Find What Feels Good: Stack Green Lights & Reduce Red Lights

I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to this week's edition of Stream of Consciousness!

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Most of the information we consume is highly generalized - this applies to health advice, career advice, relationship advice and more.

If there's one thing I have learned during my healing journey over the past few years it's been don't always listen to what “most people should do”.

In a lot of ways it’s easier to read about something that's “good for you” and assume that it's something you should add to your routine because there's research supporting its benefits.

The harder thing to do is to expose yourself to new ideas and run them through your own personal filter of “is this actually helping me?”.

I used to listen to everything doctors told me. I used to follow what other successful athletes were doing in their training without question. I used to listen to generalized nutrition advice. Until…that didn't work for me anymore.

Salt went through a period where it was all over the news and it's been popularized that it can cause high blood pressure and that high salt diets should be avoided. But if you have low blood pressure like I do, salt is actually a really good thing.

I did cold showers regularly for more than a year before realizing with the help of data from Whoop that because I was already spending a lot of time in a sympathetic state, amping that up even more constantly was causing detrimental stress.

I have tried fasting for longer periods of time because there's a lot of research supporting it's benefits. But most of that research involves male subjects only and if you're a woman with high cortisol, not eating for prolonged periods can actually make your cortisol increase even more and be detrimental.

I spent years thinking pain I was experiencing during training and sports was normal and something everyone around me was experiencing because of the “no pain no gain” mentality that was ingrained in us. But it is definitely not normal to dislocate your shoulders or jaw several times during a hockey game.

Waking up at 5 am can be great for some people. For others (like me) it may be better to go with your natural rhythm if you skew towards being a night owl. (I recently stumbled upon this cool chronotype quiz to help you understand what you naturally skew towards in terms of sleep and wake cycles).

My point is, it's important to expose yourself to new ideas, try new things, and be an explorer of sorts. It is equally important to check in with your body to see if these things are giving you green lights or if they are giving you red lights.

Then, to work towards stacking more green lights.

And not to immediately reject the red lights but to be curious about them.

If there are changes you can make to re-test and re-assess the initial red lights that feel like the right thing to do, go for it.

Then reduce or remove the red lights that remain to make space for more green lights.

The hardest part of all of this?

Listening to your body sometimes means going against the grain.

The grain of social norms and what is “socially acceptable”.

The grain of schedule norms and “what the normal thing to do is”.

The grain of identity - “if I don't do X anymore I don't know who I am”.

But I can tell you from first hand experience that the repercussions of ignoring when your body is screaming at you are significant and worse than continuing to push through.

I would also argue that there are a lot of things that are considered “normal” in our society that….are definitely not good for us objectively and it would work to our collective benefit to take individual steps toward more green light alternatives.

I'm very much still on an epic healing journey and framing things through this lens. Using green and red lights seems to be helping.

I hope this helps you in some small way with what you are experiencing in your life at the moment.

Lisa ✌️

Soulwork 💜

📚 The Body Keeps The Score

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Here’s to navigating life off of autopilot. ✨