How To Optimize Your Environment For PTSD Recovery | Monday Motivation PTSD TV

So hey everyone, welcome to PTSD TV. Today is Monday and today is Monday Motivation. So today what we're talking about is auditing your environment. This is going to be a great episode. It's something Brad and I still do very consistently. And this episode of PTSD TV is sponsored by Broken to Unbreakable, which is my PTSD and CPTSD recovery program. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Kayleen. I'm a CPTSD and PTSD recovery coach. I had CPTSD of my own for more than 15 years and now no longer do. Which is why I'm able to do what I do now. And this lovely man to my right here is Brad.

I am Kayleen's significant other, and I'm very excited to be here today. And I was there for every step of Kayleen's journey to recovery, and I also recovered from my own, uh, PTSD as well. So I'm very excited today because this is something that we just did over the weekend, and it is extremely, extremely motivating. It is a little action— it's a little more action-based than what we usually do, But it will get you motivated, get you giving you momentum and get you taking action, which is the most important thing. So I'm excited to dive into this one.

I'm excited as well. And like Brad just said, like, this is something we still do. This is something we just did this weekend. We just did this past week with the offices. So we're talking about auditing your environment. So the 3 things we're going to be talking about today are what your environment consists of, how to identify if they are negative things, and then how to actually do an environment audit. So number 1, what your environment consists of. So Brad, what does your environment consist of?

Your environment really is everything in your external world, right? So the people that you surround yourself with, the things that you surround yourself with, if you're watching TV, the inputs, the things that you put into your brain, like if you're putting books like you can see behind us into your brain, are you watching TV? And if you are watching TV, what type of TV shows are you watching? Because all those things influence the way that you feel, the way that you think, and the way that you act. Which really is pretty much everything. Because if you think about it, everything that happens in your life first starts in your brain, and your environment affects how you think, and the way that you think affects the actions that you take. And the only way that you get results in your life is if you take action. So your environment has a huge impact on the way that you take action and ultimately the way you get results in your life. So it's incredibly important to get right. It's it's not like a all or nothing kind of thing. Like you can be in a bad environment, but it will just really really it'll make it a heck of a lot harder to perform and to do the things that you need to do if you're in a bad environment. And really what we're going to be talking about today is how to in any environment make it the best environment that it can be and really make the most of where you're at right now. Because you know we're not saying that you have to move to some mansion in you know Los Angeles to be happy and to be successful. But we're going to teach you how to like make the most of where you are right now so you can actually start achieving those recovery goals that you're having. And I know like a lot of people, um, have the— have, have trouble with, you know, staying consistent with doing the things that they know they need to do or breaking the bad habits or like all these things that really are just all the things that are pulling you down. So this is something just to like kind of cut all the anchors so you can start actually making progress moving forward. Um, but really it's everything. Your environment is everything in your physical world, and all everything in your physical world affects your internal world, which is a good thing to remember. And a key little thing that we came up with, a little quote we came up with this morning, is physical clutter creates mental clutter. So your physical world, if it's cluttered, if it's all you know just all over the place, messy, gross, sticky, if everything is just like sticky, like you go into some people's house and like you just like open the cabinet and it's just like sticky, your like hand sticks to it. You don't even have to hold the cabinet door. Like you stick your hand to it and you just pull it out because it's so sticky.

We've had a sticky house before.

That affects— that clutters your mind, man.

That's a— I mean, you just hit on kind of all the right points there. And it's so, so important to kind of get this right. And like Brad said, like you don't have to be some McMansion, some McMillionaire to do this and to get this right. And like, yeah, sure. It would probably be nice to have a hot tub in every room. Right. And that might feel good, but But we're talking about, you know, making the most of the environment you're in. And this was really important for Brad and I on our recovery journey, journeys, and something we're consistently doing and consistently making better each and every day, kind of day in and day out. And we always, we do this time and again and we remind ourselves of it. And, you know, for those of you who have ever done, like, we as, as a family, we always did like spring cleaning and we do like one big clean. And it was, it was a stepping stone to what we'll explain in a minute and what really is the environment audit. But, you know, this is something we, we just, we just do, and it's so important. And it's, it's not make or break, but it's going to make it a heck of a lot easier. And I like what you said about, um, what'd you say, like cutting the anchors? That's a great way to put it.

Yeah, cutting all the stuff.

It's going to make it a heck of a lot easier. Because when we were living in an environment that was— and it was the same environment, all we did was change some of the things in the environment— but when we were living in an environment that was cluttered and dark and sticky and, you know, just kind of like just a bad environment, just like gross.

It don't make you feel too good.

It doesn't feel good. You don't feel very motivated each and every day to get up and, and do and even just like exist as like a normal human. And like, you know, if your shower is gross, then like you're not even gonna want to take a shower, you know? So like all these little things and like they sound silly, but they really add up to, to kind of a big Yeah, because what—

you have that pile of clothes in the corner of your room, what do you do? You shut your brain off to kind of like the present moment. This is something that I realized. It's like when you're in a clean environment, it pulls you into your life more. Like, but when you have all this clutter, all this dirt and grime and filth around you, it's like you just shut it all off and you live in your brain. And your brain can be a scary place sometimes. But like, just ask yourself like right now, like I'm sure everybody has this experience. Like you walk into a clean environment, you walk into a new environment, like and it makes you feel good. Like you feel lighter, you feel better, happier. You know, like my my um there's a story of my aunt. I might have shared this once before, who had a friend that was like massively massively depressed, and um you know her house was just a complete mess. So what she did, and a few of her other family members went and just cleaned the entire house like. ceiling to floor. I don't know if that's the way you say it, but they cleaned the entire house nuts to bolts. They did everything, whatever. I don't know, I'm trying to think of something, but they cleaned everything. And her— she like turned around and like she went from like super depressed to like being able to get out of bed and being able to take action, being able to like do some things that she enjoyed again. And it was all her environment, just her physical environment made that— made that big of a shift. And Ask yourself right now, how positive, how positive is your environment right now? How positive? How does it make you feel? How does your environment, the physical things in your world, the people in your world, how do they make you feel? They make you feel better about yourself. Do they push you up or do they pull you down? And that's a really, really big question. And how well do you police your environment? How often do you police your environment? How often do you take a look at your environment and be like, I need to clean this place up? Like, how often are you actually— like, when you take something out, do you put it back when you're done with it? That's a, that's a rule I learned from Kayleen.

That's—

I have to put away everything that I take out, and it keeps your environment in a, in a good state, which is how you can help maintain that good environment.

But it keeps you clean. Yeah. And something that my dad used to say this all the time, and it used to— as a kid, it used to drive me nuts. And he used to say, you know, a job's not finished until it's cleaned up. So, you know, a job's not finished until it's cleaned up, whether we were building You know, I don't know, like a go-kart or like a makeshift skateboard or birdhouse.

You brought the cable?

Go-kart? Nah, I'll show you a picture. It wasn't very good. You know, whatever it was, you know, he would say a job's not finished until it's cleaned up. If we were painting something, if we were painting the house, painting the deck, you know, it wasn't done. Even though the deck was done, it wasn't done until all the tools were back and the paint was away and everything was cleaned up. And as a kid, it used to drive me wild. It used to make me so frustrated. Like, I don't want to clean up. I just did all this work. But it's holds true and it's a really, really good thing to implement within your life. And, you know, if you take something out, put it back right away because it's gonna— otherwise, that's how like the cycle starts and that's how it gets cluttered. Because like, you know, you can start— you can clean your house head to toe, ceiling to floor, whatever studs in, and, and it could be like sparkling, right? And then, you know, you leave one thing out and then it just kind of— it compounds on itself and all of a sudden you live in this like weird dirty environment where there's clothes everywhere and like you're not even really a dirty person, it just kind of builds up. And this is something I used to say to Brad too, is like, when I used to like clean my car, like I would clean my car and it'd be like clean and I would vacuum it and it would be great. And then like the second I made the choice to leave one cup in there, you know, whether it was my coffee cup and not bring it back into the house, the whole, the whole car got dirty and I didn't clean it again for months. So if you're a spring cleaner and you only kind of, you know, like Brad was saying, like kind of police yourself once a, once a year in this area, that's not quite enough. And so what we want to try to build is, you know, you want to be looking at this very, very consistently, especially at first. And we're going to explain kind of how to identify if things are negative. So you want to be thinking, uh, looking at these a lot more consistently than you probably are. We can all be better about it. And so instead of just kind of compounding on itself and like building up and it being a negative place, You want this to compound positively. So you keep putting things away and, you know, you, you always, once you use a Tupperware and wash a Tupperware, then you put it back, even though it takes a little bit more effort, you put it back in the stack so you don't have a weird Tupperware cabinet.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. The weird Tupperware. Yeah, we have. I had that before Kayleen came into my life. But you really want to police this well and you kind of want to be a little I don't know, I don't like saying this, but you kinda wanna be like a little anal or like a little over the top on things. A little Type A. Yeah, yeah, just a little bit. Like once you get it to the point where, what I like to do is I like to clean everything. So everything is just like sparkling clean. And then if I see like, if like a little piece of paper like this like falls on the floor, I like, now I feel like I have to pick it up and throw it away. 'Cause I like to keep my environment clean and really nice. And then you, so you wanna be like, you see one little thing, like, oh, I gotta pick that up and throw it away. Right now, and that helps keep it where it is right now. And I have a few more things that we can do to kind of maintain this as we go on, but I think we'll move on into how we can actually audit it and get it into a positive environment in the first place, because there's certain things that you need to do that are actually kind of emotional things that you need to do that will help push you through it to make you feel better. But first of all, how do you identify if things are negative? How do you identify if things in your environment are negative? First thing is simple: How does it make you feel? And most of the time people don't even ask themselves, how does this thing make me feel? Whether it's like a physical thing— that's a good flick— or a person or an input like a TV show or a radio show or music, or like all these things affect how the way you feel and the way you think and everything. The way you think the world works, you know, are you watching the news? Like, do you think the world's a dangerous place? All these things are affecting how you feel. So the first thing is like, ask yourself, you know, how do these things make you feel? Honestly, do they make you feel good? Do they make you feel bad?

And you have to think about it. You have to dig into this. And the first step here and the first step, what we're doing here today and what you're doing here right now is bringing the awareness to it. So become aware of the things in your life. Like Brad was saying, like when we had a cluttered environment, it was very easy for us to like, I don't know, like retreat, I guess, like not be present in our environment and like not even notice the dirty clothes on the floor and not even notice that it kind of needs to be vacuumed or that things are sticky or whatever. You know, so first and foremost, become aware and bring that awareness into your environment and take a look around and try to take like an outside perspective. If you were walking into your house for the first time, what would you notice?

That's a, that's a good point because when you walk into somebody else's house, or here's a great example too, if you're walking into a new apartment or a new house that you're about to buy or a hotel room, you notice every little thing. But when you walk into your own house, you don't. Like right now I'm just noticing something I want to clean up. But you notice every little thing when you walk into a new house, or you go to like a showing for a new house, or you go to like see a new apartment. You're like, oh well, there's a tiny little crack in the ceiling up there, and like, oh, the molding over there is a little dirty from when people like wiped their hands on it or something. And you notice every little thing, like that's where the dog pissed on the floor. And you notice every little thing, but then when you walk in your house You never look at it from that perspective. So try to look at it as a brand new house, a brand new environment, and really ask yourself, how does this make me feel? 'Cause most of the time, like Kain said, it's just habit. You walk in, you don't notice anything. You don't notice the grime in the corners, on the ceiling. When you had that can of SpaghettiOs on the stove that you forgot to open, so it just exploded on the ceiling. You don't notice that 'cause you see it every day. So how does it make you feel? And do you have a goal? What's your goal? What are you trying to accomplish in your life? And is your environment supporting you in that goal? You know, in your recovery, is your environment supporting you in your recovery? One way is like, okay, TV, that doesn't really support me in my recovery. But reading this book or watching this podcast or whatever, you know, remove the TV or put it in a place that's really inaccessible and put a book there. So you automatically Or your default setting is to go pick up that book instead of your default setting being to turn on the TV and numb yourself out. So it's about replacing the things and putting things in accessible places that are going to make you support your goals. And most people, first of all, don't even have a goal or define a goal. So the first step is obviously defining that goal and then manipulating your environment to support that goal and asking yourself, does this support me in that goal?

That's a great point and a great question to ask. And what we always, especially obviously around the office, but does this get us closer to where we want to go? Like, does it, does it matter at all? You know, does that— like, every little thing. And you think about— so like this week we did it with all the offices and we, we did it at the house as well. But something we did in the offices, you know, does this get us closer to where we want to go?

Mm-hmm.

And there were a lot of things that didn't, you know, that were maybe things that shouldn't be in our office or in our environment here at least, right? And so we got rid of those things. And so you have to ask yourself, you know, what is the goal of your environment? You know, it should make you feel good. It should feel clean. It should make you feel motivated, right? And so whether that's hanging things on the wall and changing that up, or changing the— this is something I used to do a lot. I used to change the layout of the room. I used to change the, you know, where the couch was and where the chairs were and where the TV was and stuff like that. Because like, you're, you're just used to your environment. It's just there and you're used to it, right? So if you change those things, all of a sudden you're like, this feels like a like a new place. This is really cool. And so you become aware, and then it's easier to kind of keep things clean. It's easier to maintain that. And, you know, you have to be asking yourself— and, you know, for those of you who are of course joining us on a podcast called PTSD TV, you know, likely it's your— one of your very core goals should be recovery. Or if you're here for a partner, you know, helping your partner or taking care of yourself and helping your partner in recovery.

Mm-hmm.

And so does your environment set yourself up for recovery? Do you have, you know, books on PTSD? Or, you know, do you have a whole shelf full of alcohol that maybe doesn't make situations better? You know, do you have a lot of food that makes you feel, you know, tired and unmotivated?

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, looking at all areas of your life, you know, if your environment's sticky, if your shower is gross, you know, it's gonna be hard to reach those goals. It's gonna be harder than it has to be Because you're meeting all this like resistance along the way.

Yeah.

So for those of you who are here, you know, it's likely that one of your core goals is or should be to, you know, fully recover from PTSD, right? And so your environment should support that. You know, like, and then, you know, we can get off into the weeds about, you know, what is your recovery plan and stuff like that. But your environment should support you recovering from PTSD. Something I recommend to all my clients, something that we have in our, in our house, I mean, in our room, in our offices, are no negativity signs. You know, we literally have a sign that says no negativity. And, you know, we do that very specifically. And this is something I recommend to all my clients because it's super important. And it's a reminder. Something else that we have is our commitment contracts. I've talked about commitment contracts a handful of times on the podcast or in other videos or stuff like that. And, you know, we, those are things that we keep in front of us and now they're more just reminders of what we've accomplished. And, you know, the habits we've built in our life. But for those, you know, who are just beginning their recovery journey and just beginning, you know, working with us, that's something that we recommend because you need to create this new environment and you need to create these new habits and get into this new thing. And, you know, remind yourself every day of your commitment and remind yourself no negativity and no negative inputs and things like that. So, I mean, there's a lot that goes into it, but—

Because you need to be reminded every single day because the default is that everything falls back into chaos. Everything is being pulled back into chaos. And that is something that is really important because it's not like a one and done. I clean everything once and then everything stays clean forever. Or like, I audit my environment, I get rid of this TV show, I get rid of all this bad food, I get rid of the alcohol, and then it just stays like that forever and everything changes. Um, but that's not how— that's not how life works. That's not how the world works. Everything is constantly being pulled into chaos. You know, it's just like that's what life is. Like, like you can go to the gym once, but like if you don't go consistently over a long period of time, you're not going to see the results. So everything you have to— it's a, it's a lifestyle change that you're looking for. You're not looking for like a quick one-and-done crash diet type thing. You're looking for something that you can consistently do for life, literally for life. And that's the mindset that you need to get into. You need to get into the mindset of like long-term thinking instead of like I'm gonna like change everything overnight. It's like, I'm going to change everything for my life. For like—

This is your life.

Yeah. Long-term, meaning your life. Like literally, I, I designed my workout to be like, okay, I'm designing this workout so I can do it every single day, 6 days a week for the next— how old am I? 60 years.

Forever.

And right before I'm 90, hopefully forever. I'll probably change it up probably when I'm in my 70s, maybe 60s. 70s, I think. I'll change it up when I'm in my 70s. Yeah, the lighter weights. But I designed it in a way that like, I know I can do this 6 days a week for my life and it's going to keep me in the state where I, I enjoy being. So you have to change your— shift your whole entire mindset of like, I'm just gonna do one huge cleaning, to like, I'm gonna change my entire way I think about maintaining my life and maintaining my environment for the long term. And you have to change from like today to the long term. And when you can make that shift and really think of like the long-term changes and see and your goal being long-term change versus like short-term change, your whole world will change. A lot of change going on here. But, um, it's, it's like, it's like when someone's consistently working on healing their PTSD day in and day out, and day to day they don't see much improvement, or they see like fluctuations where one day is really good and then one day is really bad, but over But they like they work for a short period of time. They don't see the results, and then they stop. They don't consistently do it long enough because they don't see the change is so small day to day that they don't work long enough to see the long-term change. Because like every single day when you work on something, you get like it could be like a half or a quarter of a percent better that you can't even notice that you're getting better. But you have to keep working at it day after day after day after day after day after day. Over the long term to get better. It's not just one day. It's not just one week. It's not just one month. It's your life. You know, you're not doing a diet for one month. You're doing a diet for your life. You're not cleaning your environment for one day. You're cleaning your environment for life. You're keeping this environment for your life. And when you can make that shift, everything, everything changes. And I love it because like I can apply that to anything that we're talking about. But like for right now, your environment. How does how can you make this change? For life? Not just like, I'm gonna clean it once and it's gonna be great, but how can I clean this and maintain this for life? And this is something that you— like, we'll give you some strategies, but you need to like do some critical thinking and be like, how can I do this for myself? I can— how can I apply this for myself? Because like, one thing that we always talk about is like, we don't want to be people who give you, this is the only thing that you can do to get better. We want to teach you how to be independent thinkers, how you do— how you can solve your problems on your own, how to come up with solutions on your own, because you are Extremely, extremely capable. Like everybody here is super intelligent who can come up with their own solutions to their own problems. They just need the right kind of framework of thinking to come up with their own solutions. And I got a little distracted on that for a second, but I'll dial it back in. Anyways, how to identify if your environment, the things in your environment are positive or negative, were the two questions that we brought up. Does it get me closer to my goal? And how does it make me feel? Does this make me feel good? And so next we'll go into actually doing the environmental— the environment audit. And it's really, really, really simple. You go through every single item in your house and on your— here's another good one— on your computer and on your phones. How is your phone environment? How many apps you got on your phone, man? How many notifications you got? Those things are pinging every day.

Oh, the notifications is a good one to talk about, actually. So, um, Brad has brought into my life— I've brought a lot of things into his life, and he's brought a lot of things into my life, one of which being your, um, what would you call it?

I'm the app police.

Electronic clutter. So, you know, like, my desktop was, before I met him, a mess. You know, the way I organized my online files was, you know, atrocious. And all the apps on my phones, and I had notifications for everything, for all, all of the apps. And what he's brought into my life is, you know, creating online kind of filing systems and, and organizing my desktop and keeping my desktop clear.

Yeah.

And then also on my phone, you know, the only thing on my phone that has notifications, uh, are iMessages, whatever, text messages. That's the only thing I get notified of. Otherwise, you know, if someone calls, I'm not sure if that counts as a notification. So email is off. All the apps are off, the Instagram, the Facebook. I don't get it. Doesn't ping. It doesn't light up for anything other than a message. And for the most part, it doesn't even do that because we keep it on sleep mode. Right. So, you know, we want to try to live our lives to the best of our abilities and being always drawn into something, it's always buzzing in your pocket or it's always taking your attention is not going to get you closer to your goal, no matter what your goal is.

Right. Does it get you closer to your goal? Does it make you feel good?

Usually not. So that's a good one. You know, taking those notifications off, it was hard at first. I didn't get it at first. I was like, why? I don't, I like, I just want to know what's going on, but it's a really, really good exercise. So when we're talking about auditing your environment, there's a lot of different things that go into that, especially nowadays.

Your digital environment.

Your digital environment, your computer, your tabs on your computer, your desktop, the way you organize files, maybe your hard drives if you have them. So, you know, on top of, you know, the phones and the notifications and the apps, you know, put the apps into folders or delete the apps if you don't use them. Brad is always going on my phone and deleting my apps.

Still to this day. Actually, I'll do it right after this episode. That reminds me.

So, so watch all of your environments. And that's, that's, that's an important one, I think, just to bring up to become aware of.

It's super simple, but it is, it is great to be aware of your digital environment. And I mean, this goes down to like your inbox and how many accounts do you have and just like simple, like, yeah, you want to be like minimalism. You want to be minimal and simple. You want things to be super simple and super minimal and you want everything to be aligned with Your goal, and you want everything to make you feel as good as possible, as motivated as possible. So it's super simple. We're going to keep it super simple. This audit, you go through everything in your house and on your digital devices, and you ask yourself, how does this make me feel? And does it? Does this get me closer to my goal? If the answer is no, then you get rid of it ruthlessly. You know, because you're gonna have emotions when you get rid of this stuff, and you're gonna be like, ah, I don't want to get rid of this. I don't want to get rid of social media app, or I don't want to get rid of the notifications. I need this. I need this, Marie.

Kondo, right? She has a show on Netflix now. I'm pretty sure. I don't, I don't remember what it's called, but I read a book on, on her or her book a handful of years ago. And her thing is, is, you know, does it bring value to your life? I'm pretty sure.

No. Does it, does it spark joy?

Does it spark joy? Which is, you know, a similar thing when it comes to personal stuff, but does it get you closer to goal or does it spark joy? Does it make you feel good?

Right.

And if it doesn't do any of those things, what is it doing in your life?

Why would you know?

So get rid of it. So it's, that's really important. And I think that's a, that's a good one to bring in. Um, you know, because like I'm a very sentimental person.

Yeah.

Like there are a lot of things, like Brad gave me a music box and like, does it get me closer to my goal?

No.

Does it spark joy? Absolutely.

You know, so true. And it doesn't make you feel bad. It's positive though. It makes you feel good.

It's positive and it's a lovely thing I love to have in my environment.

But you can, you can almost rationalize, over-rationalize anything. It's like, oh yes, this, this makes me feel good. Or like, this makes me, gives me this memory or something. Yeah.

Please be truthful with yourself.

Be truthful. It's like if you have, if you have like clothes in your closet that you haven't worn in 2 years or 3 years, you don't You don't need them, you're not gonna wear them. Be honest with yourself, am I really gonna wear this in the future? Am I really gonna use this thing in the future? No. And it's hard in the beginning, but once you break it, you have to be ruthless with yourself, you have to be disciplined with yourself, be like, I'm gonna get rid of this. And I like to create 3 piles. Actually, it's really just 2 piles. It's throw away and donate, and then the keep I just put back to wherever I found it. Throw away and donate. So go through everything, everything, everything. This took me over the course of the year. I probably audited my environment like 5 times.

All right.

Like everything. Like everything. Like, I mean, like going through every single thing, right?

Because we're like 8 months into the year.

Oh, I meant this one year, 2 years ago.

Okay.

I'm talking about something like 2 years ago. I audited my environment like 5 times over the course of the entire year, whatever. Like, but I went through like every single thing in my house because it's a lot of effort to go through every single little thing in your house and you're like, oh, do I want this? Is this Does this, um, you know, this does this get me closer to my goal? Does this make me feel good? Does this add value to my life? And I remember like the first time I did, I got rid of like a lot three bags of clothes and like like bins, like probably trash bags of trash and things I like donated and just like threw away. And that happened the next four times. Literally, I went through it like five times. And this is why you have to go over it over and over it because the first time you'll be a little bit. emotional about getting rid of things and sentimental about things that where you really don't need it.

Weird things like jeans.

Which is like, okay, like that's fine. But like, but that's why it's important to keep doing this and keep doing this over and over and over.

You get better at it.

You get better at it. Yeah.

And because I was really not good at it at first. I got rid of one thing.

Yeah, because like at the beginning, like maybe you don't have to get rid of everything, but you get rid of this one thing that you thought was like sentimental to you or like you thought had a lot of meaning. And then you go to do it again and you think about it and you're like, oh, I didn't even Remember that I got rid of that, right? Like, I don't even miss that now.

That's the best. It's like, oh, I didn't even know I still had this. And then you're like, oh, but I'm so attached to it. Well, no, it's probably time. Yeah. So those are all good things.

And we're not telling you to get rid of it.

Every time you do it, you're gonna get a little bit better at it and you're gonna get rid of more things. And eventually, I mean, you're gonna have to do this throughout your life. This is something, like we said, we just did this weekend and we're gonna continue. We're gonna do it in a few months.

I want to do it again right now because I know there's more stuff I can get rid of. Because it makes you feel good every time you get rid of stuff. It like, it gets cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. You get less and less stuff, less and less stuff that, you know, like we said, the physical clutter creates mental clutter. So you get less physical clutter. So you think clearer, your life is better, you're happier, you feel better. Everything's better when you get rid of stuff. So it's like something that I always like to do and I want to do right now.

So that's what we have.

So that's it. That's the environment audit. And you want to make sure you do it.

Yeah, make sure again and again and again, look at your inputs. Ask yourself how it makes you feel and if it's positive or negative, if it gets you closer to your goal. And if it doesn't, get rid of it, eliminate it, donate it, give it away, trash it. Just get it out of your environment and out of your life.

Here's what you should do for your action today. Pick one day this week because it's gonna take a long time. One day, a weekend, maybe this weekend. Maybe today and be like, I'm gonna— I'm gonna go through every item in my house and get rid of it. And the most important thing about watching these and showing up and listening to these podcasts is actually going through and doing the work, because you can listen to this and your environment will never change unless you get down into the dirty corners of your house and clean it up.

And a good way to not make it overwhelming for those of you who, you know, kind of maybe don't have a whole day to do something like this is Take a few hours this weekend, you know, instead of watching a movie, or even with a movie on in the background, and do one room. You know, pick one room, pick one kind of section, pick, you know, just doing your clothes.

That's true.

And so you can, so you can knock it off kind of one by one. Um, is that something I recommend to my clients too? Like, clean house but slowly, you know, so, so it's not this— you don't have to make it this big 3-day project and get into the middle of it and then have to go back to work. work or like whatever.

Yeah, but if you can do that, that's something that we like to do.

We're pretty obsessive. We like to take a day and like do it all and get it done and work pretty hard and pretty fast. But for those of you who are not like that, it's good to chunk it up as well.

Yeah, make a list. Make a list of every room in your house that you're gonna go through and really commit to doing this. Yeah, either pick a day, do it all in one day, but that might be too much. It probably will be too much. Or do like Kayleen said and chunk it down and literally write a list on a piece of paper of every room in your house in the order that you're gonna do it and And then go through it every single day until it's done. And just do it. Just do it. It's gonna suck. Like, no one likes cleaning. Like, I like cleaning, but it feels awesome afterwards. And then you're like, I really kind of liked this. I like doing this because it makes you— when it's all done, you sit in your clean room and like, it just— and you have less stuff. It feels so much better.

And it is instant gratification.

Yeah. Which is amazing.

So that's what we have for you today. So take action. Everything in, you know, in recovery, in life is action-based. Everything that we teach is action-based. action-based. We can talk to you until, you know, I don't know, the sun comes back up again next week. You know, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours, but make sure you are taking action because learning all this will do no good. So make sure you take action, take action, take action on everything that we say. If you want to go anywhere in life, you have to take action. So that's the most important thing, right? Yep.

Okay. And we have one question here. I can see it. There's some questions on live because now we're doing these live now, but I saw a really good question here about people from Zoe that I want to kind of address right now. Zoe or Zoe, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, but she basically asked, does the same thing apply to people who don't contribute to your goal? How ruthless would you be around this? That's a great question. Yeah, I mean, it gets difficult with people. Right, right. I mean, it depends. And, um, you know, Kayleen has some really good personal experience with this, and I do too. Like, I personally had— like, there's some people in your life that you just like can't get rid of. Like, you love them, and like sometimes they're really negative. I mean, it depends on, on every situation. Like, your situation can be totally different from our situation, and ultimately you have to make the decision yourself. Um, but for something like— there's some people like family members That like, I don't know, you go to holidays or whatever and like you can't really get rid of them. You can't just like get rid of them altogether. And there's different ways that you can kind of handle that. For example, there was someone in my life, one of my family members, who was just like every time I went to go speak with them was just like super, super negative, super judgmental towards me, towards everybody else. And you know, I tried having like a conversation with them and And I let him know, but things still didn't change. But I didn't want to take it personally. I didn't want to like lash out. I didn't want to fight, and I didn't want to cut him out of my life because I loved him. Um, so I started doing— I was just like, when he started going negative, I was just like, all right, I'm gonna see you later.

He'd just leave.

And I would just leave. Like, honestly, it was just like— but after a while, it started to work, and I wasn't like negative towards him. I didn't like, you know, engage in that kind of negative, negative activity. But it was one thing that helped change that behavior, and he got it. And then, you know, like, he got it pretty quickly that that's not something that I tolerated in my life. And, you know, that's just— I'm not saying that's what you need to do in your situation.

Mm-hmm.

One thing is, like I was saying before, is like, I want everybody here to critically think about their own situation. We'll give you some examples of things that you can do. The most important thing is like to really— probably the most important thing would be like take some time today and really think about You know how this person makes you feel, and how you see your future with this person, and how you can kind of change things and the actions that you can take to really create the life in the environment that you want. And you have to start asking asking these questions, asking yourself these questions, and like you know shutting off your phone, shutting off Facebook and everything, and just like getting quiet and literally just like I like to like close my eyes, take deep breaths, and then like. Ask myself the ask ask myself these really hard questions because I'm sure like inside of you you have the answer the exact answer to your specific situation because we we can't possibly know what your situation is right now. But that would be my advice because that's what I would do and that's what I did to come up with my solution and it worked and like you try one thing and it might not work and then you try something else. It really like life is an experiment. You know we can give you a few strategies a handful of strategies. But ultimately, you know, and you'll know whether or not you can cut this person out of your life or not. And like, there have been people in my life where I'm just like, I'm not gonna spend time with you anymore, you know. I didn't say that to their face. I just kind of like dwindled away because there's people like that that you can do that with. But, um, for the people who like aren't important, you know, I was pretty ruthless with it, and it really improved my life, and it really helped me get to that next level where I wanted to go. And there's good people out there. There's a lot of good people out there too that, um, that you can find, that you can connect with. And I think that's an important thing to know too, is like, there are groups of people— I don't know if you're religious or not, but one of my best friends, he, he is. I'm not particularly religious, but, um, he found a ton of, a ton of good people because this was something he struggled with. He's like, he's like, everybody I seem to meet is just like really negative and like just makes me feel really bad about myself. But then he found this group of of people at a local church that just like supported them, like, and loved them, like, unconditionally. And they made a lot, a lot of good friends there. So like, there's a lot of good people in the world. Doesn't have to be a religious group, but it's about knowing that there are good people out there and being committed to finding those good people and bringing them into your life. So that's another aspect of it too, because sometimes you can be afraid of cutting people out because you're like, oh, now I don't have anybody. It's like you feel that attachment to other people. I'm like, well, now I might not have any friends. Or like, I might— like, people might not like me. But there are— that's something to always know, is like, there's always, always good people out there. Like, you are a good person. That's why I always told myself, it's like, Brad, you are a good person. If you can't possibly be the only good person on this planet, and like, you are a really good person, and you can't possibly be the only good person on this planet. So that's what I would say. And I'll throw it over to Kayleen to see how she would answer it, because this is actually a really good question.

This is a good question, and it does depend on kind of a few factors. One of which being kind of your level of relationship. So like Brad said, there are people that you can ruthlessly cut out of your life. And you, you know, it's weird at first. It's a strange thing to kind of do at first, but you have to think long-term. You have to think about the rest of your life. You have to think about your future. And, you know, you don't want to not cut someone out of your life because you don't want to make them feel bad. You know, if there's someone that's really important to you, there are different things that you can do. If there's someone that like you don't see in your future, you don't see at your wedding, you don't see, you know, hanging out when you guys are 100 years old and being friends or family or whatever, then get them out of your life. Stop hanging out with them if they're negative. There, there are friends that I have that I just don't hang out with because they're really negative, or friends that I had, right?

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, then from there, if they're someone that you still love and, you know, you still have a connection with, But they are still negative. You know, something that I have, I have a lot of friends from college that I love dearly and deeply, but I only spend time with them once a year because I don't want the input in my life. And so that's something you can do too, is you can kind of keep in touch and you can kind of, you know, once a year see them, once a year, you know, catch up and like show them that you care about them, but you don't really want the input in your life consistently.

Yeah.

And then of course there's family and friends and, and like close friends and close family. And you, you, you can cut anyone out. This is your life. You have to think about, at the end of the day, you are the only person that you are guaranteed. So this is your life. So you can ruthlessly cut anyone out. And it doesn't mean it's easy to do. It's definitely a challenging thing to do, but you can do it. So you have to kind of decide for yourself if this person is someone you, you truly love deeply, but they're just the worst, but you want them in your life. then there are some things you can do, and one of which is limiting your time with them.

Yeah.

The other is setting up expectations. So for the negative people in our life that we know they're negative, we know every time we see them, you know, we don't feel good, but we love them deeply, right? They're deep, they're close family members, and we're not willing to get rid of them. You know, setting up expectations. So like, I know, I know. You know, when I see a certain family member, that they're gonna be negative, they're, you know, they're gonna be kind of, kind of weird, kind of mean. And I know that going in.

And you know that with certainty?

I know every single time. I know what they're gonna say. I know what they're gonna ask about. And I can be firm in myself. I'm confident in myself. I'm confident in my life. I love my life. And I can just spread love back knowing that they're gonna be negative. And then once we reach a certain threshold, we can leave. You know, and say, hey, I love you so much, and then, and then leave the conversation or the event or whatever it is. And that's something that Brad had success with. And after a while, that family member kind of got the hint and stayed away from certain, certain topics that they got negative on. And then the other thing that you can do is, depending on your relationship with the person, you know, if this is, if this is a spouse, if this is maybe a kid, you know, what you can do is you can, you can sit down and have a conversation with them. And try to bring them on board. And everything that we're doing, we want to make a lifestyle change. And so have this conversation and say, you know, hey, listen, you know, I'm working really hard at X, Y, and Z, and, you know, this is kind of what I've been learning. And, you know, what I was kind of thinking about is, you know, maybe we can bring this into our life together, into our team environment together. And, you know, it would mean a lot to me if we explored X, Y, and Z together and try to get them on board and have a conversation and ask them, you know, how they feel about it and what they think of it and bring this into your lifestyle. So there's, there's a lot of different routes you can go. You can be completely ruthless and you have to think about your future. You know, do you want these people to be with you forever? Do you want them at your wedding? Are they important enough to be at your wedding table? You know, are they important enough to be the 5 people that like you love dearly and would do anything for this in this world?

Yeah.

you know, then maybe it's time for a conversation. Or are they just close family that you just, you're not willing to get rid of? You know, then maybe it's time to set some boundaries, some internal boundaries, some expectations. Know they're going to be negative. Know when you're going to leave. Have an exit plan. You know, go in and know and just, and love the time that you're there, you're there because you, you knew exactly what was going to happen. And, and then go. Or are they someone that, you know, if they were at your wedding, they'd be 6 tables away from you. And, you know, you, If they came, great. If they didn't, okay, you know? And so, and then just, just cut them out.

Yeah.

And don't, don't feel bad about that. Don't feel— because this is your life and, you know, it's nothing personal to them. It's about your life and your goals and how you want to feel good. So I know that's kind of a muddled answer and there's a lot more that goes into kind of each of those routes and each of those conversations, but hopefully that clears up a little bit.

Well, really what— there were 2 things that kind of Kayleen brought up was like setting boundaries, which is like pretty much like the time that you spend with somebody else. And then setting up the expectations between the other person within your own mind, expectations that you hold. And the first one, one example to kind of elaborate on that, or that could make it a little bit more clear. I heard this from somebody. There are 5-minute friends, there are 5-hour friends, and there are 5-day friends. People who you only want to be around for 5 minutes, but you still love them. People you want to, you could be around for like 5 hours. So you could go like to an event with them and you still love them. But then you're like, okay, that's, that's good. And then there's people that you go onto like a whole vacation with where you just like love them the whole time. And I have 5-minute friends, I have 5-hour friends, and I have 5-day friends.

I never heard that. I really like that.

So that's like, that's another way you could think about it, is like you could just limit the amount of time that you have with somebody. And then the other example was, or the other thing, so that was the boundaries. The other one was the internal expectations that you bring to people that you, you can't really cut out. And this is something that Kayleen and I were actually talking about this morning. Yeah, in the car. Um, and I'll see if I can get my, my thought process back on this. But an example is, is in my life, I have one like really extremely negative family member. And every negative person and like every single interaction with this person is just like really negative. And it's just like it brings a lot of people down. But you know with certainty that when you meet this person, they're gonna be negative, or like there's gonna be something that they get mad at or like short with, or like something's gonna like get them annoyed. But then to myself, I'm like, I know that this person deep down is hurt, and this is why this person gets angry. So I'm able to sympathize with, with them. I'm not really explaining this well.

Well, it's like, so Brad is trying to explain, like, like we go to a family event and there's one family member that is always super negative and kind of tries to bring everything down and always has something to complain about. And, you know, before we were on— when we were still on this journey, when we were still figuring this out, we would go to the event and they would say their negative thing and we would get upset, right? And we would be like, why are you like that? Like, why are you so negative? There's so many things to be grateful for. And every time we went to the event, we would be like surprised that this happened, right? We'd be like—

And let it affect us.

And let it affect us. But, you know, once we learned how to set those internal expectations and say, okay, every time, you know, we're gonna go here and this is probably verbatim what's gonna be said. Then when it was said, we'd be like, oh well, we knew that was gonna happen, and it didn't have to affect us.

Yeah.

And so Brad's saying, like, you know, if you're going into a situation— we're talking about internal expectations— if you're going into a situation and every single time you're finding yourself surprised, you know, you have to think, you have to reflect, and you have to set those internal expectations. And Brad and I were talking about this morning about a separate family member that is always surprised when they butt heads with another family member, and every single week They are surprised that this person—

Took it to the next level of something negative.

Whatever, you know. So, so if you're finding yourself consistently surprised that someone is negative or hurting you or whatever, think about those internal expectations. Because oftentimes what's happening is we're going into a conversation and we're— you're— we're going into an experience and, you know, we just— we so want the best. We so want everyone to get along. We're feeling good. We're doing our gratitudes. We're on our healing journey. We want everyone on that same wavelength. And, you know, all we want is just to, just to chill. Everyone's going to be relaxed. You know, it's Easter or whatever. We're going to have breakfast and it's going to be great. And then we get disappointed. So we're setting these expectations internally anyway. So we have to set appropriate expectations. Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, that's great. That's better than I could have explained it. Um, but yeah, I think that's it. I hope that answered your question. Um, Kind of went through that thoroughly. If you want, this will be recorded on our podcast PTSD TV, so you can go back and listen to this again. But yeah, I hope you enjoyed it.

Yes, that's what we have for you today. There's that, there's that silence. So take action, do the environmental audit, people included. We can't read all of your questions and all your comments because they're like a little bit too far away, but we'll try to do that when we can. But for those of you, you know, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for being here, for showing up to the lives, to the podcast, You know, we so appreciate each and every one of you. We believe in each and every one of you. If you haven't already, go check out the— go to overcomingptsd.info/go. overcomingptsd.info/go. I'm running a free recovery training, the 3 Pillars of Recovery. You can go and check that out if you haven't already. It's a great training. And that's what's going on.

It'll really help you stay consistent with your environment because a lot of times it's like you clean it. This is what would happen to me. I'd clean my environment. I get it to a really awesome place. But then, you know, my PTSD would like kick in, make me feel really, really bad, and then I drop down like really, really far and everything would just like go to hell real quick. And what Kayleen teaches in that, in that training is, you know, how to consistently heal and how to eliminate those symptoms for good so you can, you know, again cut these anchors permanently, but the anchors of PTSD, so you can, you know, work on your environment making it better so it just goes up and up and up and up and there's no limit, and there's nothing that pulls you back down in those drastic ways. So if you want to go check that out, I would highly recommend it. She spent freaking probably a month on this putting this together, and it's the best thing that's out there for PTSD recovery and any— like, everything. It simplifies the whole process. So definitely go check that out at overcomingptsd.info/go. We'll put the link in the description, so go click that, pick a time, commit to it, and enjoy it. Sit back and enjoy.

Sit back and enjoy.

Mm-hmm.

All right, so that's what we have for you. We love you. We believe in you. We want to put the power in your hands. We know that you can do this. We're not extraordinary people. You know, we just take action and we're just learning and giving this information to you. So we're not special, and I think that's important to point out time and again. We're not superhuman. We've, we've been to rock bottom. We've done this journey. So if that's where you're at, you know, we're here to help. We're here to love you. We believe in you. We support you. And we are here for you, and we appreciate you showing up to the podcast, to the lives, to everything, and making it this far in in the in the audio. Whatever whatever it is that you're doing, you know that you're taking action, and now just you know keep that going, keep that momentum going. So we love you all. We believe in you. We're here for you. Feel free to reach out if you have questions or anything like that, and we will see you all tomorrow.

Keep going and never stop.

All right.

See you tomorrow. Bye bye. See ya.