You know the feeling…you’re tired, maybe dealing with a cold, a long week, too many appointments, needs, demands, and you can feel it inside of you, you're so over it.   

You've known for a while that things need to dial back and slow down. You can feel you've been suppressing emotions but know there's no holding back. It's here, it’s real, you're done. 

What if you let that be OK? 

In this episode, I'll tell you how it could help you to take better care of yourself if you allow yourself to get over it instead of being OK with it. 

You'll hear about what happens when you give yourself space to be over cancer, over treatments, appointments, scans, and obligations. 

At the end of the day, you get to decide what works in your life and how. 

But sometimes you have to get over it to see it. 

Full Transcript Below:

 SPEAKERS

Laura Lummer

Laura Lummer  00:00

You're listening to the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a Certified Life health and nutrition coach, and I'm also a breast cancer thriver. If you're trying to figure out how to move past the trauma and the emotional toll of breast cancer, you've come to the right place. In this podcast, I will give you the tools and the insights to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer. Well, let's get started.

Laura Lummer  00:33

Hello, and welcome to episode 208 of the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I am your host, Laura Lummer. And I'm very excited to give you a very special offer to start off the show. So I think I talked about in a previous show, but right now in the better than before breast cancer life coaching membership, we're going through 90 days of wellness. And there's a big surprise coming down the road for you regarding 90 days of wellness too. But for right now I know that as we're going through this program, and we're digging into our thoughts about every aspect of our health, it has become more and more apparent to me how many people are struggling with wellness after breast cancer with nutrition after breast cancer, and the confusion and the overwhelm, and the overwhelming emotions that come with having to take charge of something else and do one more thing for your health. So I created for you a guide called How to Eat without fear and guilt after breast cancer. This is a heart centered approach to creating a nutrition program for yourself a heart centered approach to learning how to feed your body. And what that means is that this is not about macros and measurements and weighing food and calories in and calories out. This is about taking a completely new approach in looking at yourself through this lens. And learning to really tap into your body and how your body responds to food, how you actually feel about your body, and how that affects your thoughts about how you feed your body. So in this guide, I go into our thoughts and our feelings about fear and our guilt and shame around food and the buzzwords we use like good food, bad food, cheap meals, and so on. And I offer you a new approach to food. There's also some coaching, of course, inside this guide, and a couple of exercises for you to do for yourself to get clarity on how will you really think about you and what you deserve, and what your body deserves. And why you think you deserve it. And whether or not you're taking the actions to treat yourself in the way you believe you deserve. I think it's pretty cool exercise, but then I created it. So I want to offer it to you. It's a free download. And when you download this, you not only get the guide that has all of the information and the coaching written down in there and the worksheets on it. But you also get the audible version of it. I am a huge audible fan, I listen to podcasts, I listen to Audible books all the time. And if you're anything like me, and you don't want to go through the hassle of printing something out, I have recorded this entire guide for you. So you can just listen to me walk you through it. But make sure when you do that, that you have a pencil and paper handy, because I still want you to answer the questions. If you listen to this podcast with any regularity, then you know that part of coaching that I recommend and self coaching and the work we do on ourselves is actually get stuff out of your head. In so often that doesn't happen. So so so often, that does not happen no matter how many times I say it, and then sometimes one of my clients will do it. And I'll say, oh my gosh, you know what, I have this huge breakthrough. I actually wrote this stuff down. And here's what I saw. And here's what I learned. Trust me when I tell you there is value in getting something on paper in making it tangible in looking at it, owning it and then working through it. So I give you both the PDF version, you can download it print it out right in it and the audible version, you can listen and still right through all the exercises, you can grab that now at the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash eat, you can go just straight to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com and scroll on down to the bottom and you will see a place where you can go ahead and grab that guide. So go and get it today and dig through it and DM me and let me know what you think about it, what questions you might have about it. Or join my free Facebook group the breast cancer recovery group and have a discussion about it and your thoughts about food and And what food means to you and your body, I would love to hear from you. Alright, so that's the breast cancer recovery coach.com, forward slash eat. So speaking about feeling certain

Laura Lummer  05:11

ways about your body, how you feel what you think you deserve. And based on that, like this is a really important concept. When we learn to think of ourselves and and truly value ourselves, when we learn to tap into understanding our worthiness, the way we treat ourselves changes. When I see people know people, whether this is a client, or just throughout my life, people that I've encountered, who are in very toxic relationships, or maybe have some very unhealthy practices in their lives 100% of the time, that person does not value themselves, they just, they don't feel that they're worthy, they don't embrace their own worthiness. And most of the time, they look for some kind of outside influence to validate their own sense of self worth. But when you start to work on that, when you start to just really understand your own sense of self worth, like your value, as a human being, you start to treat yourself differently. And I thought about this a lot recently, I'll share a story with you in this last couple of months, you know, my medical treatments are on this cycle. And for some reason, many of the treatments are just falling very close together over this last several weeks. And I do a lot of things to support my health, I not only pursue conventional treatments, and I see my oncologist every two weeks, but I have acupuncture and cupping every week. And I do Reiki every week. And I take a tremendous amount of supplements. And there's just a lot of practices that go into what I do to take care of myself. And those include picking up prescriptions and taking prescriptions and doing research on supplements, and going to all of these appointments. So I came home from an appointment. And even though I have an amazing medical team, there are times when I can see that that medical team is stressed. They're just human beings, and they're stressed. And I can see they're pressed for time. And sadly, sometimes that happens when I feel like I may need a little more time or I have more questions. And that can be a little bit frustrating. But it's okay. I mean, I manage that I talk to them. Again, I have a really great team. And I've learned a lot about managing medical care with my team. Regardless, you go in and it's a lot of work, right I talk with my clients, sometimes they'll say to me, this is really hard, Laura, it just takes so much energy, you know, it takes so much energy to do this work and do these practices. And sometimes it's hard to do that because you get really tired. And that is 100% True 100% True. So the story that I want to share is I had gone to this appointment. And I came home from the appointment and I just felt frustrated, I was just tired of driving to the doctor and driving to the pharmacy, and going to all of these things that I believe are doing something good for me. But that I also just want to take a break from, you know, just want to have a life, that doesn't mean go to all the places do all the things stay focused and on top of it. And I came home and I was telling my husband about it. I said I'm just done. I'm done with this. Now into he's a great husband. And he said to me, if I thought you really meant that I'd be very worried right now. But I know that you don't and it's just a moment and everything's gonna be fine. And he's so cute. I appreciate that support. But at the same time, that isn't how I meant or what I meant when I said I'm done was like, That's it, this body is going to heal dammit, no matter what I am done. I'm gonna fix this, right. So I don't have to keep going and doing all of these things I don't want to keep doing. And then I went that night and I take morning vitamins on supplements and prescriptions, afternoon ones and evening ones. And I wanted to take my evening ones I had this handful of pills. And I was just in this funk of like, I'm so tired of this. I looked at all these pills,

Laura Lummer  09:35

and I just went I'm just not going to do this right now. There are a couple of them that I don't feel comfortable skipping, you know my prescriptions I'm not going to skip and there are a few supplements that I think are very powerful that I don't skip and yet I had this huge pile of them and I thought to myself, I'm just not doing all that tonight. I'm not swallowing 30 different pills right now. I just I'm tired Are you right now. And I started to think about that a lot. And I gave myself that grace. And I gave myself that space. And I thought about how often I hear that from clients how often I see people post about that in the breast cancer recovery group, and say, I'm just, I'm tired, I don't want to do it anymore, whether they're in treatment. And then coming up on a new phase of treatment. Sometimes I'll see women who've had surgery, and now they have to do chemo or now they have to do radiation, and depending, or they have to do their adjuvant treatment and start on Tamoxifen or letrozole or some kind of aromatase inhibitor. And they'll post about ask questions about and say why I'm tired of this. And I want to address that specifically today. Because I think it's so important to allow ourselves to be tired. I think sometimes, you know, we only have so much resilience, we only had so much energy. And sometimes we get tired. I think that we have to be careful when we get tired and say to ourselves, not just I'm tired of this. But ask ourselves, what does that mean to me right now. So for me, I'm tired of this the other day meant, I need a break, I need to look at my schedule. And when I have these appointments, I need to schedule them differently. So that right now, or at least for a period of a couple of weeks, it doesn't feel like I have one thing stacked upon another mentally and emotionally. I need a break. Oftentimes, I'll coach someone and they're under a tremendous amount of stress, because they're feeling pressured to make a decision and started treatment the following week, or you know, start on their adjuvant treatment. And I think it's so important that you understand that you have the right to ask for time and space, that if you're feeling pressured and you're feeling tired, and you're feeling stress, and you haven't even yet processed the decision that you have to make or the treatment that you have to go through that it's okay to say, I need a moment, I need a week, I need two weeks of dialing things back or taking a break from things. And it's okay in most situations, it's okay to do that. You know, it's okay to step back for a second. And of course, if it's a medical thing, then talk to your doctor about it. But if it's a life thing, or taking supplements, or arranging appointments, and you're just grinding yourself, and you're feeling tired, what happens is if we don't address that, sometimes we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes we just want to say, I'm just frigging done, I don't want to take these pills anymore. I'm not gonna go to the scans anymore, I'm not going to do radiation, I'm not going to do anything, I'm done. I'm tired, we can allow that overwhelming wave of emotion, to cloud our judgment regarding how well we're going to take care of ourselves. If we want to take good care of ourselves, we have the permission to give ourselves a break. I like to think of myself sometimes as being outside of myself, when I feel this tight, heavy kind of emotion come up this like I'm done. I'm done with everything. Like I just want to have fun and go to yoga and go out to dinner and not take pills and not be a kid. I

Laura Lummer  13:39

don't want to be a cancer patient right now. And when I get that feeling, I try to look at myself as if I were a dear friend of mine if I were my best friend in the world, and what would I say to that person in that time? Sometimes I think that we do this ourselves. And sadly, we do this with others as we go right to you trying to spin things and say no, just don't think of it like that. Look at the bright side, Cheer up. I want to offer that the important thing is to say, I bet you are. It's understandable that you're tired. You know what, you've been working a lot. You've been working a lot and had a lot of demands on you while you're managing what's going on with your cancer treatment while you're managing what's going on with your teenager, whatever is happening in your life. And it's okay to look at ourselves with that compassion, to step outside of ourselves and say what do you need? What do you need so you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and stop giving yourself the important treatment and support that you need? What do you need so that you can give yourself space to just allow your brain to relax. Allow your energy to restore in your body so that you can circle back to that thing that may be frosted. Reading you and feeling overwhelming or feeling like one thing too many. And you can circle back to the fresh brain. So I was telling you that I had come to take my supplements or a bunch of supplements. And I was like, I literally do not even want to go through the effort of swallowing all these, like just swallowing all of these is more than I can do tonight. I don't want to do it. And part of that was just me stomping my foot, like I don't want to be a cancer patient anymore. I don't want to do this. But you know, my arm had been swollen, it was really hot weather out here in California, it's been very humid and hot. And so that affects the lymphedema. And so my arm had been uncomfortable, I've taken all this stuff, and I'm going to all these appointments. And I just stood there for a little while, and I thought, it's okay to be tired of this. It's perfectly okay to just not want to do this right now. And, and allowing myself to stay there and process and allow those emotions to come up, allow the frustration, allow the sadness, allow the anger, allow it all to come up and say, I'm so over this, right? gave me that moment of saying it's okay. You're gonna be over it, take what you absolutely need to do. And then take a break. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that we are hardest on ourselves. And sometimes we have to stop being hard on ourselves. We have to stop pushing ourselves and let ourselves have a moment. When we realize in that moment, I'm doing something to myself putting myself through something that I don't like and doesn't feel good. Then we have this amazing awareness. And we get to say, Well, why? Why am I pushing this so hard? Why am I making myself feel worse? Why am I doing this to myself right now? And what are the other options? I had this great conversation with my sister the other day. And she was saying to me how she wants to do yoga every morning. She said she had made this decision to do yoga on alternating days, and to go to this other resistance training gym on alternating days. And she said, I started to realize that every day was that was a gym day, I would wake up dreading it. I just didn't want to go. I didn't want to do it. I had a hard time getting up. I pushed myself through it. But every time I'd wake up on a Yoga Day, I just feel good. I love doing yoga, I want to go to yoga, I always look forward to it. It's not hard to get up out of bed. And she does. And I said to myself, You know what, I just want to do yoga every day. I love this. And in doing that, she realized she said, I'm a grown up. I'm a grown ass woman. If I want to do yoga every day, I can do yoga every day. Why am I making myself do something else that I don't like in lieu of doing something I do like.

Laura Lummer  18:09

And so she decided to do yoga every day. But she wouldn't have even had the space to make that decision. If she hadn't stopped and let herself truly feel what was going on. Truly notice, right? Sometimes we just don't want to notice we don't want to notice I'm tired, we don't want to notice I'm fed up. We don't want to notice I'm pushing myself too hard. We have whatever story in our mind that says you got to keep going, you got to keep pushing, you have to do this. But if you just take a break and let yourself notice. You might be surprised at the options that come up for you. You might be surprised that when you notice and you allow and you give yourself gentleness and you say, Yeah, you know what, I don't have to do this to me. I get to explore other options here because I don't like what I'm feeling. I need more tenderness, I need more gentleness, I need more space, I need time to process. All of those things are acceptable. And most of the time, we are the ones who shut them down. We shut ourselves down. And we shut down those emotions and we suppress them. And what that does not do is support your body's ability to heal. So I wanted to share that with you know, sometimes I get these stories and I think I'm going to talk about this on the podcast and I think God geez, they're gonna listen to their life coach and go, This guy was a hot mess. But the fact is, it's just true. It's just real life, and real life and families and relationships and kids and finances and treatments. All of it takes energy and all of it takes its toll. It's just being real sometimes to notice that you need time and you need a break. And when you do that, you're actually in an act of self love. You know, like I said a minute ago looking at yourself from outside of yourself for a moment and saying, What is that human being need? What compassion? Would you extend to them? What kindness what space? What would you allow this person to have if you didn't judge them and push them as harshly as you do to yourself. And when we can step back and look at ourselves through that lens, and give ourselves a break, hush, that break can just kind of open the floodgates to more strength and resilience coming in. But without that space, we can just, you know, start to get threadbare, we wear ourselves thin. And when we wear ourselves, then we are not treating ourselves with love. We are not in an act of self care. And we are not supporting our own ability to hear. hope somebody needed to hear that. Take a moment for yourself, let yourself cry, let yourself be tired, let yourself be frustrated. Let yourself stamp your foot in say, I'm only human and today I've had enough. And just let that be because the moment will pass and then you'll have the space to regroup. And in that space, you'll make better choices to love yourself more. All right friends, go and download how to eat without fearing guilt after breast cancer and start loving your body through the way that you feed it. And I will talk to you again next week and until then be so good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well. Take care

21:42

you've put your courage to the test laid all your doubts your mind is clearer than before your heart is full and wanting more your futures given all you know has you been waiting on this