The Crunchy Allergist 0:03
Sick of the fatigue and fog? Fed up with the unpredictable flares? Hangry from the super restrictive diets?
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Hello and welcome to the Crunchy Allergists Podcast. A podcast empowering those who, like me, appreciate both a naturally minded and scientifically grounded approach to health and healing.
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Hi, I'm your host, Dr. Kara Wada. Quadrupel board certified pediatric and adult allergy immunology and lifestyle medicine physician, Sjogren's patient and life coach. My recipe for success, combined the anti inflammatory lifestyle, trusting therapeutic relationships, modern medicine and mindset to harness our body's ability to heal.
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Now, although I might be a physician, I'm not your physician. And this podcast is for educational purposes only.
The Crunchy Allergist 0:53
Welcome, everyone and thank you so much for joining me today on this very special episode of the Crunchy Allergies Podcast.
The Crunchy Allergist 1:01
Today, we're gonna talk all about time. Time and energy are a huge issue when you are dealing with a chronic illness. Time and energy scarcity is a big fear I see amongst chronic illness folks, myself included. And understandably so, when your body is betraying you, and you're running on a battery that won't fully charge like that old iPhone, it's really natural for us to flip from thriving mode back into survival mode.
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But today, I want to challenge your thoughts and your perceptions on time. Our thoughts about time are what given immense power over our lives, and the results we see in our lives. And I'm going to make the case for this today. So let's jump in.
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How many times have you found yourself saying you don't have enough time, I'm too busy. Or if you're like me, when you're thinking all of these things, you'll quickly jump into that overwhelmed mode of like, you know, just trying to keep your head above water and trying to just keep swimming, like Dory from Finding Nemo. Unfortunately, when we get into this overwhelmed feeling, it flips us into our fight or flight, fawn or freeze state. So this is our nervous systems way of trying to protect ourselves. It's called the sympathetic state. So this is in contrast to parasympathetic state, which is our rest, digest and heal mode, which is where we want to try to spend more of our time. But it's increasingly hard in modern life, to stay in that rest and digest mode, right, there's so much going on. And so when we flip into this fight or flight fawn or freeze response, you may find yourself kind of with some of these typical type reactions. And I've been guilty of all of these at one time or another, you may be get grumpy with your partner or your children. You might be unable to sit and actually enjoy relaxing. You're kind of just trying to keep busy. You may be will doom scroll through social media, or find other activities to busy yourself. Or you may find yourself over apologizing because you did over commit. And you know, now you're feeling really bad about it.
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So I'm curious if any of this rings a bell. As I mentioned, I totally have been guilty of each of these at different times in my life. And it sometimes happens, right? But I want to share today, a concept with you that quite literally has changed my life. And I don't say that lightly. It's really pretty common. Lately, with all the things that I do have going on that people will ask, like, how do you do it all? You have sjogrens. So you know your health isn't necessarily 100%. But you're still going to the office and you're trying to be an active, you know, role in your kids lives, a mom and a wife and doing this podcast and the blog and the summit and all of these things. And it's really this concept that I learned that I'm going to teach you today that really has helped me get all the juice from my days, so to speak and to take a quote from one of my daughter's favorite bedtime storybooks.
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So, let me share the secret with you today. We're gonna dive right in. And the first concept I want to share with you is that time is just a circumstance. Whether it's one hour, one day or one year, we all can kind of agree that one day is 24 hours, one hour is 60 minutes. One minute is 60 seconds. Like that's all agreed upon right?
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Now, though, I want you to think about how we think about time. All right, good, because that changes everything. We're gonna go through two different scenarios, and walk through them.
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So the first scenario is, I only have two hours. Alright, how many times have you found yourself saying I only have this amount of time? And think about the feeling that that creates? How does that make you feel? How does that thought about two hours, which we can agree upon is 120 minutes? How does it make you feel? When I think about it, I only have two hours, I start to feel stressed. I feel rushed. I'm overwhelmed, I feel under pressure. I am automatically put into that sympathetic state. My nervous system is on high alert. And very often, I find myself having a lot of trouble focusing, because my lizard brain is in survival mode.
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So what happens when you're in that survival mode? Not much, right? Like if you're not able to focus, and you're coming from that feeling of kind of time scarcity. It puts you in this state where you're not going to get as much done as maybe you had hoped, right? And then as a result of that, if you're anything like me, you'll start feeling guilty or shame because you spent that extra time scrolling or putter I call it puttering around. You'll feel like oh, gosh, I wasted all that time. And this cycle will perpetuate your rest will not be restful, you won't actually get to enjoy it. And your productive time isn't very productive. But really, you still had that? 120 minutes that two hours, right?
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So let's contrast that with scenario number two. I have two whole hours. So how are you feeling now? If you're thinking like I'm thinking, I have this feeling of like expansiveness like I'm energized, what stuff am I going to get done in this two hours? I'm feeling pretty good. And it may be a situation where I have my to do list ready to go. And I'm just going to check those things off one by one. I'm going to get stuff done. You can replace stuff with your favorite four letter word, but I'm going to try to keep this podcast language clean. Even though my language may not always be clean otherwise. Or better yet, I may have two whole hours to curl up and read a book or take a glorious afternoon nap, which is honestly one of my most favorite things to do, especially if I if I've been kind of using up a little more of my energy with activities.
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So then I come away, knowing that I used my time. How, you know, kind of how I wanted to. I came from this feeling of abundance, and there's no guil. You did or I did what I needed to do for those two hours. It's what was required by me or of the world or however you want to think about that.
The Crunchy Allergist 8:59
So again, we still have this 120 minutes this two hours. That is non negotiable, right? But we have two very distinct thoughts we can have about that circumstance. We can think, "Ah, I only have two hours" and send ourselves into that fight or flight that scared little lizard brain not really making maybe the most of what that time could be right? Or we can contrast that with "I have two whole hours. This is amazing. What am I going to, you know, how am I going to use that time?"
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So that's just to illustrate the power that we have. When we think our thoughts about time. Time is just a number, right? And we can't create more of it. So that does add a little bit of pressure, right. So let's kind of jump into that.
The Crunchy Allergist 9:58
So the second step, we have this awareness now that we have thoughts about time, and thoughts about time will influence how we feel and act about that that time, right? But we also need to think about how we want to use that time, because if time is a certain amount, right, we need to have some prioritization kind of a rank list of what we actually want to get done. And think about how that relates to our priorities or goals, what do we actually want to accomplish in a given period of time. And one thing I would challenge you to think about is that if everything is important, nothing is important.
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You have to kind of make some decisions, think about what your goal may be for the next. You know, several weeks, have a time and focus on that. So what are your time priorities? What do you really want to be spending your time doing? And I would challenge you, although it might be a little scary. And I tried to do this periodically. But take a look at your screentime report on your phone. It can be pretty amazing how those little breaks little like brain breaks of surfing can turn into hours over time, pretty quickly. So and that's not to shame you. But just to kind of help you realize, you know that there are sometimes ways that the time we're spending is not in alignment with the priorities that we would like to actually see our time being spent doing.
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So maybe, you know, one way I encourage my clients to work on this is to pick one main goal at a time. And focus on that goal for a few weeks to kind of get it down and into their routine. And then you know, so maybe it's focusing on sleep routines, or maybe a good example is trying to incorporate movement into into your life daily. And that may look different for each one of us, depending on where we're coming from with our our chronic illness.
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But if that is going to be your goal or your priority, then let's put it on your calendar. Let's put it on your calendar like you would a doctor's appointment or a meeting that's important, or some other event that would take priority in your life, and it's gonna be an appointment with yourself.
The Crunchy Allergist 12:49
Now, that's not to say there isn't some flexibility, we know that with living with chronic illness there are going in just living in general, there are going to be emergencies that pop up, life happens. And then in those cases, what we learned to do is brush it off. And just get back on track when you're able to. There's no shame, there's no guilt. Because when you put that shame and guilt on things, you, you will quickly learn that that is one way that you are just wasting more of that precious battery life or those spoons or whatever analogy you would like to use.
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I think it's also important to realize, you know, when you do have slip ups or you know, hiccups along the way, you are not going back to the starting line. You're just getting back on track where you left off. And so, you know, I think many of us have this preconceived notion that we're going all the way back to the beginning. You're restarting your journey, but you're not, you're just getting back on track to where you were, you're still further along in your journey than you were when you initially started.
The Crunchy Allergist 14:05
Alright, so let's summarize a little bit of what we talked about today. Because this is kind of some heavy stuff. But when you're able to create awareness around your thoughts, in particularly your thoughts around time, you're able to take back control of your schedule and time rather than letting it control you.
The Crunchy Allergist 14:28
You also get to spend less of your time and energy feeling shameful or guilty about how you're spending your time. And that opens up a whole lot of possibilities on how you can redirect that time and energy towards things that you figured out are your priorities. So in the end, you ended up realigning your time with those priorities. You end up getting those results that you want in life, all while using less energy because you're not wasting it on on that work. And that shame and that guilt, it's pretty amazing. And when you are able to kind of focus that, like, that's how I get all this done along with having help. So that is, you know, part of the prioritization as well. You know, making decisions and what you want to do and what you can maybe ask for help to reach those goals you want.
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So that's why I have my team kind of helping me behind the scenes. Because that allows me to create this content, and then help get more of that out to you. All right.
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So if you want to learn more about how we do this, how I work one on one with my clients to redefine success, I want you to hop over to the Crunchy Allergist website, www.crunchyallergist.com. And you're going to click on the work with me tab. And you'll see all about what it looks like to redefine success with me.
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So how does that look? You will learn how to stop stress from stealing your spoons or your energy, you're going to reset your relationship with restorative rest. And you're going to learn how to deal with the uncertainty that comes with living with a chronic illness like sjogrens. You also get to work with my good friend colleague, and just amazing registered dietitian and anti inflammatory food expert, Jennifer Tharani. She walks through our clients, walks our clients through how to nourish to flourish using a non restrictive strategy towards eating and nutrition. We are enrolling and starting this journey with a small group of us. April 15th.
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So if you want more information or to set up a time to see if we're a good fit for one another hop over there, and I look forward to talking with you soon. And if you haven't signed up for the free virtual sjogrens summit, it is going on now. And we will have those replays up and ready for you too. So you will see that under the summit tab over on the website as well. Thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to talking with you next week.
