Ep 48. Belief or Behavior: Which Comes First? w/ Michelle Weil

This week I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Michelle Weil, fellow sleep coach (and dear friend), to discuss a powerful question about the insomnia recovery process:

Does belief shape behavior, or does behavior shift belief?

And why does it even matter?

Well, if you're struggling insomnia, you've probably got some unhelpful beliefs about sleep that aren't even true.

Do any of these thoughts feel like unshakable facts?

"I'll never recover."

"My body is broken."

"I'm the one person who can't be helped."

If so, you're not alone.

But what if these persistent thoughts aren't absolute truths? What if they're just well-rehearsed mental loops running on replay?

Michelle and I explore:

— How limiting beliefs unknowingly fuel sleep anxiety

— Whether belief shifts first — or behavior leads the way

— Simple ways to challenge old sleep narratives

— Why you don’t need perfect beliefs to recover

If fear-based beliefs are keeping you stuck, this episode is a must!

Listen for truths rather than fixes. Because those are the realizations that will lead you back to effortless sleep.

Enjoy! 🧡

 
Mentioned Resources:

👉🏼 Michelle's website

👉🏼 Ep 7. The Lighter Side of Insomnia

Connect with Beth Kendall:

👉 Instagram

Work with Beth Kendall:

👉 Start the Free Insomnia Course

👉 Learn About the Mentorship

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

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About Beth Kendall MA, FNTP:

For decades, Beth struggled with the relentless grip of insomnia. After finally understanding insomnia from a mind-body perspective, she changed her relationship with sleep, and completely recovered. Liberated from the constant worry of not sleeping, she’s on a mission to help others recover as well. Her transformative program Mind. Body. Sleep.® has been a beacon of light for hundreds of others seeking solace from sleepless nights.

DISCLAIMER: The podcasts available on this website have been produced for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. The contents of this podcast do not constitute medical or professional advice. No person listening to and/or viewing any podcast from this website should act or refrain from acting on the basis of the content of a podcast without first seeking appropriate professional advice and/or counseling, nor shall the information be used as a substitute for professional advice and/or counseling. The Mind. Body. Sleep. Podcast expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to any actions taken or not taken based on any or all contents of this site as there are no assurance as to any particular outcome.

TRANSCRIPT:

How to Work With Limiting Beliefs During Insomnia Recovery

Welcome and Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so super excited for today's episode because one of my closest friends and favorite humans who also just happens to be a sleep coach, is with us today. Her name is Michelle Weil. Welcome, Michelle.

Michelle:

Oh my goodness. What a warm welcome. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here with you as well.

Beth:

I'm so excited. You can tell. We've been talking about this call for a while, and thanks so much for being here and finally working this out. But for any of the listeners out there, not familiar with Michelle, we did an episode together way back when the podcast started. It's episode number seven, and it's called The Lighter Side of Insomnia. So do go and check that out. I'll link it up in the show notes for sure. It's a great episode, and Michelle talks a bit about her story. And right off the bat, I want to share Michelle's contact information and where you can find her because you can learn a lot even from her website. Plus it has such a fabulous name, which is hopeful mind.com, right? Yeah, you got it. Yep. And I'll link that up in the show notes as well, but you can find [email protected] and just to provide some context for today's episode and how it came to be.

Belief or Behavior: Which Comes First?

And the title of this is probably going to be: Belief or Behavior: Which Comes First. This came through quite a while back during one of our many, many conversations when we were breaking down the concept of belief. And you said something along the lines of sometimes belief comes first and sometimes behavior comes first in terms of driving the recovery process. And I was like, oh, we have to talk more about that. So I don't even know for sure what you're going to say on this topic, but I'm just as interested as everyone else listening. So my goal today really is to soak up the wisdom of this concept and hear what Michelle has to say. So Michelle, why don't you first tell us, if you wouldn't mind expanding a little bit on this idea of belief or how you see the role of belief in the recovery process?

What Is a Belief?

Michelle:

Sure. So thanks again for having me, and my intention for today is actually to gain from your wisdom. I know you have so much experience on this as well, and so looking forward to swapping some of our stories today. But yeah, maybe to start off, we can just talk a little bit about what is belief even? What does it mean to have a belief about something? And I always think about belief in the context of our thoughts, but specifically just that our beliefs come from the thoughts that we've had and believed many, many times. Essentially, if we have a certain thought pattern and we've believed it and we've believed it again and again and again over time, that becomes a belief that we have. So that's how I think about this. That's really all it is, is just a thought pattern you've had, not just you've had many times, but you've believed many times over.

And then we sort of integrate that as part of our new belief system that can sort of begin to run in the background. And at that point, our beliefs can really start to inform our life. It can be the lens through which we are viewing our life, and at the same time, our life and our different life experiences can also impact and change our beliefs. So I really do see that it goes both ways in the sense that our beliefs, excuse me, can certainly impact our life, but that our life can also impact our beliefs. You have a bit of experience around that as well.

The Role of Beliefs in Insomnia Recovery

Beth:

No, I love that. I love the bidirectionality of that. It's so true. And I like the idea of beliefs as kind of a thinking system. Absolutely. And just thoughts that we repeat over and over. And that is what starts to create the blueprint of our reality. It kind of becomes the map of our perception, so to speak. And I think bet you can really relate to this, where belief work in general kind of came on my radar was reading Bruce Lipton's Biology of Belief. Did you read that?

Michelle:

Oh, yes. It's a good one for all of you out there. It's a great book.

Beth:

It is a great book. And I loved that it really showed us the power of epigenetics, but that it is really, and that we're not victims of our genetics, that our beliefs, the power have a lot of influence on how we drive our genetics in both directions. So yeah, beliefs play a significant role, I think in our lives for sure.

Common Limiting Beliefs During Insomnia

Michelle:

Oh, hugely. And I mean, I'm sure you've had a similar experience in coaching where we start to see a lot of really similar belief systems come up with the people that we're working with that again, remind me very much of myself when I was going through insomnia, some really classic, very normal beliefs such as, well, what if I never recover or the belief of I will never recover, other people can't. Sorry, but I can't. Things like that, that are so common that come up that you can tell is a belief system. It's a thought pattern that someone's been buying into probably for a long time, and I know what that feels like. It can feel like truth. And I think that's the hard part about our beliefs is they really do feel like the truth as opposed to a thought pattern that we have been buying into for a long time, which is a big difference.

How Behavior Can Shift Beliefs

Beth:

Oh, yes. That's huge. I think that's what ultimately shattered the structure of insomnia for me, was realizing that it really truly was my belief in my broken brain that had been propping up insomnia the whole time. And when that belief sort of came to the forefront and showed itself, and I saw it for what it was, and I realized there was never anything broken or wrong with me, it was my belief that there was was ultimately what was creating the thinking system of insomnia, so to speak. Yeah. And all the beliefs that you mentioned are such common beliefs for all of us that have been through insomnia. Yeah. So how does behavior factor into this?

Michelle:

Well, I think that a lot of the times we can start to think that we need to have a certain positive belief

Or set of beliefs in order to recover from insomnia. For example, it could be tempting to think, well, I really need to believe that I'm going to recover, or I really need to believe I'm going to feel great again. I'm going to sleep really well. All these things in order to recover. It's not really true. We don't need to go into the recovery process with these really strong, positive, uplifting beliefs. And that's okay. So if we have limiting beliefs going into it, that's all right. And it's really because our own behavior can really start to shift our beliefs essentially. It can start to even poke some holes into some of the belief systems that at the time we believe as truth. And we can start to see, well wait a minute, maybe that's actually not the truth.

Beth:

Maybe

Michelle:

That's just something I've been holding onto for a long time. And so behavior can be this really great, almost like backdoor way to start to challenge our existing beliefs and to start to open the door just a little bit like a crack and let some light in so that we can start to question them, or they can even start to just fall away on their own. So one phrase I really like is act greater. You can act greater than your beliefs. And I know you and I talk a lot about the concept of being beginning to live life again as part of the recovery process in the sense that we want to start to move towards the things that feel important and meaningful for us, again, at a pace that feels okay for us. And a lot of the times that means starting to do certain things before maybe we believe we can, if that makes sense. So for example, we might not believe that we can go to work before we're fully recovered and sleeping well, or we might not believe that it's okay to socialize in the evening unless we've slept really well. Things like this

Such a big part of the recovery process is starting to gently challenge some of these things by going ahead and actually doing some of these things again, maybe not all at once, but at a pace that feels okay so that you can start to see, wait a minute, I just did the thing I didn't think was possible. And then that can really be a big part of shifting a belief a little bit, or sometimes allowing it to just fall away completely.

Beth:

Yes.

Michelle:

Yeah.

Act Greater Than Your Beliefs

Beth:

Yeah. Oh, that's so true. I think the first introduction I had to that idea, it might've been from DNRS, which was think bigger than you feel. Oh, I love that. Or maybe it was Joe Dispenza somewhere along the way. I remember hearing that. But you're saying act bigger than the belief, is that what you said? Act greater,

Michelle:

Greater than the

Beth:

Belief?

Michelle:

Same thing, really the same exact thing.

Beth:

Yeah. Yes. I think that is a great way to start separating. I think when you're going through insomnia, we just unconsciously fuse everything or attach everything to sleep and allow that to sort of drive everything else in our life. And it is starting to take those little incremental steps that would be called behaviors and start disproving disproving our capacity, so to speak. And that's what ultimately builds capacity. Right?

Michelle:

Exactly. One thing that came to me as you were sharing this is even a really small shift in language can help with this. So even for example, if someone is saying the belief is, for example, I can't do this until I sleep well or until I recover, even starting to phrase that to yourself as I choose not to do this or I won't do this without even acting or having a new behavior can actually start to create a shift just by changing the language you're using with yourself from, I can't to I choose or I can't to I won't.

Beth:

Yeah.

Michelle:

Yeah.

Beth:

That's so good. I'm really relating to this idea so much because I think in my personal experience, I've had both ends of this where the behavior nudges the belief and then the belief organically leads to different behaviors. And for the first, it was really coming out of chronic illness. I was living in that world and just so I had so many beliefs on the whole experience, just so many, and I had to do the behavior first. I had to start nudging myself into things like doing more or living life or focusing more on joy, or I did a lot of visualization, starting to reconnect with good feelings again, engaging in different types of information and things like that. And that ultimately is what led to a belief system that was more aligned with what I wanted. And then with insomnia, having gone through that experience, I think the belief or a lot of the core beliefs that I hold now around resiliency and our innate ability to sleep, to heal, those kinds of things, they were kind of already more grounded in me. So then the behavior changed more automatically or more organically, but that these two really do work together. They're two sides of the same coin. And I love that you, you're really reminding us that you definitely don't need to have these perfect beliefs to recover from insomnia. And I remember people asking me, well, how did you believe that you would ever get better? Or How did you believe that? And it wasn't that I believed it, but I did believe that it was possible.

And I think that word possible is a nice bridge. I believed it was possible, and that was enough. I didn't know what was going to happen, but that word I believed in what was possible definitely was a nice bridge.

Michelle:

Oh, I love that. Very similar. I have a very similar story both with chronic health issues. We both have a past with those experiences and with insomnia and having both, there were times where I would have a certain belief and then that would drive a certain experience or behavior that would be supportive of that belief. And other times where, no, it wasn't really there, but I was able to take certain actions that could help create either a new belief or help maybe really limiting one fall away a little bit. And so having both experiences I think is helpful to see and allow it to go in both directions. And just like you, I think with my insomnia recovery for that part, it was the same. I went from believing I will never sleep again. I am broken. All of these types of beliefs, I carried those for years. And when I began to understand what was really happening, what was really driving this, it was the belief that recovery was possible. The belief that,

Wait, I'm not broken. It's possible that I'm not broken. So that shift into more possibility is really, really significant. And then for a lot of other elements of recovery, as I was thinking about this a little bit before we connected, a lot of it was really going from the behavior to belief a lot, because I had a lot of beliefs around just things I couldn't do because of my sleep, and there were just so many of them. And so things like, again, socializing in the evening, going to events, travel, a big one for me was working even bigger. One was just the ability to feel remotely safe and and just a sense of wellbeing, all these things. So I had really, really limiting beliefs on all of those things. And it was sort of like a little bit of baby stepping into acting, taking some action, acting greater than I was feeling. And over time, allowing that to again, gently challenge those really limiting beliefs, let them start falling away. So I found going in each direction was equally valuable, if that makes sense. So if it's okay to not have a belief in place, it's really okay. You can really start working with it in a totally different way. And I would say as well, just the idea of, well, are you open to something being possible?

And that's a question I ask my clients all the time is, are you open to a different possibility? And that alone is really big. Even if you're open 3% to a new possibility, that is everything.

Beth:

It'll bloom from there.

Michelle:

It will

Beth:

In whatever way it's supposed to.

Michelle:

Exactly. Yeah, it will. It really, really will.

Beth:

Yeah. Oh, this is so fascinating. What do you think? Are there things that people can do that are listening that would like to explore maybe how to work with this? I think, I always think working with a coach on these kinds of things is sometimes the fastest way to do this work, because it can be hard to see your own blind spots sometimes. Definitely the brain, it just naturally wants to kind of try and delete anything that doesn't align with a current belief system. So sometimes it's helpful to have another person say something like that, are you just a little bit open to the possibility that X, Y, Z? But I think that you can do this kind of change work on your own as well. Definitely. And if that were the case, how would you recommend people do that?

Practical Ways to Work With Limiting Beliefs

Michelle:

Good question. I would start with elevating awareness around the limiting beliefs that are really present and can be really driving a lot of emotional pain, a lot of sometimes limiting behaviors. And so one question I may ask a client around this might be, what sort of narratives come up for you

Either right now if they're going through a difficult time or if you're not in a difficult time right now, think of a time where you were and what were some of the narratives that came up that your mind was telling you? Some of the classic ones are, I'll never recover, I'll never sleep again. I'll never feel okay again, things like that. But there could be many others. I can't function at work unless I sleep. That's a big one for a lot of people, so many different ones. So you could start by asking yourself, what comes up for me when my insomnia is present? What is coming up? And through having that intention of seeing that even if you don't know how to answer this in the moment, that's okay. It will come to you essentially, if you're asking the question, you have the intention that you would like to see it, you will start to see it and you will start to see these narratives coming up, and it really helps to shine a light on them. Essentially, you're kind of taking them out of the darkness sometimes of your subconscious. You're bringing them forward, and that's uncomfortable. This is really,

Beth:

You're taking them out of the unconscious and putting them into the conscious awareness.

Michelle:

For sure. Which of course is not a fun thing. And so a lot of the times I will encourage people, let's write this down. Let's write down what's coming up right now. And so you can end up having a bit of a list in front of you sometimes, and that can be like, holy cow, look at all this stuff. And I know that the next temptation could be either to judge yourself for this or to feel overwhelmed of, oh my gosh, there's so much here. Or it's all so negative. I'm never going to get out of this because look at all my really horrible limiting beliefs. But it's okay. It's normal. It's normal to have a list. Okay. And very similar to how we approach insomnia as a whole and anxiety as a whole, instead of wanting to really go to war and fight the beliefs, sort of how do we get rid of them

Instead, I love people to actually connect with, well, how does it feel? How does this feel when you look at this? Or if you read this? So connect with almost that emotional undertone that's there, and also send these beliefs a little bit of love. And I know that can be a tough one, but really all these beliefs that we have that we're carrying around that feel so scary and limited, they all just represent a part of us that is very scared or maybe very angry, very sad. It could be we're all a little bit different, but they just represent that part of us that's in pain and is really feeling uncertain about the future.

And so the idea of trying to fight that or get rid of that or something like that, well, not only does it not work very well, but it doesn't feel good. It just feels like going into more resistance against our own pain, our own thinking pattern. And then it tends to just hold on longer. So that's why I like to bring up this idea of, okay, can we send some love to these beliefs? Can we be with them in a more loving way? And there's sort of different ways to do that. But I thought I would share that general concept of instead of fighting and judging, can you view them through the lens of some love and compassion for yourself and know that that is actually going to be a really helpful part of letting them fall away on their own.

Beth:

Yes. Yeah. Oh, I agree so much with that. I think that that alone changes the association, or the charge of the belief. Absolutely. Just having that compassion, or even if compassion doesn't feel accessible, even I think the act of writing that sort of brain dump action, which I still do to this day,

Michelle:

Often same, same.

Beth:

It does create some distance, and it also just a little bit of neutrality. It's like, oh, isn't that interesting that this belief and this belief and this belief? And then if you can even move that a little bit into that kindness, like, oh, isn't that interesting that I've developed this from whatever I've been through? To have this belief is a lovely way to start transmuting it.

Michelle:

Oh, it is. And such a good point. You don't have to go nearly as far as love. That's not for everybody. Yeah, that's okay. You don't need to go that far. I wanted to share that in case it resonated, but you're right, just the act of having some more awareness, really bringing it out more out into the light onto the paper is going to be so helpful. And viewing it with an attitude of, well, isn't this okay? Interesting. This is what's been running in the background, or this is what I've been choosing to buy into. Right? This idea of I've been choosing to buy into this, maybe not even entirely consciously, but if you switch it into, wait, I can choose not to buy into this.

Beth:

Right?

Michelle:

I don't have to.

Beth:

And I love that because that's one of the things that helped me so much getting over both illness and insomnia. And for you as well, I know, is this idea that we do have that ability to choose that our beliefs are malleable, they're changeable, and we can work with them, even as stubborn as they feel sometimes. We can still work with them. And I love that we can sort of choose, is this something that I want to believe or is there somewhere else I could go with this that feels more in the direction of where I want to go in my life?

Michelle:

Exactly. And just that it doesn't mean necessarily that the belief is gone in that moment.

Beth:

Oh, yeah.

Michelle:

Right. It's more about opening. It takes time. It can take time. Well, you know what? I find sometimes it can be really fast, and other times it can take time. So it can go either way because I have certainly had moments where beliefs have shifted in an instant, and then I've had other times where they've really clung on longer. But the act of being more aware of what's there, looking at it differently, having a little bit more compassion, especially if it's a lot of resistance and fight towards it, loosening that a little bit can just soften the relationship with that belief just enough that it starts to lose a bit of its power a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And then over time, it sort of just dissipates. It can dissipate on its own essentially without us having to specifically go after it, so to speak.

Beth:

And I think humor is the fastest way to shift your perception on a belief or I don't know. I find anytime I love that I can laugh at my, because my brain can get really very, it's a very interesting place, but I find that humorous now, whereas most of my life, I think I was beating myself up, judging myself, looking for things I was doing wrong. And now I'm just much more apt to say, well, that's just my brain sometimes. But humor is a good way to work with beliefs as well. And I was going to say, do we want to talk about just the other day, we were talking about those two questions we ask after a belief a lot of times in our coaching calls.

Michelle:

Yeah, let's do that. So this is a bit of a different approach. There's no right or wrong way. I think we're just sharing some different ideas. So this isn't like you must do everything.

Beth:

No, exactly.

Michelle:

Not at all. Just different ideas since we're all a little different and different things resonate. So we were talking about asking some questions when beliefs pop up, and one of those questions is that you can ask yourself at any time when you notice you are maybe in the belief, in the belief of a very limiting belief, you could ask yourself, well, is this absolutely true? Is this absolutely true? And I know that it may feel really true, but do you have evidence that this belief is absolutely true? A lot of the time, most of the, the answer is no, because so many of our beliefs are future focused, right? I will never recover, for example. Can you know that that is absolutely true? Do you have evidence for that? And none of us really do. So it's not about minimizing the pain of that belief or anything like that. It's just a gentle inquiry into, wait a minute, what if this isn't a hundred percent true? I'm assuming it is.

Beth:

Yes.

Michelle:

Yeah.

Beth:

Yeah. That's a good one. That's a really good one. And what about behaviors? Do we want to talk about ways we can shift with that? I know that's so individual depending on how they're experiencing insomnia, but were there ways maybe that you did in your journey to work with the behavior aspect?

Michelle:

That's a good question. Oh gosh. Several different ways. I think one of the common themes was for me to move a little bit slowly. So for example, if I had a belief around let's go with the ability to work, because in the last year to year and a half of my insomnia, I had stopped working and at some point actually believed that I could not work again. So what started off as a very well-intentioned going to stop working so that I can really put all of my time and effort into insomnia, recovery, so many people, it's such a good intention. It wasn't helpful or supportive for me. And over time, what ended up happening was the belief I am not able to work anymore.

And so that was one of my biggest, hardest belief systems and to work with. And so for me, it was very much overcoming that belief was very much behavior before belief. And it actually did involve slowly beginning to work again. And for me, that happened to look like going into coach training that happened to look like beginning to coach people. None of that was planned, but it was also intimidating. I thought, well, again, this wasn't part of the plan to do any of this, and can I do it? How is this going to go? So in a way, it was obviously a great thing and it was a new career and all of this wonderful stuff, but at the time it was scary.

It was intimidating. I didn't really know. It was just through the act of starting to do it.

Then I just noticed more and more I would just do it more and more. Okay, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And I noticed that I started to build a belief that I could, I started to build more confidence around myself and my ability to work. Even if I had had a hard night, oh, interesting. I can still be really productive. I can still help people. I can still feel functional, I can all of these things. So I really had to start experiencing that and going through, again, that shift in behavior, choosing to take some new action, even though I was scared, I was scared, I was nervous. I was entering the unknown, a new career, eventually entrepreneurship, all the things, but it did, it absolutely shifted that belief over time. So that was really, I think that was a big one for me. Do you have one that you can think of that was similar, where it was really much more about the behavior piece that was leading into a new belief for yourself?

Beth:

I think for insomnia, it was very much the same. It was a little bit more in the participating in life, the experiential aspect of living life. And my sleep wasn't necessarily great during those times, but I think it was the act of engaging with life and doing the things that I had kind of been putting off or always sort of working around my sleep, just starting to dip my toe in the waters of doing those things in a very gentle way. I wasn't into, I always say suffering is not required in this process in any way, but just starting to just push the boundaries of what my mind was telling me and thinking, ah, I don't know about that. So very much the same in that regards with insomnia, but with illness, when I was coming out of that, it took shape more along the lines of the information I was exposing myself to

And really starting to put some thought and consideration in how I wanted to curate that. What were the inputs I wanted to create, the belief systems I wanted. And so a lot of times that meant giving up, researching what was wrong with me, instead engaging with content that was showing me what was right with me. So moving away from the, fixing myself into the creating of what I wanted. And so it meant following new people. It was the introduction of Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza and all of these people that have, I think, very empowering teachings. Zach Bush, Zach Bush was a huge influence on me and his connection to nature and that we are nature and that we're healing machines. And I think all those people really, that was the beginning of my cultivation of my core beliefs now that I hold now. And I think it was because it was so different than the way I had been engaging with information. It was like prior to that it was just all what I didn't want. Basically it was all sickness or not sleeping or just Facebook groups of people that it just wasn't moving me in the direction I wanted. So that was kind of how the behavioral aspect took shape for me.

Michelle:

Yeah, that's really powerful. And that's such a good point that we can also begin to choose, wait, what do I want to choose for myself with this? What do I want to choose to believe what serves me the most?

I think that's so incredibly powerful and also makes me think of how as we're going through recovery, some of the behaviors that we can be doing, we may not even realize, but we could be unintentionally driving or supporting beliefs that are not helpful to us. Or one way I like to say that is sometimes we are unintentionally adding a lot of fear to fear. You were talking about how you shifted the content you were listening to on purpose because you were in a place where you were wanting to consciously move in the direction of some different beliefs.

And I think that's really powerful. But even realizing, okay, wait a minute, what are the things that I could be doing right now that could be strengthening a limiting belief that is not serving me? What are the things I could be doing right now that are unintentionally adding a lot of fear to fear, things like that, because that's going to be really powerful too. So in part, we've been talking about how to help these really limiting beliefs fall away or to choose ones that feel better. We can also talk about what are the things that we're doing that are actually strengthening these limiting beliefs that we may not want, if that makes sense. That tends to be a piece of the puzzle for most of us as well. And I was the same. There would be things that I would be listening to or following, or you may be a part of certain groups that are maybe really, really focused only on symptoms as an example that could be maintaining your belief that you are very broken, things like that, that can be sort of coming into play that are maybe a little bit less obvious, but they're there, if that makes sense.

Beth:

Yeah, it does. Well said. I think that we'll always find whatever we're looking for. So we have to be, and this is where the conscious, the awareness, the skill of awareness and building that awareness muscle a little bit. I think it kind of all starts there. Just noticing sometimes just noticing, oh, is this something I really want? Because sometimes these behaviors get so automatic that we don't really even notice. So yeah, I think that we can unintentionally reinforce whatever we're looking for for sure

Michelle:

In such a big way. And I think a really helpful way to look at that is asking yourself or noticing, well, how do you feel during that? How do you feel?

Beth:

Yes.

Michelle:

And I think we can ask that question more and you'll start to see, oh, wait a minute. I really don't feel good after that. I feel much more scared after that, for example.

And I know that one thing that just came to me as you were sharing that, which I don't never think to mention, it's just not top of mind, but one of the things that I really shifted on purpose during my recovery process very similarly to you was I really shifted the content that I was listening to in a big way. I really started to notice how things were making me feel. And I remember always trying to start the day listening to content that allowed me to feel uplifted in some way. And it was something I was doing pretty much every single day, whatever it might've been. And it was always that this intention of wanting to feel in some way uplifted. Now the word uplifted can mean something different depending on what your starting point is. So feeling more uplifted could be feeling more neutral. That's uplifted if you're feeling really in a lot of pain, for example. But just beginning to notice what are the inputs, what are the things that I'm taking in that are making me feel reinforcing? Maybe that old storyline of I'm broken in some way. Unfortunately, a lot of the sleep content out there is really kind of reinforcing of that. So what are the things that I'm doing that are really reinforcing that? And what are the things I can replace that with that either have nothing to do with this and I just enjoy it, or they're going to feel in some way uplifting.

Beth:

Yeah. I love that you brought up just the somatic aspect of just noticing how you feel when you are engaging with whatever you're doing. And it's taken me this long in my life to even make that connection with myself. Same, just noticing it is like people are like, if they're not sure, I would notice how it makes you feel. If you can tap into that and just notice that a little bit, it'll kind of tell you what you need to know. And I think sometimes with these types of shifts or behaviors, there can be when we're more intentional about it, because I know for me, the researching, I was such a researcher. I mean, oh my goodness, it's interesting. Now I'm not at all. I'm just, I am not at all. But back then it was almost like a compulsion. It was like, oh, I just had to research and find the answer and get to the bottom of it and know at least read or learn everything I needed to know to understand it. And when I first started pulling myself away from that intentionally, that can come with some discomfort.

So sometimes the discomfort, if you're discomfort, it's only because you're kind of changing an automatic loop. You're taking yourself off automatic. And that can be like any habit. It can be a bit uncomfortable at first, but ultimately the intention becomes wherever we should do that becomes the new automatic. And then if I were to now say, go back into researching mode, I remember I had some health thing come up a while back, and I think I was going down the research and you're like, don't do it. You're like, don't do it. Step away from Google, step away. Step away. I was like, oh, maybe I just need to look up. And you're like, don't do it. Don't do it from one researcher to another. Don't do it. And so now my automatic is to not do it and to do it. I think I would get a little voice in my head saying, probably not going to help you out too much. So yeah, that's a great conversation.

Michelle:

I was the same as, you know, the depths of research that I think you and I could have made careers out of researching health and absolutely. It also makes me think that that idea of how do you feel is also an indicator of which beliefs could be active in this moment as well. So one way to check in if people think, well, I don't even know what's there. How do I know if a particular limiting belief is even here? Right? Checking in with how you feel can be a really simple way to know if that's the case. Yeah, yeah.

Wrap Up

Beth:

Yeah. I love that. Well, I think that is a wonderful place to wrap up this wonderful episode. Michelle. I really, really appreciate you coming on. I love you so much. You are a great friend, a great coach, and I hope you come back and see us and talk to us again.

Michelle:

Oh, I love you too. I'm blushing and I am just so happy to be here and love coming back anytime. Thank you so much for having me.

Beth:

Yes, and again, it's hopeful mind.com everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Beth Kendall. This is the Mind. Body. Sleep. Podcast. Be well...