Episode 141: Releasing A Need To / Have To Mindset

PodcastSelf-Development
Written By Naomi Nakamura

Our mindsets can be a massive roadblock on our journey to achieving whatever it is we want to do in life. If we succumb to it, then we're more likely to become less healthy (physically and mentally), and less productive.

In this episode, I share with you some recent shifts that I’ve had related to my mindset, and how it impacted my productivity, stress, and combatting burnout.

If you’re someone who’s ambitious, driven, with so many things you want to do but you’re struggling with finding the time and energy to get it done, then this episode is for you!

Episode Highlights:

  • Burnout is more than just being tired

  • The different types of burnout

  • How to see things from a different perspective and rewriting the stories we tell ourselves

  • Where do our expectations come from?

  • Learning about embodiment and the idea of our internal struggles

  • Doing what works for you

We can’t avoid stress but we can change how we respond and react to it!

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE

“What happens when you address all the typical things, but you still feel burnt out and exhausted? That’s when I realized that burnout also comes from internal sources. What I mean by that is our mindset, how we frame things, how we see things, our perspectives and the stories that we tell ourselves and whether they’re true or not. ”
— Naomi Nakamura

Read the Episode Transcript:

Hello, my friends and welcome back to the show.

So I’m kind of winging it today because I had a whole other episode planned. I had another topic to talk about that was really aligned with some of the things we've been talking about in the past several weeks with leaky gut and food sensitivities.

But last night, I was listening to my friend Sarah Morgan's podcast, and she's a past guest of the show. She joins me in Episode 116 on productivity mindset and daring to grow.

Mindset is something that I've really been working on for the past several years, but really a lot more intentionally in the past several months, really since we all went into lockdown and the pandemic started. I feel like in this past five to six months, I've really had a breakthrough.

And what I want to talk about today is not necessarily specific to what Sarah's episode was about, but it got me thinking about mindset. And I felt really compelled to pivot this week and have an episode on mindset and I want to share with you some of the recent shifts that I've had.

For years, I have had a lot of ideas and thoughts and hypotheses floating around in my head and for a long time, I didn't know how to quantify them, I didn't know where they came from. I didn't even know what to call it. I didn't even have any type of framework to put them in.

And through the work that I've been done, I found a context to help me understand them and put them I guess, in a way that makes sense to me. And I also felt really validated.

So, I'm feeling prompted, and have this overwhelming need to talk about this today and to postpone the original episode that I had planned.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you're here and you're listening, and you are someone who you're very driven, you're ambitious, you're a high achiever, and there's so many things you want to do. The ideas are endless, but you're also struggling with having the time and the energy to get it all done and you're feeling burnt out and fatigued and just stressed.

Well, this episode is for you. Because when we’re feeling really stressed, and we're tired that really Is what burnout is. And this is something I have struggled with, on and off for many years, but really more in awareness the past five years.

And so now I've shared the past episodes how I've struggled with burnout, and I can't remember the episode names off the top of my head, but I will link to them in the show notes at www.livefablife.com/141.

But you know, as I've shared, I have struggled with tiredness and fatigue, and burnout and adrenal fatigue. And, to me, burnout really goes beyond just being tired, right?

We all feel tired, but it really goes beyond that. It's being tired all the time, but also being wired. And even though you have this tiredness, you still keep pushing on through.

It's this feeling of being apathetic and really not caring about things or caring about people that you normally do care about. And you actually really do but you're just you're going through this funk.

So, for me it was I would look in the mirror and I would be feeling lethargic and tired and just like I didn't care anymore, and I didn't recognize myself. And that's when I knew like, okay, this is more than just feeling tired.

Because when we're talking about adrenals, and we've been talking about adrenal health and adrenal fatigue, the first thing that it comes back to is stress because the role of cortisol is significant here, and it's significant in our adrenal health and cortisol. In layman's terms, it's the hormone that helps us manage our stress and the stress that we feel in our body.

And I've talked about having sleep struggles and how I've tried all the recommended remedies for years. And they worked until they didn’t and it always came back to this cycle.

And so I had to ask myself, you know, if I have taken melatonin if I'm using the blue light glasses, I've taken all the devices out of my room, if I'm going to bed at the same time every night if I am diffusing and using essential oils to help me sleep and relax. If I'm keeping a notepad by my bed to help jot things down if I'm using breathing techniques, and I'm still not sleeping well, like, there's got to be something deeper going on here.

And through this process of trying to figure it out and peel back the layers and getting to the root of what it is that I've come to understand and to realize that there's actually different types of burnout.

There's the burnout from external sources, and that is maybe you're working too many hours, or you have financial stress, or you're over exercising or you're eating a poor diet or you're eating foods that your body has a reaction to, or simply you're just not prioritizing sleep, your Netflix bingeing till late at night, your honor devices, these are all things that come from external sources.

There's also things like toxic relationships and not establishing boundaries and having poor communications all those things can also be a result and stress and affect cortisol in your body. And if not address can result in burnout as well.

But what happens when you address those things, but you still feel burnt out, you still feel this exhaustion?

And that's when I realized that burnout also comes from internal sources. And what I mean by that is I'm talking about our mindset, and how we frame things, and how we see things, our perspectives and the stories that we tell ourselves whether they be truth or not.

And especially the “should”, the things that we “should” be doing, the “need to’s”, the “have to’s,” the expectations,

Both placing these expectations on us and what's compelling us to have to meet them, I think that we have to, and this is what I mean, when I say the “need to / have to” mindset and admittedly I'm someone who I am ambitious. I'm a Type A person. There's always a lot of things on my to do list.

You know, during this pandemic, a lot of people have been going stir crazy because we have been asked to stay home and we’re not going out as much. And people are getting cabin fever.

I don't get that. I always have stuff to do, but these are things that no one is making me do.

I compel myself to do them, for example, this podcast. No one's making me do this. I'm not getting paid to do it. I purposely have a sponsor-free podcast.

And I've taken breaks and skipped a week here and there. But for the most part, 143 episodes in this is 141 episodes, but there were two episodes that there was an episode zero and I didn't have an episode, which I don't know why I did that at the time.

Anyways, 143 episodes in, and you know, no one's compelling me to do this. But this is something I have committed to for the past three years.

So, it goes deeper than just having to deal with all these external stressors that we have.

And so, when we think about the stories that we tell ourselves or these expectations that we've perceived to have that we think are placed upon us by other people or that we place upon ourselves, we have to think about well, where did these expectations come from? Are the things that we have been conditioned to think or to expect from our childhood?

For example, I'm going to give you a perfect example of how this came up for me. So since this pandemic started, I've had this fear about what if I get laid off? And when you work in the tech industry, like I do, especially for a public company, that's always in the back of your head, because every time you announced earnings, if your company didn't do well, or if it's the end of your fiscal year, a lot of these companies will have annual layoffs where they'll lay off a certain percentage of low performers or they need to cut budget, you know, there's many different ways these things happen. And it's even more so during this pandemic.

So, I've had this underlying, I don't want to say it's fear, but it's been an area of concern about what if I get laid off?

I have been working with people who have challenged my thinking. Why do I think you have to have a full time job (beyond the “I need income to pay my bills and to pay my rent and to pay my insurance and take care of myself to put food on the table,” because we can earn money in different ways. Will it really the end of the earth for me?

I see this, especially in working in Beautycounter, as a mentor to many women, they wonder, “What will women think of me?” “What will others think of me?”

I see this especially when they have a real desire to do something, but think, “Well, I can't do that. I really love Beautycounter, I love the mission and it looks like so much fun. But I can't do that because I can't sell.”

Well, who says you can't sell? Why do you think that these are the stories that we tell ourselves? It's this, “I need to do this.” “I have to do this.”

This kind of mindset, the internal mindset that I'm talking about, are things that create an internal angst, or an internal tension inside of us.

And when we ignore them, and don't address them, that tension builds up whether we realize it or not.

And if I look at why I can't sleep, really, for my whole life, I've had to go deep and ask, “Are there internal tensions that I need to come to terms with?”

And I needed to learn how to release and maybe reframe and even reparent some of these beliefs. So, since the pandemic started, I've been working on this by going to a meditation circle hosted by my friend, Sadie Adams. She is so gifted in the work that she does, and she has been on a guest on this show twice.

And through going through that meditation circle, I have been learning about embodiment and the idea that our internal struggles, our emotions, all these things manifest physically.

And how do I think they've manifested physically for me? Through poor sleep, aches and pains, maybe different illnesses? Probably not just me, it's probably really common and other people as well.

And so how have I been working to release this “need to / have to” mindset.

And literally, this is something that I have spent endless hours journaling about and really thinking about, and just putting a lot of effort into it.

So, like I said, I've been going to the weekly meditation circles, but beyond that, I've been having one-on-one guided sessions with Sadie. And this is where we've explored my mindset and what's going on with my psyche, really in great detail. But it's not like therapy because we're talking about it as how does my body feel? And then what things can I do physically in my body to work through releasing this and then it kind of goes around in a circle were doing less physical aspects can help me release some beliefs and some blocks that I have, and some of these stories that I tell myself.

Now another way that I've been working through this is really digging into Human Design. And I also have done an episode on that, and if you have not listened to that episode, again, I will have a link to that in the show notes.

Human Design is made up of a collection of different systems, subsystems, and things like the chakra system, or even astrology. So, I've been going even a level deeper and just trying to learn more about those other subsystems of Human Design.

I've been doing a lot of journaling, and I've just really observing, were we’ve been in shut down I've spent a lot of quiet time at home and having lots of moments of reflection, and a lot of self-observation.

And what has that brought me it's brought an opportunity to reframe, for example, this pandemic is horrible. Many people have lost their lives. The country and the world are in chaos. We've all been stuck at home; many people have had enormous economic challenges.

But this opportunity for reflection and personal growth has been my personal pandemic experience. Had I not been forced to stay home, would I have had these opportunities to reflect and to self-observe? So that's one way that we can reframe things and look at something a little bit differently.

You know, another thing I've often thought about is there was an enormous reaction to the George Floyd murder, worldwide. And I asked myself, because he was definitely not the first and he won't be the last, but what was it about this specific situation that made the world do something and finally take action?

Had we not been a pandemic, would that have happened because again, we were all at home and there weren’t a lot of other distractions going on? Just another way of reframing and looking at what's going on in its world.

And then again, another way of looking at the pandemic is that it's given us a permission to slow down.

For me, it's given me the permission to release some of the things that I have put on my to-do list that I've placed expectations upon myself. And so, as a result of all of these things, I have learned that I am a Projector in the Human Design System, and I've embraced that. Just learning and understanding that aspect about myself has given me so much permission to release some of this, again, expectations they've placed on myself.

For example, Projectors, because we don't have our own energy source, we don't create our own energy, we draw from other people and Projectors really are at their best when we work like 4-5 hours a day vs 12, 13, 14, 15 hours a day.

Honestly that's really what life had been like for me for several years between my full-time job, and then doing a lot of my side hustle work. So, learning that I'm a Projector and what's best for a Projector, I really fell into and embrace that.

And I can't tell you how my quality of life has so greatly improved, not just physically but also just mentally. Every week a lot of that internal tension about “I really need to do this”, “I really should do this.” because this influencer business coach says I need to do it this way. No, nobody says you need to do it this way. Do what works for you.

Now another thing that I've done is I've allowed myself to take daily naps. I talked about this in a recent episode, the one I did on sleep, and it's learning to release routines and doing things a certain way but yet still kind of making it a ritual.

And so whether it's 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes an hour, I really make it a priority to have a daily nap. And that's really been able to compensate for some of the sleep challenges that I've had. It's been hugely impactful on my level of energy, and on my clarity, and just how I feel every day.

A huge thing that I've done, three years into this podcast, which by the way, last month was my three-year anniversary and I forgot and totally missed it…

I started outsourcing the production of this podcast three years in, I was doing it 100% all on my own. I couldn't take any social time to spend time with friends.

Because it's was like, I have to get my thoughts together, then I have to outline what I'm going to say, I have to record it, and then I have to edit it. And then I have to work the file to make the audio quality sound great. And then I have to do the show notes and then I have to create the images for social media. It’s a lot.

And so I was actually cold called by a production company. I talked to them. I really like how they work. I like their process. I like the work that they do, they came with great recommendations. And so for the past month, I have been outsourcing the production of this podcast.

I cannot tell you how many hours, it's given me back and my week, and how much of a mental relief it's been because once I record this thing, I send it off, and I'm done with it until I get it back on Monday before production. It's been huge.

I highly recommend learning how to delegate, especially if you're someone like me, I'm a control freak. I truly don't believe that other people can do my things better than I can. But I'm learning and so that has been a huge area of growth for me.

And then also related to that I've taken on more help with virtual assistants. And you may not see those things, but they're happening behind the scenes and they have been hugely helpful to me.

It's like this burden lifted off my shoulders because it's no longer something I need to do myself, but yet it's still getting done.

And I feel like it's that internal expectation. That pressure of again, “need to / have to”, that I no longer have on myself with regard to these things.

And I am learning more and more every day on different ways I can release that expectation, that mindset. I'm feeling a lot more relaxed, I'm feeling a lot happier, I'm feeling a lot more joyful.

And I'm not feeling guilty for taking time to spend with friends even though you know, we are still in the pandemic. I do have my bubble that I circulate through. But again, I don't have guilt. I don't have guilt if I want to just read a book, or if I just want to take a two-hour nap on a Saturday afternoon. I don't have that guilt of “Gosh, I really should be working on next week's podcast episode.”

So again, I don't know who needs to hear this, but I kind of feel like this an important thing that we need to talk about.

I know I've winged this. I've probably repeated myself a lot. talked in circles maybe gone off on a tangent or two. This is me in real life.

When I do episodes that are more on specific health-related topics, I try to stick close to the outline because I don't want to miss speak or misrepresent or, say a thought wrong. And I probably have.

But you know, this is more really what I'm going through talking about how I'm working through, not just mindset, but how that really affects my injury knows and my energy, my quality of sleep, and just my overall quality of life.

So, if you're still listening to this, you are a great friend. Thank you for being here. And once again, thank you for listening and for joining me every week. I so appreciate you.

We'll get back to regular programming next week. We'll see you then. Bye.

Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Nutrition Health Coach. She helps passionate, ambitious high-achievers who are being dragged down by fatigue, burnout, sugar cravings, poor sleep, unexplained weight issues, and hormonal challenges optimize health, find balance, and upgrade their energy so they can do big things in this world.

Through her weekly show, The Live FAB Live Podcast, programs, coaching, and services, she teaches women how to optimize their diet, support their gut health, reduce their toxic load, and improve their productivity, bringing work + wellness together.

Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!

Connect with Naomi on: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest

Naomi Nakamura

http://www.livefablife.com
Previous

Episode 142: Using Human Design As A Tool for Health, Productivity, and Reframing Your Mindset with Erin Claire Jones
Next

Episode 140: Adrenals, Stressors and Leaky Gut