Danielle Thornton shares two ways to handle stress and anxiety during lockdown: practice self-compassion instead of self-blame, and protect your basics like sleep, hygiene, and routine. Taking 30-minute breaks from parenting and light exercise help you function better and show your kids what healthy looks like.
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Hey everybody, welcome. My name is Danielle Thornton, and if you don't know me, I am a life coach specializing in eliminating anxiety, depression and self doubt from your life, while also helping you improve your relationships with yourself and others. So I wanted to come on today and talk about what's going on right now in the world with COVID 19 and how a lot of you are struggling to deal with what's going on. There's been a lot of changes for everybody and there's really two important things that you can do to help you get through this time and help you get through the stress and the anxiety and maybe the depression that you're feeling during this time. So the first one is self compassion. It's so important that you are being really patient with what's going on around you and inside of you. Right. A lot of us are experiencing a lot of anxiety.
That might be around financial situations, family situations, it might be around the health issues that a lot of people are experiencing. So there's a lot of reasons why we're all experiencing heightened anxiety right now. And when we have that heightened anxiety, what happens is we start behaving in different ways from our norm. Or if we struggle in certain areas of our life that we're not necessarily happy with, those usually are kind of magnified. So we tend to be really hard on ourselves because if we have an area of our lives where we're really trying to improve, a time like this is really going to make that a little bit more difficult, right? So if you are beating yourself up for maybe you're at home more and you're eating more, or maybe you are getting really annoyed with your kids or you're getting really frustrated with your spouse. These are all really normal things that it's important to be really compassionate with yourself about and not beat yourself up about. Because when you do that, you're just adding more stress and you're adding more trying to think of the right word here. You're just adding more pain and negativity to what's already going on inside of you. So it's really important that you are really extra compassionate with yourself right now during this time. Others too, to be really honest, because we're all, you know, struggling to deal with what's going on. So self compassion is really, really important. And so what does that look like if you lose your temper with your kids or your husband or your wife? You know, make sure you recognize it. It's okay to recognize that and maybe think about what you could have done differently next time or how you might be overreacting, but you. But don't beat yourself up about it. Don't blame yourself and don't overanalyze it to the point where you are feeling badly for doing what you did. You can recognize something and you can even have self reflection without self judgment.
Self compassion might be mean just being a little bit more patient with yourself. If you are, you know, overeating, or if you are not exercising, or if you feel like you might need more rest than normal, it's really important to allow yourself those things that you feel like you need. Pay attention to what you need and it's okay if you need a nap or to relax or some alone time. Those things are really, really important. So the second thing that really kind of goes along with self compassion that's really important right now is self care. And there's a lot of ways that you can take care of yourself. I just mentioned taking a nap. If you just need some time to rest and relax, it might mean making sure that you are getting in the shower and making sure that you are taking care of your hygiene. Because when we're not doing that, we tend to feel worse about ourselves. So when we do take care of ourselves, we feel better, we feel more positive, and that's a really important thing. For a lot of us that are working from home right now, we have our normal routine of getting up and going to work, showering, getting dressed, putting our makeup on. So make sure you do as much of that as possible. You don't necessarily have to get up and put on work clothes if you're not going into the office, for example, but you know, make sure that you're keeping to your normal routine as much as possible. And then you're going to kind of know where you might be able to adjust and that's okay. So for me, for example, I. When I get up in the morning, I don't put on work clothes, but I make sure to put on my workout clothes because that just gets me ready to go outside and take a walk or get on my peloton or whatever that might be. I'm just setting up myself up for success. Now, let's say I just decide I don't want to do that today. I'm really stressed out or I'm really tired. And again, that's okay too. You can be patient with yourself in that.
But you're setting yourself up for success as much as possible. There's a lot of ways that you can take care of yourself if you're a mom or a dad and you have kids at home and they're at home a lot more than what you're used to. You know, asking your spouse if you can have 30 minutes of quiet time where you go read a book or you go for a walk or whatever that might be. And then, you know, it can be a trade off. You can make sure that they have their time as well and then you each have your individual time with your kids. So self care looks different for a lot of different people. But I think in our society we tend to feel like we have to be very productive and we can't slow down and we can't stop and rest and that's really going to cause a lot of extra anxiety or extra depression because we're not really taking care of ourselves. And the great thing about this is when you're doing this, you're teaching your kids how to do it too. Because whatever level of self care we have, we typically have learned growing up from our parents, right? If we had parents that exercised and they had healthy habits, then we're typically going to incorporate those into our lives. So when you're doing these things, you're not only improving your life, but you're improving the life of those around you and setting a really good example. So I hope these help. I can't stress how important they are right now. And there's a lot more that kind of goes into self compassion and self care, but you know what that means for you and so make sure you're really paying attention to these in the next weeks that come. As we're kind of going through this.
Make sure that you're focusing on, you know, being compassionate with yourself, taking care of yourself. Focus first and foremost and then you can take care of others. So I hope this helped. I hope you have a great day. Make sure you comment below if this was helpful for you. Actually comment below and let me know. What are your self care practices? How much self compassion do you practice in your life? And I really love to hear from you. Hope you guys have a great day and until next time. Bye.
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