Check Your Receipts!
We all know that feeling of checking our bank statements after a particularly heavy weekend or a productive shopping spree. Often, what follows is a sinking realisation that we have left ourselves with limited resources for the remainder of the month. We’ve been chatting this week about spending and investment. Covid-19 has sent many peoples finances into an uncertain spin, however we have not just been looking at how we are investing money, but our time and our energy too.
We believe that our time and energy is an important form of currency, just like money. It must be spent on the right things, saved when necessary, and topped up when lacking. In order to manage our expenses healthily we must be checking our receipts! It might be helpful to spend a little bit of time on reflection. During this time, you could make a list of the places, people and thoughts that you are spending the most time and energy on. It will act as a bank statement and you will be able to observe easily what is serving you and what isn’t.
Experiencing this lockdown has left a lot of people feeling cooped up and trapped. During this time, it’s easy to feel small things become bigger and bigger. Even if we are able to identify these feelings, it is sometimes difficult to sync our emotive response with the knowledge that we may becoming overwhelmed. The feelings are still very real even if the situation isn’t. You may be used to interacting with a multitude of people in a day, these people may have offered you some perspective that you may not be getting now. Whether you are isolated alone, or in a family of six, it is easy to let your mind run away with itself.
Hindsight is 2020, it is easy for us to look back and say – “I have been misspending a lot of my energy on, trying to fix five other people’s problems” but what is the use in this if we continue to repeat these actions over and over again. This is where the tricky bit comes in. This is where we have to break our spending habits! We have been trying to intercept our emotional overspending!
To combat emotional overspending, we want to intercept any sabotaging thoughts or feelings we might be experiencing. In doing this we are taking power away from the negative, which means these feelings are unable to grow within us. If we are able to do this then it frees up all our misspent time and energy to refocus on positive things and nice thoughts! What a treat!
Ways that we are intercepting emotional overspending and refocusing:
Talk to yourself like you would your best friend. Especially if your inner monologue is becoming overly critical – focus on using positive and encouraging words within yourself.
If you notice you are spending a particularly long time thinking about one negative thought – ask yourself why. Ask yourself if it is helpful, if it is contributing to fixing the problem. Allow yourself to shift focus to thoughts that bring you more comfort.
Call a close friend to gain some perspective and remain connected – you are not alone.
Take a walk and get some fresh air. Be present in your observations. Take photographs of things that take your interest and observe beauty in the spaces around you.
Partake in yoga practice from home to get out of your head and appreciate your body. (Go check out @openmindedfitnessgroup and @Julialaluneyoga online class timetable)
Meditate in a quiet space for however long you can! We have created a lovely gratitude meditation for you to practice along with and connect with abundance. Gratitude Meditation.
Ground yourself by doing something simple that slows down and distracts your mind. Watch a funny movie or dig into a good book, crochet yourself a hammock, then lay in the hammock, the possibilities are endless.
Focus on the things that you have, the privileges that you enjoy and express gratitude for those things. You can do this by starting a gratitude journal by writing down three things a day that you feel grateful for. Thinking about what we feel grateful for shifts our focus from what we have lost to what we have. Moving forward with the frame of mind that this provides, helps us to spend our emotional resources in the right places.
There are a multitude of ways to refocus your spending of energy and time, you just have discover what works best for you. In the meantime – check your receipts!
Through Gemin-Eye
Kate and Rosanne x
