Untangling Stressful Habits – Pushing Through

If you have been in my world for a while, you will know that I am passionate about habits and untangling unhelpful habits to live a fulfilling and whole-hearted life as a well-being. So I am writing a series to shed some light on some stressful habits that have come back in to my awareness recently.

Before I start sharing about stressful habits, let’s have a look at what stressful habits are.

What Are Stressful Habits?

Basically – habits can be useful or not so useful, helpful or not so helpful, stress inducing or not. Sometimes we are conscious of our habit/s (i.e. often chosen and intentional) or the habit/s can sit within our blind spots or the unknown.

When I refer to stressful habits, I am referring to habits that are impacting our overall life, business or well-being. They could be adding extra stress, suffering or draining life force energy in our lives. The stressful habits could be showing up in one or a variety of areas within our lives (i.e. physical, emotional, mental, financial, environmental or social).

In order to start to untangle from stressful habits, we need to develop self-awareness, so we can be more responsible and take ownership of our own life. Today I wanted to introduce pushing through.

Stressful Habit: Pushing Through

Just so we are on the same page about pushing through, some definitions include –

• “to cause a plan or suggestion to be officially accepted or put into use” ~ Cambridge Dictionary
• “to exercise restraining or directIf someone pushes through a law, they succeed in getting it accepted although some people oppose it” ~ Collins Dictionary, and
• “To force someone or something to perforate, penetrate, or pass through something.” ~ The Free Dictionary.

How would you define pushing through? Feel free to share below.

Where Does Pushing Through Show Up?

Pushing through can happen in our professional lives as well as our private lives. It is that feeling, thought or behaviour that reminds us we need to keep going. We have to attend the social events, complete the reports and everything else on our to do list, even though our body is asking us to rest.

We ignore the signals. The guilt is too much to deal with. Thoughts like “What they think of me if I don’t go?” or “no-one can complete the report as good as me” go through your mind.

And so we push through. We remind ourself that we will rest later when we have more time. When there are fewer demands on us and our time.

However, as the days, weeks and months go by, we start to realise the demands don’t stop. We realise people are continually wanting something from us.

Bit by bit, we start to realise that we are the one who needs to create clear boundaries in our life and know what is best for us in any given moment. We start to realise, we need to rest.

Don’t worry, I imagine most of us have tried pushing through at some stage throughout our lives until we develop self-awareness, so BE self-compassionate 🙂

Over to You…

Now you have this awareness, what is your next step? Feel free to share any insights on pushing through or a reflection below. Sometimes change can take a while, so be patient and of course self-compassionate. Also – remember when control is consciously understood it supports our adventure of wholeness and heartful living.

If you are ready to take yourself on the adventure of getting to know yourself (your true Self), why not join the Toolkit? A place where I share tools, inspiration and ideas to live a courageous and openhearted life.