Despite hormonal ups and downs life goes on! A while ago I decided that I needed to consciously work to improve my emotional intelligence. I did this because being able to better identify, understand, and deal with your emotions is extra helpful during perimenopause when your hormones routinely hijack your feelings.
But, when I started looking around for practical and actionable information all I found were people spouting platitudes. It took a while and a lot of reading, journaling, thinking, and being
confused to figure out better search terms, methods, and to realize I already had what I needed.
Here’s help to find your new normal – hormonal ups and downs be damned
Here are 3 things I recommend to perimenopausal women and anyone who wants to get better at managing emotions. It’s enlightening to just consider that you might need to conscious and consistently work on improving your emotional wellbeing. Hormonal ups and downs will continue but you’ll have more tools to manage your emotions.
(Re)read The Artist’s Way
Julia Cameron’s classic 12 week “path to higher creativity” will provide you with many tools. It’ll also help you recognize and “recover” a sense of 1 or more of 12 important categories:
- abundance
- autonomy
- compassion
- connection
- faith
- identity
- integrity
- possibility
- power
- safety
- self-protection
- strength
Listen To Buddhify and soothe those hormonal ups and downs mindfully
This guided meditation app is the best I’ve tried. It has meditations from 5-30 minutes covering a range of situations: waking up, walking, needing presence, being overwhelmed, traveling, and some to help you grow your practice by learning new techniques.
I listen to “Good” every single morning. It ends, “May things be good today. And when things aren’t so good, may my ability to deal with that be good today.” I can’t tell you how many times repeating that refrain has helped me stay on track.
Read Content At NickWignall.com
This clinical psychologist has really helped me adjust my expectations around what it takes to get and stay emotionally healthy.
He offers actionable advice and provides enough detail about the why and how that you can actually make change. He also has a podcast if you like and learn from those.
A good starter article is 10 Simple Ways to Improve Your Self-Awareness – https://nickwignall.com/self-awareness/
So there you go!
These 3 resources will refresh you as they guide you to a more relaxed and clearer sense of self and wellbeing.
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