Nicole LePera

We build habits throughout our day.

We set alarms on our phone, post-its around or, right, map this onto a habit we already do.

We drink coffee in the morning.

We brush our teeth and we make the intentional effort to begin to refocus our attention from the racing thoughts that are probably coming from a stressed body to the body.

And say, how am I breathing right now?

How is my heart?

Maybe even putting a hand on your chest right now to notice how quickly it's beating.

How tense are my muscles?

And this is going back to the wisdom you were sharing earlier.

Some of us don't even notice that we're clenching our jaw all day long until someone says, hey, let your jaw hang open.

Or for me, I carry my shoulders so far up to my ears that it takes me a minute to.

And then by contrast, it's like, wow.

All of that stress.

And so that stress is happening behind the scenes, is always talking to our brain, is often resulting in those racing thoughts, those catastrophe thoughts.

It's not a surprise then that when something was happening, my body helped my mind assign the meaning that what was happening was not good.

It was something terrible because my body was always under that stress.

So as we build that bridge to actually notice our body in real time, I would suggest though, and I would acknowledge that we're probably not going to notice the stress in the moment where we're overwhelmed with stress.

So this is a practice that we want to build foundationally in our day when our body isn't too overwhelmed.

So that as in the moment, right, our mind is starting to race, our muscles are starting to tense, our heart is starting to elevate.

Now we have some real tools.