I’ve recently been interviewed for Brittany A. Johnson’s podcast, LifeSaveHer. Brittany is a therapist specializing in depression, anxiety and past trauma. We talked about Mental Load and overwhelm, but I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to Brittany’s work and her podcast. You can find all session recordings on her site, on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. They are excellent! Brittany covers a variety of topics, and has a unique talent for making complex mental health topics very accessible.

With Brittany’s permission, I want to share parts of the transcript of her episode, Handle with Care.  In this episode, Brittany breaks down the sources of negative self-talk, and its effects on how we treat ourselves and interact with others. She explains why it’s so important to be more gentle with ourselves. The following section is from the end of the episode, slightly edited for readability. Here Brittany sums up how to initiate this change, and recommends action steps:

“Gentle” doesn’t mean that there’s no accountability. […]

  

It really is just about being able to use language that is more supportive. That is more loving. That is, again, gentle. But how do we do that? How do we start switching our brains to say, OK, we know for all these years we’ve looked at things this way, but now we need to switch it up. Now we need to do something different. So what’s the “How”?  

 

So, the first thing to the “how” is determining why it’s important to you to give yourself a little bit of gentleness, and some grace. 

 

Overwhelmingly the reason that it’s important to do so, if you are not sure about your own “why”, the number one reason that it’s important to you is because you have one life. And being hard on yourself and always looking at things through the lens of “things need to be perfect” and “you need to be perfect”, will always increase your anxiety. It will increase your risk of having depression because when you don’t reach these goals and when you don’t get these things done, here comes this sense of defeat. And here comes this sadness. 

 

And in turn, it starts to create a physical response. You see people who end up on high blood pressure medication because they’re always so stressed out and always trying to meet the mark. You see people who have trouble sleeping. You see people who have trouble losing weight. You see people who have trouble gaining weight. Your hair can fall out when you have this type of stress and this type of go-go-go! attitude with harsh go-go goals. 

 

So that’s WHY. Your overall health and well-being depend on how you talk to yourself.  

 

So, the next thing you can do is start identifying several statements that you can say to yourself throughout the day that reinforce:

• It’s OK to be gentle. 
• It’s OK to give yourself a hug. 
• It’s OK to celebrate little wins. 

 

The next thing that is really important to do is, when you wake up in the morning, if you wake up and your first thing is to pray, then as you’re doing your prayers, you are also infusing some abilities to be gentle. Abilities to say it’s OK. We can still get everything done even if we miss this step right here, we still can get this thing done.  

 

Throughout the day, having several statements that you say to yourself to reinforce them.  

 

Then before bed, do a quick inventory of how: 

• How well did we do today with being gentle with ourselves?
• How well did we do today with getting things done without the added pressure?  

 

Also think about looking at yourself as if you were a child. Would you want to talk to your child the way you talk to yourself? Really sit with that question, and if the answer is “yes” because you still think that harshness is needed, look at how it impacts your life today. Look at how much harder it makes it for you to get things done, or how much harder it is to interact with people. Ask yourself, are you still sure that that’s the way that you want to do things with your own kids? And when the answer hits “no”, then you give your set yourself that same grace, because you have to be OK with you. And you have to be able to look at yourself and be able to be gentle and loving with yourself, so you can teach that to other people. 

 

And the same thing goes for your other relationships. Being able to be gentle with yourself will allow you to extend that to other people and you will notice how quickly the conflicts will decrease. When you’re able to look at someone and say, “What’s going on with you today?” with the sense of caring as opposed to, why are you causing more pain in my life today?  

 

If you are a religious person, the same thing goes for that. God extends grace to us so we can extend grace to ourselves and others. Many of us say it at church every Sunday during the service and during the benediction that we will extend grace and peace and love to others. We also have to do that to ourselves. […] 

 

I can tell you, I’ve been doing it every day consistently again for the last six weeks. And so many things have opened up and been better in my life. The way I interact with people, the way I sleep, the way I move through the world throughout the day has definitely increased because I’m able to be gentle with myself and handle myself with care. 

 

So I’ll leave you with that today: Handle yourself with care going forward.