mute or detox things in your life. Maybe it's time to add something in. Maybe it's just time to go on a silent walk or have a quieter weekend. Only you will know exactly what you need, but I really want to encourage you to do a little self-check-in, do a little detox, and see how you feel. Do you feel refreshed? Notice how you feel after like a week of some changes in your life. Do you feel refreshed? Do you feel recharged? Do you feel a little lighter, maybe a little less anxious? I just only want the absolute most clarity for you and your life, the same way I do with my own. So, until next time, check in with yourself and take care of yourself. You deserve it because you were made for more and you always have been.