Sometimes we get into a place in our life where nothing is feeling right.
We feel a lot of discomfort in all the different areas of our life.
It's not just one thing, it's everything.
So you might not say that everything is horrible, but it's just uncomfortable.
And today I'm talking about that topic on the Soulline Self-Care podcast,
so let's get into it.
You're listening to the Soulline Self-Care podcast.
I'm your host Tina Stinson, and I had a stroke at the age of 39 from stress
and burnout that shook my world.
Now I'm laying it all out.
The deep-level self-care practices and mindset shifts that I needed that could be healthy,
balanced, and thriving.
Join me in this intimate space as we explore healing, resilience, and a soul's journey to alignment.
This is where real conversations about deep-level self-care happen.
Let's get into it.
Hello guys and welcome back to the Soulline Self-Care podcast.
My name is Tina Stinson and I am your host.
And today we are talking all about what to do when you start to feel like everything
is uncomfortable in your life.
Nothing's going right. Every air of your life has some sort of discomfort.
So it's not necessarily terrible, like the worst thing in the world, but just you were just so
uncomfortable and you're feeling kind of stuck.
I've been talking about being stuck a lot lately because that seems to be the topic that keeps
arising in my life among friends, family, clients, and so I've been talking about this as much as
possible and I've also heard a little bit of chatter about how 2024 has started off crazy,
less crazily.
And I feel a little bit of this discomfort or disruption in my life too.
And so I thought it would be good to talk about how I've been handling it and helping other people
move through this feeling of discomfort.
And so I feel like sometimes when things like this happen in our lives, whether it be in one area,
so like if you're dealing with some kind of discomfort in one area or disruption or whatever
you want to call it, shittiness, you know, and say maybe it could be relationships, it could be your
career, it could be your health, whatever it might be, it could be all of the above.
It's because there's some kind of a need for transformation or change, right?
So whenever we're trying to make a positive change into something new, this is also uncomfortable for us,
right? So they always talk about, you know, like there's always discomfort before you grow,
like in order to have transformation, there's discomfort.
Just like when you're building a muscle, you work out and you get sore, but in the muscles transforming,
anytime there's a transformation, it's uncomfortable, right?
And so even when we are going through some sort of a transformation that we don't really want
at the moment, like when we have all kinds of disruption in our lives and we're like, why is this
happening to me? I always tell you guys, you were supposed to ask the question, why is this happening
for me, right? Which is the last thing you ever feel like doing when you're going through something.
So I know this is hard. I've been through this myself many, many times. I believe that it's
something that comes back to us over and over again because life is, you know, runs in cycles,
you know, up and down and back and forth and whatever you want to call it, light and dark.
There's always cycles and so you're always going through some kind of a cycle. So I feel like
rather than moving into the cycle of discomfort, whatever might be feeling this right now,
then thinking of yourself as a victim and just seeing where life tosses you around,
I personally, even though I'd love to have walo and self-pity sometimes myself and I,
you know, I talk about that before on the podcast about how it's good to sometimes just give yourself
the pity party, let yourself, you know, be happy, mad, sad, you know, whatever you're feeling at the
time, feel your feelings, but move through it. Like don't stay there too long. Even though I love
doing this sometimes, I also don't see the point in staying there too long and I would like to
try to move myself through it and I don't want to be tossed around. I want to kind of make the
decision of the direction that we're going to, you know, that I want to bring myself into. I want
to be a part of the decision making, right? And so I'm going to share with you a few ways that I do
that today on the podcast and I hope it's helpful to you. So the first point that I always make and
maybe you guys are sick of me saying this if you listen to the podcast all the time, but if you're
new here, I always say, you know, ask the questions, you know, why is this happening right now, right?
So you look at whatever the disruption is in your life or the discomfort and you're like, why is this
happening? You know, like, like I said earlier, there's probably some sort of a transformation
needed. So what's the transformation needed? Where do I need to move to? How can I learn from this
situation in order to bring more positive things into my life? What do I need to look at? What do I need
to change? You know, and start seeing what comes up when you ask yourself those questions. Don't
just like ask the questions and then like, you know, not listen for answers. Ask yourself the questions
and then, you know, as I always say, journal it out or just see what comes up, what pops into your head,
go into a meditation and think about it. You know, like before you go into some type of a meditation,
especially if you're just listening, maybe to sound or music when you meditate and not like a guided
meditation, you know, ask yourself the question, what do I need to see from this situation? What do I
need to learn? What do I need to change? Right? Ask yourself the questions and see what comes up.
That's one of the most important steps you could take because you're you're kind of taking
responsibility for yourself. You're not just letting yourself be tossed around by the circumstances
of life. You're saying to yourself, well, how can I learn from this? How can I take control of this?
Or my hate using the word control? I maybe how could I point myself in the right direction?
And so these are all important questions, right? So like say,
your disruption is within your career. Maybe you hate your job, you're miserable and it's been
especially miserable lately. And so, you know, you might ask your question, well, what's the change
that needs to happen? Do I need to get a new job? Do I need to go back to school? Do I need to learn
a new trade? Do I want to just maybe still work for the same company? I love the company, but maybe I
want to do something differently. How can I shift into that? How can I change to do something that I
would enjoy more within this company? So it's like, there's no black and white answer. There's no
one answer. There's all different types of answers. And the next thing I would encourage you to do
is really to tune into your feelings, right? So like tune into your inner guidance system and see what
feels right. And if you don't know what feels right, if you don't know what you really want,
then you could say, well, I'm very uncomfortable. Let's go back to let's just use career as an example.
Again, like, I'm really uncomfortable in my career. This is what I don't like. Like, I feel,
you might feel underappreciated or you feel like your job is pointless. You feel like you want
more purpose, right? I hear that from a lot of people like they feel like, what am I doing? Like,
why am I spending, you know, 80% of my life doing this? It feels, it does not feel purposeful. And I
actually feel like you could bring purpose to almost any job that you do, but I feel like sometimes
it's hard, especially if you're not feeling passionate about it. But you could say, I feel this way,
well, what do you want to feel instead? I want to feel maybe you want to go from feeling like your
job has no purpose to having some type of purpose. Well, how do I bring those feelings into my life?
So it's always, when it comes to something that we want, it's always about how we want to feel.
It always comes back to our feelings. And so when we don't know exactly what we want,
it's always good to go to how we want to feel because you can, and even if you're like, I don't know
how I want to feel, you could look at how you feel now and say, okay, I know I don't want this.
So a lot of us know what we don't want. I don't want to feel this way. Well, what is the opposite
of this way? What is the opposite of feeling like your job has no purpose? Well, obviously it would be
that you have some purpose. How can I feel purposeful? Okay, even if you can't figure out one tiny
little thing that makes you feel purposeful in your job, you could bring purpose into your life in
another area, right? So how can I bring more purpose into other areas of my life? How can I do that?
So there's so many different ways to deal with these like feelings of discomfort.
But when it comes down to it, I think it's so important and it's so much easier to really focus
on the feelings because when we focus on those feelings, it's so, it really gets to you,
gets to you to your core. Like you really can understand yourself better. It's easier for you to
kind of express how you want to feel than it is to come up with, you know, a checklist of things
that you want in your life when you're feeling completely stock or when you're feeling completely
you know, uncomfortable with everything in your life. So it's much easier to say, I want to feel
this way. It's so much easier to come up with those feelings. And so I would encourage you
after you asked those questions that I talked about earlier, right? I really think you should explore
all the different feelings you want to feel, right? And one of the things I love about
being alive today is the technology. So there's so many negative things about technology,
right? So many, so many negative things. But if we really open our eyes, I really do believe
there's more positive things about technology. It really just depends on what you want to focus on.
And the things that you feel like aren't positive, then I would encourage you to like remove,
though, we have the ability to remove a lot of technology from our life. And the reason I bring
this point up is because when you get really stuck, it's just so much fun to use technology to
help you get unstuck. And so you could use like, you could use Google and say, what are, you know,
50 things I could do to feel more purposeful and just like hit enter or see what comes up.
Yes, I guarantee you'll come up with a bunch of stuff that's so insignificant to you, but I guarantee
also something might come up that will kind of stem your mat, you know, it'll just like wake up your
imagination, right? And so, and chat GPT is really good for this too. So a lot of people are like super
against AI. I actually love artificial intelligence because you could, there's so many
positive ways that you could use it. Yes, I agree. It can be a little scary and at sometimes,
but I feel like there's many positive ways you can do it. So you could go on to chat GPT if you're a
person who has experimented with this, which I've had so much fun with using like chat GPT almost as
somebody to bounce stuff off of like ideas, you know, and so it's a lot of fun. What comes up sometimes.
And so you could go in there and just say, could you give me a hundred ways that I could feel more
happy and see what it says. Can you give me a hundred ways? I could feel more purposeful. Can you
give me a hundred ways? And I think one of the funnest things about chat GPT over googling something
is that it's very specific to what you ask. So you could be more specific. How can I feel more
purposeful at the job? This is what I do for a living. This is the exact thing that I do every day.
These are the tasks that I do every day. How can I make this more purposeful? Give me a hundred
ways. And like in three seconds, it's going to give you a hundred ways to do that. Now will they
all be significant? Absolutely not. The better you ask the question, the better the answer you'll get.
This is just another way to like be creative and explore different ways that you can bring the
feelings you want into your life. And it's something that's different and some of you might be really
turned off by using technology. But I really think there's so many positive ways. You could also
if you want to feel a certain way, maybe you feel alone, maybe you've changed over the past couple
of years. You've lost some friends and you don't feel like you belong anywhere. So you could go
onto a social media platform and find a group. Anyone who really knows me knows how much I despise
certain social media platforms and I really don't like them. But even the ones that I despise that
I'm not going to mention any names, there are things I like about those platforms. You know, there's
always positive things that I like about those platforms. And so I never completely disconnect
myself from them because there are positive things. So there's different ways that you can use
these modern day things that are available to us to bring different things into your life.
And if you don't like being exposed through these things, you could completely remove them from
your life. It's a choice. And so you can make that choice to bring more of what you want into your
life and completely remove those things from your life. You know, you could bring feelings of
happiness and peace or just like a good feeling into your life by the different things that you
watch on TV. I've always found it interesting what they talk about a TV channel. Because it's like
your program in yourself and they call it a TV program. So you really are these things you watch
kind of do program you. So what are you watching on TV? And so nowadays I find that it's really hard
to watch to it's really hard to find things to watch on TV that are just like really like good happy
stories. Like, you know, they don't have to necessarily be all positive. But it's just like a good
story like soul surfer. Like I always love that movie and I'm not religious at all because there is
like a religious component to that movie. But I'm not religious at all, but I just love the story.
Like it's just such a beautiful human story. And last night I watched Coda and I highly recommend it.
What a beautiful story. And what a, you know, what a great way. So Coda stands for children of deaf
adults. I think that's what it stands for. So it's about a family that the whole family's deaf
except for one of the children. And it tells you the story about how they function in the world. And
it's so interesting. And the whole story is just a beautiful story. So I highly recommend it. But I
think that it's hard to find this type of programming on TV. I feel like there's a lot of negativity
right now. And I'm nothing. I don't enjoy like a good, like I love like spy movies. Is this good for
my nervous system all the time watching spy movies? No, no. Highly excitable, like very stressful
sometimes. But I do love watching them. But I know when I shouldn't watch them. Like when I'm
highly anxious, I shouldn't watch something like that. So let me do something else. Read a book or
something. And so really paying attention to all the things that you expose yourself to when you're
trying to bring certain feelings into your life. So if you're really feeling it right now. So if
you're really in a place where you're very uncomfortable, get down to the nitty-gritty. Don't just
pay attention to the big things that affect your energy in your life. Pay attention to every little
thing, everything affects your energy, all of your surroundings. I also talk a lot about decluttering
on this podcast. There's so many episodes about decluttering. I love. And it's not just decluttering
your space. It's decluttering your mind, the processes in your life, right? The way you do things,
it's about removing friction, it's about removing discomfort. So this is a big part about removing
discomfort from your life. How can I make myself more comfortable? And this does involve space
sometimes. Like if your home is very, whenever I'm in a really crappy mood or I'm feeling it,
my space gets cluttered and dirty, right? I don't take care of it as well. And I know for a fact that if
I fix that, it makes me automatically feel better. So like tune in into those things that automatically
make you feel better, right? What about like, how could it just feel to like wash your bedding
and then like go to bed and like on like clean sheet, everything's clean and washed? I don't know.
Anyone who has animals like dogs or cats knows exactly what I mean by this. I wash my bedding so
often because it gets full of dog hair and I hate going to bed at night and have dog hair stick to
my freshly moisturized face. And so you know, you got to clean the bedding. But how good does it feel
getting into that bed? How good does it feel to wake up in the morning to a clean, beautiful,
organized house? And so give yourself those things when you can, when you have the capacity to
declutter a part of your life. And as I was just speaking about that includes the media that you're
exposing yourself to. You're exposing your energy to these things and these things program you, right?
That's why they're called programs. Same thing with music. What music makes you feel good?
So I talked about this a little bit. I can't remember what day it was. It was either Sunday or Monday
because I've been kind of trying to do this series of really quick self-care things that you could
do for yourself, Deale. So if you're interested in that, you could follow me on Instagram or TikTok
@teanestintsandcoach. I'm pretty sure something like that. If you search it, you'll find me.
And so I've been doing like little quick things that you could do as self-care. And one of them
was to make a playlist of music you love. And it doesn't necessarily have to be music that's
positive. It's just music that makes you feel good, right? So I find that music anchors us two different
time periods in our life where we experience different things. And so like a really good time
period for me. And I couldn't tell you why is like the 70s. 70s music brings me back to just like
happiness. It doesn't matter what song it is. It just matters if I was familiar with the song.
This was music might maybe my parents listen to that they like kind of turned me on to. And then
music that I ended up loving myself as I grew up in the 70s. And so I was in the 70s. I was about
you know coming into like between eight and ten years old, right? And so that's when music really
started to connect with music. I've always been super connected to music. And so how can you
use music in your life? You know, can you listen to make a playlist? Listen to these songs when
you get ready in the morning. Maybe you need to listen to songs that have no words. Sometimes listening
to just music, like instrumental music, whatever you might like is very, very relaxing because the
words make you think, right? The words kind of move you in a different direction. And so listening to the
music that just makes you feel comfortable and better whether it be like jazz or maybe it's
classical music, whatever it might be, try listening to music without words. And if you're a runner,
I would encourage you to run to music like this. It's so interesting. If you're the type of person
who always has to have music on when you run, and I'm kind of like that person, try to listen to
like instrumental music when you're running. It's so different. It almost feels like you're like in a
music video or a movie or something. Really cool. So look at all these different aspects. You know, so
you, so we started out this podcast talking about, you know, like what we're feeling, where we're
feeling this discomfort, what do we want to feel instead? Even if we don't know what we actually
want in life, we're feeling so stuck. We don't know what we want. We're just feeling all this discomfort
right now. We know we're going through some kind of a transformation. How can we move it along in a
positive direction? Ask yourself the questions that I talked about earlier. You know, focus on the
feelings you want to feel. Use technology if that kind of like jives with you. And then also start to
pay attention to the things that you expose your energy to. This also includes people, right? And so
when you have energy vampires in your life, whether you love them or not, whether you're going to
remove them from your life or not, how can you deal with those different energies, right? So you might
have someone in your life who is an energy vampire. They suck the life out of you, but you love them.
They're a big part of your family or I mean your life. They could be a family member usually is,
right? And so how can you protect yourself from that energy vampire, right? And there's so many
different ways to do this. You could choose when you expose yourself to them. Don't expose yourself
to an energy vampire when you're not feeling the greatest. You know, how can you recharge after
being around that person? How can you maybe change the topics that you talk about with this person?
So you don't lose as much energy, right? Pay attention to all these little aspects. Every little change
that you make, every little shift that you make makes a difference in the way you feel. It all
matters. It's so important. I can't emphasize this enough because sometimes people get stuck because
that the changes they they are aware of that they need to make are so large. They seem so large.
So then they just get frozen. They don't do anything. What I'm telling you is that you can make these
tiny little shifts, even if you did one little tiny thing every day. And that's why I'm doing that
series on Instagram where it's like these little things that you could do or TikTok I'm doing it too.
You know, even if you do one little tiny thing a day that can improve your energy, your mood,
whatever it might be, that makes a big difference. And over time, it's just like compound
interest, interest. It like builds on itself and you create more and more momentum every momentum every
day. So I hope that this was really helpful to you guys. I also want to let you guys know that
I have openings for my private coaching right now and for starting in February. So if you're
interested in that, I'm going to put a link in the show notes. You could sign up for a free session
and the session, it's not a coaching session, it's like an information session so that you can learn
more about what I do in the private coaching and how it works. But also if you're just interested
in getting more support, I could point you in the right directions. There's many, many ways,
different ways that you could work with me. So if you need more support, more help with this type
of thing in your life, then definitely sign up for that free session. I would be happy to talk to
you about what direction that you could go in that would be helpful to you. Okay guys, until next
week, remember to practice deep-level self-care every day. Love you lots. Bye.
