You’ve seen on television shows and movies how defibrillator paddles are used to jump start the heart when someone is having a heart attack. There is a lot of chaos in the space, and everything is moving fast. As the paddles are placed on the patient’s chest there is a momentary pause when the person in charge states in a voice of command “Stand Clear!” and everyone in the space pulls back for a moment so that no one is touching or connecting to the patient. With a jolt the electric shock is delivered which momentarily stuns the heart so it can reconfigure its internal rhythm to create a heartbeat that can sustain life.
PAUSE
As a practice, any time you intentionally take a pause for a deep breath into your lower belly at your center below your naval, you are triggering your natural hormonal response for stress resilience. Slow deep breaths stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system to shift out of the fight or flight stress response that can rev up the stress hormones any time you are on that mental-emotional roller coaster. Dropping into your center with a deep breath is the pause.
NOTICE
During the pause you can check-in with yourself. What is your inner pulse? Is this rhythm sustaining your life? Name whatever you are feeing or experiencing in the moment in a neutral, nonjudgmental way by simply noticing what is up for you. Is it insecurity? Frustration? Overwhelm? Trigger by a personality or event? If you can name it, you are practicing self-awareness. Self-awareness is the notice step.
CHOOSE
Choose is the turnaround step. Will you configure yourself into a more sustainable pattern or will you continue on the path of self-sabotage? This is the moment, in the gap after the notice step that you can either chose something that will empower you to rebalance and refocus yourself or you may choose something that will sabotage you such as a stress habit like emotional eating, anxiety produced physical symptoms, numbing out with something like social media scrolling or otherwise distracting behaviors.
Exercising your free will to choose something that will reboot your mental and emotional state back into balance as an act of empowerment is an act of self-love.
PRACTICING
Practicing Pause-Notice-Choose can support you in your day-to-day activities at work or at home. Responding to life’s demands without reactivity is an empowering skill to develop. Giving yourself the space to pause in your day, so you can internally assess your internal reality. From here, you can give yourself the grace and self-compassion to take responsibility for whatever you name as your feelings, thoughts or experience in that moment especially if they are linked to negative energy. The choices of what you can do for yourself to refocus and rebalance as an act of empowerment may vary and it may be helpful to make a short list of options such as making a cup of tea, saying a prayer to give-away the negativity or to reach out to someone for support so you can “empty your basket” as they listen to you.
SELF AWARENESS
Self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-love are the gifts that rewire patterns of negative self-concepts that lead to your sabotaging stress patterns. Giving yourself a tool to reboot your overwhelm and negative inner dialogue back into balance and harmony is an act of self-love.
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