How to Stop Overextending and Fostering Self Understanding

This is an extract from Dr Thema Bryant's new book Matters of the Heart: Healing Your Relationship with Yourself and Those You Love. 

  How to stop overextending Another way to enhance your self-compassion is by monitoring your generosity. Overextending yourself can result in depletion, which is counter to self-compassion. It is beautiful to be a generous person. From a morals and values place, generosity improves the lives of others and can also benefit you, as it allows you to be a blessing to others, create meaning, and have an impact. At the same time, when you dishonour, disrespect, or abandon yourself, you can create a lifestyle of overextending yourself that drains you, dishonours your humanity, and has a bad effect on your health and wellness. You may need to set more boundaries, give yourself permission to say no, learn when to exit spaces and situations, and recognise when you are being disrespected, used, or dishonoured. To build self-compassion, learn to use your discernment and voice. What have you agreed to do that has resulted in your being exhausted, overextended, and perhaps even resentful? Use your agency, your power to choose. To choose your wellness you will need to learn the holiness of no. What are your sleep and eating habits, work hours, eyes, and heart telling you about being overextended? It is self-compassion to choose your care and resist the idea that self-care is selfish. I invite you to say this aloud: ‘I am deserving of care. I am deserving of rest. I am deserving of love. I am worthy. I am enough. I can say yes to myself. I choose my wellness. My body is a temple and I come home to it with compassion’. When you are making decisions, consider the consequences of them on your mental health. Make choices that reflect your priority to live well: joyfully, healthily, mindfully, and soulfully. If these are your priorities and values, they need to manifest in some action, in some behaviours. If you want to heal your heart, show some sign that this is your intention. Readjust your schedule, habits, patterns, and boundaries. To honour yourself and to be compassionate towards yourself, what calls do you no longer need to make or accept? Where do you no longer need to go? What are the habits of overextension that you want to be intentional about releasing and replacing? What are the ways of working and of resting that you want to shift so that you can better protect and preserve yourself? You are worthy of these changes. You are entitled to protect your time, peace, and health.   Fostering self-understanding To cultivate self-compassion is to choose self-understanding over self-judgment. Look at the various chapters of your life and seek to understand how you landed there. Now take a deeper look instead of dismissing your journey with thoughts such as What’s wrong with me? or How could I be so stupid? or I’m so weak. The labels that we give ourselves or that other people have given us keep us stuck. Let me be clear, I am not talking about making excuses, which can also keep us stuck. You should accept responsibility when you mess up. Instead, I am talking about understanding yourself more fully so you can be empowered to go forwards towards your healing. When you understand, with grace, how and why you made earlier choices, you experience the liberation to make different ones the next time around. When you don’t understand yourself, you will look back at your acts harshly, even with hostility, ridicule, or intense shame, so instead try to consider:   1. What was I thinking, and where did the thoughts that led to that behaviour come from? 2. What is the source of my decision? That is to say, what in my life’s journey shaped me in such a way that I ended up choosing this way of thinking, choosing, or acting?   When you understand the root of those behaviours or events, this doesn’t mean that you are going to give up because you can’t change the past. No! Instead, you realise with grace and compassion that this is what led you here and you don’t have to continue choosing this mindset or behaviour. You can be empowered to make a new choice. You care enough about yourself that you don’t give the pain or dysfunction of your past the final say. Give yourself permission to break out of those cycles and patterns and to learn something new. You can be compassionate with yourself even as you are learning, knowing that you are worthy of new possibilities. Sabrina is a married new mother who landed her dream job a few months ago. It is a promotion in title and income and exceeds the goals she has set for herself. Her hard work has paid off, and she is excited to stretch her leadership skills. The challenges are the commute and the supervisor. The commute is 90 minutes each way in traffic. Although Sabrina is supposed to be the director of the centre, the person who has oversight for the region doesn’t want her to make any changes and is fostering dissent among those who report to her. After wrestling with her decision and discussing it with her family and in therapy, Sabrina takes the courageous step of looking for and accepting another job. She decides her mental health and family time are more important than the title and status. The new position is closer to her home, and the new workplace environment is more supportive. In the past, Sabrina would have stayed and felt she had to win everyone over to prove her own worth. In this season of her life, she is celebrating her new priority: her own heart. As you heal and grow, I invite you to breathe life into your possibility and to breathe with grace and compassion into your present moment. As poet Joel Cross reminds us, you can be the love of your life. Many of us love deeply, and out of the depths of our love, we give to others and do some incredible things. Love can lead you to some courageous, bodacious, unconventional acts. What would it look like for you to love yourself that boldly? What edifying gesture of self-compassion will you commit to doing for yourself, not rarely but regularly? In your self-compassionate care of yourself, can you be as committed, faithful, and loyal to the care of your own soul, body, mind, and heart as you have been to the care of others? Self-compassion can literally shift the trajectory of your life. You are deserving of the shift.   Activation exercise: Write a love letter to yourself. Make it full of appreciation, understanding, forgiveness, and self- preservation. Affirmation: If it aligns with you, place both hands on your heart and speak aloud the words ‘My heart is healing, and so it is’. This feature has been extracted from Matters of the Heart: Healing Your Relationship with Yourself and Those You Love by Thema Bryant (£28, Penguin Random House) and reproduced with permission from the publisher.   If you enjoyed this article why not give Women Living Deliously: An Extract from Florence Given's new book a go?