The Modern Mormon

3 Parts of Health

September 23, 2021 Kami Satterlee Season 1 Episode 8
The Modern Mormon
3 Parts of Health
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode I talk about Mental, Emotional and Physical Health. Why it's important, how we attain it, and how it affects us as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

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You are listening to the modern Mormon, Episode Number eight. Hey there, I'm Kami Satterlee. And I'm the modern Mormon. I'm an Advanced Certified life coach who's dropped the all or nothing approach to life, and religion. I can't wait to show you how. I've got you, girl. Let's go. Hello, Hello beautiful souls. Today on the podcast, we are talking about the three parts of health. And if you were to Google, this, you would probably come up with a ton of different other parts. You've got physical, emotional, social, spiritual, intellectual. But the three I want to talk about today are your emotional, your mental and your physical. And a lot of people like to kind of group together the mental and emotional, but I really like to separate them. Because to me, your mental health is your thoughts and your emotional is your feelings, I really like to keep those separate. So I'm super excited to do this, because this was actually a recommendation from one of the listeners. And they really want to hear about women's health, specifically in the LDS Church. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So to start the podcast off, I want to first start with our mental health. Typically, people don't think about their mental health until they feel like they're in more of like a mental health crisis. So when I ask the question, am I mentally healthy, they usually start to resort to Well, I guess, because I don't have a mental illness. I guess I'm fine. But health is never this or that there are a lot of factors that determine are all around health. So I never asked myself, am I mentally healthy? I never asked that question. Until I was mentally unhealthy. The only reason I knew I wasn't was because I felt out of control and crazy. That was the first time that I actually questioned my mental health. But it's so important to be asking ourselves this question you guys because it makes our brain reflect on whether or not we are taking care of our needs or not. What I've come to realize throughout my coaching and conversations with others is that I think people misunderstand mental health as and just kind of like their overall well being as just being happy all the time. Like, if you're happy, then you're good to go. That if you're struggling or you're not happy, then there's something wrong with you mentally. I feel like in today's day and age between social media, the people around us the internet, picture perfect scenario is just like constantly flashing in our face. What it's showing us is a different reality than what is. And the main problem with this is that we are not in a place where we are mentally, mentally able to handle the things that we're seeing. Then we create negative emotions based off of those things that we don't measure up to those things. And we start feeling you know, sadness and envy and then we question our mental health. And then we're so upset at ourselves because we don't have more well being. So in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, this kind of goes hand in hand with what I've talked about in previous podcasts, about striving for perfection. Take Utah, for example. So the state has around 68%, LDS. It has one of the highest drug overdose rates in our country, prescription drug deaths have increased by 400%. Since 2001, in five women in Utah are on antidepressants. Now, if you're one of these women, I feel you I too, have been on antidepressants on so many different occasions in my life, the issue was not the antidepressant. The issue is what is causing us members of the church to struggle to the point of depression. So here are my thoughts. Instead of understanding the plan of salvation, like truly understanding it, that life is about our progression, our journey, our struggles, all of that. We've trained our brains to believe that if we do all the things required of us, like if we keep the commandments fulfill our callings, check all the boxes, somehow, we kind of deserve life to be easy. And then it's not. So then we look around at all the people around us and see just perfection. We strive for it, and we fail again and again. And as we were supposed to, but instead of turning to God asking for forgiveness, and striving to be better every day, we make our failures mean, we aren't good enough. And we think that those around us are better. Now, intellectually, we understand that this is not the plan intellectually, we understand that the people around us are not actually better than us. But our brain does this unconsciously. And then with those unconscious deep rooted thoughts, those are what we take action from those are the ones that we feel the heavy emotions, we think it's us, but it's truly not. And then slowly throughout the years as the struggles increase as they do, right. The more we take on the busier life gets the more we add to our life, the more we're creating, we take on more thing, putting ourselves out there more meaning we're going to have more struggles. Then our negative thoughts about ourselves, tend to become more extreme as well. And now we've trained our brain to only think, believe and act from the negative thoughts. So we have formed thought loops that our brain is stuck on, and we feel trapped and can't get out of this is depression. This is the point where you receive a diagnosis for depression, anxiety, Adderall, right? I just can't get it all done. I can't focus, I'm losing my mind. So your doctor gives you these things, right. So our mental health is not something we wait to address until we receive that diagnosis. It is something we need to intentionally direct our brain to focus, think and believe in the way that serves us the way that God intended for us to live, an unmanaged brain will run absolutely wild. And I know this because mine has so many times, how many times have you been in the shower, and you've had so many conversations and played out scenarios, and all sorts of negative stuff, because your brain is not being managed? Maybe that's just me. But that's what I've done. I like to think our brain is like a child on an Xbox. And I've talked about this before, but they will play and play all day long. Every now and then they will wish they could stop. But feel the truth and heaviness of losing that game. That's when they feel that shame and continue to play. In the meantime, they've put up walls to the outside world. Now they are stuck in that room alone. That is like depression. I believe everyone should learn the tools needed to take control of their mind. I think coaches are in need now more than ever, in helping people especially women in the LDS faith, train their brain. perfectionism does not mean one does it all perfectly. It means that that is their goal, a goal that they can never reach, but they continue to strive for it. Don't let perfectionism be your goal, just do the next best thing for you on a daily basis. That is what I teach as a coach. And I try and tell women all the time that they try and argue that they're not trying to be perfectionist. But then when I watched the way that they beat themselves up, that's how I know they are striving for perfectionism. So if this is you, this is how you become aware of what you're actually doing. Look at the results that you're creating. Look at the way that you speak to yourself. Are you saying more positive things? Are you building yourself up? Or are you tearing yourself down? Are you telling yourself you should be doing more? Why can't you get all the things done? Why can't you be more in control in your life? If you were a better wife, your husband would do this, this and this, right? How many of these things are ringing a bell in one way or another to you? Okay, that is where depression lies. That is where that shame lies. That is huge striving for perfection. So here's what I want women of the church to know, you cannot outwork or earn your love for yourself. It is simply a decision you decide to make. You continue to make that decision multiple times daily, regardless of your experience, your failures, your actions, or where you are spiritually. In order to rewire your brain and break those negative loops, it takes for positive thoughts consistently to overpower one negative thoughts. How crazy is that doesn't even make a negative one worth it sounds exhausting. When your brain wants to go to I'm not good enough, pretty enough, then enough, successful enough worthy enough. Whatever comes up, you take control by saying I hear you brain. We aren't doing that today. It is as simple as that consistently. I believe Satan's biggest tool is shame. Shame is what leads to depression. Shame is the one that tells you, you will never measure up. Okay, so I want to jump into emotional health. It goes hand in hand with mental health. So to have great emotional health, I believe a combination of being aware of your emotions and processing your emotions is what it takes. A lot of people don't actually know how to process an emotion. And this was super funky to me when I first learned how to do it. But in order to do this, we need to first off understand where the emotions even coming from? Well, they come from our thoughts, right. So in order for us to be aware of them, we need to know what exactly we're thinking. As humans, we typically don't like the way negative emotions feel. So a lot of behavior is in an attempt to change or avoid an emotion. So when we feel negative emotion, we typically try to resist react or avoid it altogether. This just intensifies that emotion and creates bigger problems for us later on. So the three most common ways people avoid emotion is by overeating, over drinking and overworking. In the coaching world, we call this a buffer, right? This is what you're doing instead of actually processing feeling and allowing that emotion. So allowing an emotion it's a skill you have to learn and practice. It's not the same as reacting to an emotion. It's not even the same as resisting or pretending it's not there. When you allow the feeling for example, like anger without resisting reacting or avoiding it. You'll notice it by observing it like with compassion. This is the best way, it's kind of like you come outside of yourself and you become the watcher of your own brain. So when you're just observing yourself, you just look at it really curiously like, it's interesting. I'm feeling anger, where am I feeling anger, and you just start asking yourself questions about that emotion, where you're feeling it in your body. Sometimes you like to describe it, almost like it's a character, okay, that is processing an emotion. The more that you do this, and the more that you start allowing emotions, the more that you start opening up to the positive, but also the negative parts of your life, the struggles, okay? When you start allowing what is, then your life starts to become so incredible, when we can fully understand that life is supposed to be 5050 50%, positive 50% negative, this is what God actually intended. I'm pretty sure Satan is the one that wanted it positive the entire time, if I'm right. The 50% is where we learn, it's where we grow. If we continually beat ourselves up in these moments, we pause that growth and instead, we stay stuck in confusion and overwhelm. So in order to have that full human experience, there is supposed to be a balance of positive and negative. Once you accept this, your life will be incredible. And it will be filled with less negativity, because you won't actually be thinking negative thoughts about the negative thoughts and the negative parts of your life. That is what adds to that negativity, that negative 50% is when we then think about it in a negative way. That means that we are making our 50% positive part of life more negative. If that makes any sense. I've always been a pretty open and real person. So there's moments when I have hidden my true self when I have felt massive amounts of shame. But for the most part, I've always sort of put myself just out there just given it out. Just as I am, I have had a hard time I'm gonna be honest with members of the LDS church for so long, because I felt like because there was such a desire to be perfect, the members ended up hiding and kind of resisting the parts of them that were dark. It comes across as like fake, which is kind of what Mormons get labeled a lot. It's not because they don't want to be real and authentic. It's that when we talk about our struggles, it brings out that awareness in them, our lower brain wants nothing to do with awareness. So our brain just wants to keep them hidden all the time. As this pulls us kind of away from that consciousness, it's almost easier to pretend that life is rainbows and butterflies, right? So as members in our efforts to just be happy all the time, we stay away from discomfort. And that discomfort is what helps us evolve and inspires us to make our dreams come true. It's where our wisdom and and spirituality grow. Understanding that if we truly accepted that 50% negative part of our life, then we would be willing to fail. And we'd be more courageous. And we would continue to try again. And again. If we stay in the space of constantly noticing what's wrong, then we will not progress. So when we can just accept accepted all our selves, where we're at our experiences and our lives, our struggles as just that other 50% of life. That's how we create, evolve, grow everything. What's so interesting in the spiritual sense is that in accepting the 5050 of life, what we are truly accepting is the atonement Jesus Christ made for us. This increases our love for him his plan, and repentance, and our love for ourselves. mental and emotional health are key to our spiritual growth. Alright, so the last one I want to talk about is our physical health. So when we think of our physical health, we think of being kind of in shape. Some of you think of weight loss, some of you think of weight gain, some of you think of muscle building, it's just so much so much more of that. So first off, I want to talk about the reason that we are overweight or underweight. It's simple. It's because we're either overeating or not eating enough. Okay, and I know there are medical issues, but it's pretty rare. So we're just going to talk about the majority here. Okay. And in talking about the majority of people, I would say, majority is dealing with being overweight than being underweight. Okay, so we're talking about overweight today. Overweight means you eat more food than your body needs or uses for fuel. The two reasons why we overeat are number one, because our hormones are out of whack, which makes us feel hungry. When we feel hungry. We eat right. The second one is because we are used to eating to sulfur an emotional thing not so much for fuel. All right. So how do our hormones get out of whack? Well, there are many different reasons. But if you think about it, when we were born, when we were hungry, we ate right, our mothers fed us breast milk, formula, whatever, and we ate till we were full, and then we stopped. And that kind of continued as we were toddlers, right? But as you know, a culture in our society, food just is so easily available nowadays. And it tastes so Thinking good, that we have trained our bodies to think we are hungry. And then food becomes pleasure instead of fuel. So it's more of an experience. And I'm not saying that this is necessarily bad, but it's just kind of taken off over our hormones. And now our body thinks that it's hungry when it's actually not. So it's a, like a hit of dopamine to our brains every single time we answer that desire for food. So we do it again and again and again. And while doing that, it increases our desire every single time, the more we answer this, the more weight we gain. When we use food to escape our emotions, this is what we call buffering. So you might not be using it as pleasure, necessarily, but you're using it to almost overpower whatever emotion that it is, like negative inside of you, that you don't want to actually feel or continue feeling. So we eat so that our body can then create a more pleasurable feeling to overpower that negative one. This is so interesting, because a lot of the emotions that we feel are in our stomach, or like in our chest area. So if we have a really heavy negative emotion, and we numb it with food, that food then goes into our stomach, and feeling that pit in our stomach, then that kind of almost overpowers that negative emotion. So none of this is to make you feel shame, okay, if this is you, if you're somebody that's overweight, and this is kind of like hitting home for you, I don't want you to look at it just and be so curious, this is just data. A lot of this is stuff that you've never heard before. Nobody ever realizes the reasons why they are actually eating. And you might understand that it's, you know, an emotional thing. But then we kind of stop there. And then we go straight to a diet, right. So our brain doesn't necessarily like being overweight, but it also understands that it takes, you know, work and intentionality to change that. And so instead of doing that, then we just try to change the circumstance, because it seems easier. This is why we jump from diet to diet to diet, alright. But instead of doing that, I want you to just kind of get fascinated with all of this. Because it truly is simple. When we add the shame, it makes it completely impossible for us to change this. So I don't want you to go to that, I want you to just kind of look where you're at, you could be overweight, maybe not at your ideal body weight, whatever it is, I want you to look at it kind of in a positive way. There's so many times in my life where I have had such a negative emotion. And I've eaten a bunch of ice cream or something like that. And the ice cream kind of allowed me to switch to a different emotion. It allowed me to block that negative emotion, which has then allowed me to pick up my kids from school with a smile on my face. It's allowed me to continue to do the tasks I need to to throughout the day, whatever that was, like, I don't want you to go to shame because there is still a reason why your lower brain is protecting you. And sometimes it's worked out, okay, but it's not giving us the results that we actually want, which is why we want to intentionally change that. Alright. So I don't want you to shame your body or yourself for where it's at. There's just so much good that's come out of this. So I call this like seasons in life, there are seasons in life for everything, your relationships, your success, even your body. You might be in winter right now. Okay, it might feel dark and gloomy and heavy. That's okay, because you're gearing up for spring. Information is not to be used to beat yourself up. It's just data. In order to have a good physical health, we need to understand why we are doing what we are doing in the first place. Knowing what causes us to gain weight is the place to start. What I love about this is when you can understand why your brain is doing what it's doing. That's when you can stop beating yourself up. This is why mental, emotional, spiritual health all go hand in hand with your physical health. When you can understand your brain, what it's thinking, what it's feeling what it's creating for you, you can intentionally decide what you want it to be creating for you. When we do this, we can stop using food to cover up our emotions. We can stop using it to drown out our thoughts. And spiritually, we can stop using food to cover up shame. The best way to do this is to think of a life where you didn't use food as a cover up. But if you just use food, food for fuel and an occasional enjoyment, what would you do with all your free time? What would you create for yourself? Who would you become? This is the beginning there is no diet out there that can solve for your emotional health. It takes effort and it takes being intentional. It takes being uncomfortable. If we constantly eat to escape that discomfort we end up with a body that we don't want an unmanaged brain, unprocessed emotions and results in our life that are not true joy and happiness. The mental and emotional freedom that this actually gives you when you incorporate it into your life is priceless. For the short amount of discomfort you may feel by choosing not to eat something that does not fuel your body or covers up an emotion. It will leave you with endless amounts of everlasting joy. When you can disconnect from false pleasures. It will expand your mind to what's possible. You will become more humble, more intentional, more Spiritual more in tune with your Father in heaven and with yourself. You guys, our bodies are a gift. They are what house our spirit. They do not need to be beat up or shamed. They just need to be taken care of and loved wherever you are at in that journey. If you're not feeling physically healthy, decide today to be a little better. That is all it takes. You guys your physical health is so important. It is the home to all the other areas of health in your life. When you can make small changes to your physical health, your mental and emotional health will follow. And when you can have all of these things in a good place, your spiritual health will take off. If you're ready to drop the all or nothing in your life than I would be honored to be your life coach. Head over to the modern mormon.com to start your journey in becoming the confident authentic and best version of you.