Prioritize Yourself During Frustrating Times

We’ve all been there: getting super motivated to eat healthy (from this moment forward!), committing to an amazing exercise plan, feeling we can meditate every day. Yes! Motivation feels soooooo good!

But…motivation doesn’t always last long. It’s a scarce commodity and it can be frustrating when is disappears.

Here’s why we can’t rely on motivation to make changes in our lives:

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
-Greek poet Archilochus

What this quote means for health is that no matter how inspired we get in the moment, in a little while, we’re going to fall to the level of where our healthy habits are. Our brain is going to simply default to the same old patterns and lazy shortcuts it always took that make it feel like so much effort to start new actions and keep them going consistently. Prioritize Yourself During Frustrating Times always.

That quote was written in the 600s BC– we’re talking Iron Age! So although I might be a little rusty on the archaeological periods that came since, what I do know is there’s been a heck of a long time that’s passed, and we should know better now. So why is this incredible insight not embedded in each of us?

Why isn’t it already an insight we have from a young age, that’s accessible for you to leverage anytime you want to improve your healthy habits?

We haven’t learned how to actually prioritize ourselves in the face of other competing priorities.

Think about the last time you went to an appointment. Your doctor or practitioner may have helped you understand a few actions that are needed to change your condition. And depending on how much the explanation made sense to you, you may have become convinced that’s the right thing to do and walked away with a plan in hand, and fresh motivation to get it done.

How long did the motivation help you to carry on healthy actions? A few days? A week, maybe two at tops. By week 3, you’ve forgotten almost everything except maybe 10%, and the actions themselves are now added to the enormous pile of things you beat yourself up for not doing.

However, if you do a deep, deep reprioritizing of your life, you will be able to continue. That takes some learning, some support, and some external accountability. It takes learning techniques to trick your lazy brain into doing what your higher self wants you to do when your motivation is low.

If you’re curious how you can learn a ton of tricks to get your higher self showing up to make healthy decisions, day-to-day, meal-to-meal, let’s connect. I’ll help you get clarity about your health and get you started with a couple of tips. The days we live in are already frustrating enough, it can be worth it to prioritize yourself.

It is possible to learn such prioritizing techniques.