Blog Feed

Experience is the teacher of all things.

by tayokuti

Today was one of those days when a thought is reinforced through a number of events or discussions that happen during the day. We all have one of those days when you realise you learnt or re-learnt a lesson that you perhaps already knew but had forgotten and today’s lesson was a reminder for me that experience really is the one thing that helps people to understand what you are going through.

I had several discussions today which reinforced this to me and the final takeaway from today is this; in a lot of our encounters, we may find that people misunderstand us or they don’t give us the attention or care we expect when we are going through a situation. This can leave us feeling empty, disheartened and totally hurt. When we are vulnerable, we want people to sympathise with us, to empathise and try to support us especially the people we consider close friends or family. When this doesn’t happen we may feel betrayed and let down and sometimes this can be the catalyst for a breakdown in a relationship as we convince ourselves that that person is not the kind of friend we want and we shut them out. Today, I was reminded that people can find it difficult to understand and empathise with certain situations purely because they have never experienced it and therefore do not know what to do or how to support someone else through it.

My first encounter was a woman complaining about her neighbours young baby constantly crying and she had decided that she would go and knock on their door to let them know how much of a nuisance this noise was causing her. She had never had children and had no understanding of the fact that this is not something you can control. The parent is probably just as fed up as she was and they definitely would not want their child to cry all night long but what can you do when a child is teething or is ill etc.? This woman had a total lack of empathy and I could just imagine how upset her neighbor must have been to have a complaint of this sort in addition to the unending task of managing a small baby.

My second was a conversation with a new parent about the lack of sleep that accompanies a new baby. It was interesting to hear him confess that they he had always felt parents exaggerated when they complained about lack of sleep until recently when he had become a father and finally he suddenly understood, It had immediately given him a lot of empathy not just for other parents but in particular for single parents.

I was again reminded of the power of experience when I recalled a conversation with someone who had lost their mum and she said to me, that I had been so kind to her, especially in the weeks and months after, calling her constantly while a lot of other people seemed to have moved on with their lives and had stopped asking after her or asking how she was coping. I had to explain to her that I had only become empathetic after my own experience of losing my own mum when I suddenly realised how traumatic and life changing the loss of a parent can be. I remembered the feeling of shock and loneliness I felt weeks and months after she passed, everyone had gone back to their normal lives, I was still in mourning. People were having fun, laughing, going to parties and I couldn’t enjoy anything. I was having to pretend to be okay just to reassure those around me I was fine. It was this experience that made me infinitely more sympathetic and a lot more helpful to my own friend when she lost her mum.

It is good for us to remind ourselves that sometimes our friends and families may seem uncaring but that may not always be the case. We can have an expectation that people will know when we need a hug, support or someone to talk to but of course we mustn’t assume people will know this. At times, we have to ask for help and we have to know that when people haven’t experienced certain things they may have no idea at all how difficult it is unless we tell them.

The worst thing we can do when we are going through a tough time and are perhaps feeling that we have been abandoned is to become resentful, angry or bitter. This will harm our relationships in the long term and will leave us even more miserable. Instead, tell your nearest and dearest how you are feeling, seek help from professionals if you have no one you can confide in, cut people some slack and remember communication in any type of relationship is paramount to its success, if you don’t say how you are feeling, then people may assume you are doing ok.

Finally, remember that experience is the teacher of all things and perhaps what you are going through and have gone through will help make you a better person to those around you and crucially, will be what helps someone else out in a bad situation.

Tackling Weight Gain during Menopause

by tayokuti

Weight gain is one of the unfortunate challenges during perimenopause/menopause. It is particularly baffling for women who have been generally fit and exercising when they find they are gaining weight despite keeping up their normal levels of exercise and eating as they have normally done. I was exactly the same. While I didn’t put on a huge amount of weight, I found that I struggled to get into my jeans and regular clothes and yet, I was training as well and as regularly and pretty much eating the same meals I had always eaten.

What I and countless women had not realised that when perimenopause/menopause hits, the fluctuating hormones, bloating and the slowing down of our metabolism can actually cause most women to gain up to a stone over a period of a year perhaps more, what this means literally is a change in dress size for most women and unfortunately for us, the weight is all in the same area, around the belly, around the thighs or on the face and neck.

While weight gain by itself is not the end all or be all, for most women the weight gain coupled with various other symptoms and alien feelings in one’s body can cause one to feel pretty fed up.

So what can we do? How do we beat this and can it be combated with exercise alone?

First of all, let me say we can definitely work with exercise to help us mitigate the weight gain but we also need another weapon in this fight and that is our diet. Without looking at what you eat and how much you are eating, this fight is going to be so much harder. It is hard to put all of the suggestions in one article, so I am going to list a few pointers down below; Remember this is targeted at those who are tackling weight gain, if you just want to maintain or you want to gain then the points listed below won’t be relevant

Remember your body has slowed down its metabolism and therefore you don’t need the same amount of food that you have been eating. So e.g. if you have been taking in 2000 calories as your daily intake, your body probably needs a little less than that now, you can check your current TDEE (your total daily energy expenditure) on a number of online websites ( e.g. bodybuilding.com) but I have to say these numbers are rarely accurate and generally just good as a guideline as the only way we can measure your body’s metabolic needs is on very expensive machines.

I found that my TDEE dropped by about 400 calories, from 2000 to 1600. Now that may not sound a lot but if I am still eating 2000 calories daily as I used to then of course over time, I will put on weight which is exactly what happened. When I adjusted my calories to around 1600 I stopped gaining but to maintain I also still need to exercise regularly.

Exercise will stoke your metabolism so you need to exercise regularly, I try to do 10,000 steps 5 days a week and have 3 hourly sessions of resistance training,

This combination will help to keep your weight in check. There are also some other points to note;

  • Reduce stress
  • Get good quality sleep
  • Drink enough water, at least 2 litres daily
  • Avoid processed foods and trans fats
  • Reduce your sugar intake
  • Eat plenty of and a mixture of fruits and vegetables

Embrace the ordinary!

Featured by tayokuti

Have you ever asked yourself or someone else that well-known but dreaded question? “Why am I here?”. Here of course, being planet earth that we all reside on. It is a question I have asked myself more often as I get older. What is my purpose in life? Why am I not doing more with my life? What should I have done that I haven’t done? and so on. Of course, these are not easy questions to answer, that is, if there is even an appropriate answer for such questions. Surely, the answer to these questions will differ from one person to another.

Life can sometimes seem so humdrum and mundane that we question what we are doing wrong. We wonder why our life is not more exciting and full of adventure. For the majority of us, we wake up most mornings and go through the same lame stuff we did the day before and the day before that. Most of the time, we plod on without really questioning things but once in a while we start to wonder what happened to all of those amazing plans we had of what our life would look like.

The thing is we all start with an expectation of what we expect our lives to be and for virtually everyone, we want our lives to be amazing, exciting, full of adventure and promise. I am yet to meet someone whose plan was for their life to be one long slog of responsibilities and paying bills. This makes it obvious that even before we started we had already built in expectations that were perhaps a little bit lofty, perhaps overly optimistic and of course when our expectations are unrealistic then inevitably, disappointment is not far off.

If we expected that our life would be built up of major achievements that are noteworthy and impressive and that doesn’t happen we start to question what went wrong. We look around at others, and measure ourselves against them and of course we will probably have reason to feel somehow that we have failed somehow especially if the people with whom we compare ourselves seem to have done better than us in some way.

Why do we forget that not everyone can be a high flier, high achiever or even in the simplest forms, not everyone will get married, have children, buy “that” house or fly first class!. For most of us life is going to be pretty ordinary, no guts, no glory. Just getting through the regular everyday stuff and trying our best to do that as best as we can. We have to accept that ordinary is okay and actually it can be better than okay and does not mean your life cannot be full and happy. Instead we can start to think more about the ordinary or not so ordinary things that we would want to achieve in life and perhaps set small achievable goals for ourselves so that once in a while we punctuate the mundane with a bit of excitement. The funny thing about this is that when we are able to do that, we are so much more appreciative of what we have and feel even more grateful to be able to have the extra.

So perhaps we will never write that book we that dreamed about writing or maybe we will and maybe we will never visit Rome or maybe we will, we may never go trekking in India, then again we just might. whatever the case, let us learn how to be happy even in the small things, let us find a way to be grateful that we are even alive and able to dream and plan how we can do something different in our lives. Let us be grateful for the opportunities that we have had that others never got. Let us also be happy for those who do those extraordinary things we may dream of, they make it clear that our dreams are possible.

Also don’t forget that most of the things people reckon will make them happy really doesn’t and sometimes the happiest moments will come from the very normal stuff that we experience in our everyday lives. So, embrace the ordinariness of your life and make it work for you. Remember you don’t have to fit anybody’s idea of great to be happy. Find what makes you happy and stick with that.

Emotions………

by tayokuti

Our emotions and feelings, the way we feel from one day to the other can be an emotional roller-coaster and really stop us from living a contented life and peaceful life. I discuss emotions and how they can affect your desire for happiness and contentment in my book “Screaming helps”. Our feelings or emotions are very complex and many of us fail to understand what sort of impact they can have on our day to day lives.

According to the book “Discovering Psychology” by Don Hockenbury and Sandra E. Hockenbury, an emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response. We know that there is a long list of emotions such as fear, shame, anger, love, happiness, satisfaction and many more. What this definition like many others of emotion highlights is that emotions have different components, firstly they are subjective which means they are based on what you perceive, so in a sense they exist in your mind therefore, we could say they are biased depending on what you are going through and your understanding of it, secondly they bring a physiological response which means that the emotion you feel at a specific time can lead your body to respond in a very specific way. For example, you may cry if you feel sad, your heartbeat becomes faster when you are scared etc. Finally emotions have a behaviour element or expression element and this manifests itself in how you respond. So for example you feel angry, you may respond rudely and angrily to someone who speaks to you because of your anger.

I have learnt that if we let our emotions control how we behave then life can become very challenging. Emotions are fleeting and unreliable and come and go quite easily. How many times have you woken up feeling sad for no reason at all?. If you allow that feeling to persist and the emotion of sadness to take root, that can dictate how your day will go. Alternatively if you take control of how you are feeling and assess and manage your emotion, perhaps by listening to some uplifting music or a motivational podcast or practising gratitude, then you can change the feeling of sadness to a feeeling of gratitude and just like that, set a better tone for the day ahead.

We should understand that we can resist and manage our emotions and that we actually need to learn how to do this to so that we can find balance and contentment. Our emotions will lead us awry if we allow them to. This process of learning how to manage emotions requires a bit of work just as most things in life which have an intrinsic value. It requires some commitment, persistence and discipline.

Discipline and commitmment are not always going to be readily available, we have to work diligently and persist even when we dont feel like it. It is similar to the process of trying to lose weight. You know you need to exercise several times a week for an hour each time perhaps, but there will be occasions when you will be motivated and ready to do it without any trouble and there will be days when its the last thing you feel like it. If every time you don’t feel like exercising you decided not to, it would take you a very long time to achieve your goal of losing weight. It is the same with working at this thing called life, there are days you don’t feel like meditating, working on practising gratitude, being kind or managing your emotions. You cant always obey that feeling. You need to learn to assess and challenge how you feel. Why do i feel like this? What can i do to feel differently or better? Is this an emotional reaction to something else? Do i need to respond to this feeling or can I ignore it? These are all very valid questions to ask yourself whenever feelings and emotions get in the way. An absence of emotional stability can wreak havoc with your mental and physical well being as well as leading to mood swings, depression and difficulties in dealing with life’s challenges. In the long run, training your mind to be stronger than your emotions will bring emotional stability which can be a catalyst for change making you mentally healthier, better able to deal with stress and more at peace with yourself and the world around you.

Just do it afraid.

by tayokuti

Fear is a very emotional reaction to a situation or situations that can make us question what we do and how we do it. Fear at its very worst can disable and paralyse us into doing nothing. Fear can stop us from living a full life when we become so scared that we are unable to get past that fear. Many people when trying to deal with fear, work on the premise that they can get rid of or get over what they fear before they can move forward. This is not always the case. Fear is quite natural in many cases and even necessary for self – preservation in some instances. It can be induced by a perceived danger or threat for example a threat of being attacked or being in a dangerous situation. When we are scared it causes a number of physiological and psychological reactions in our bodies and these reactions while being unsettling can actually help to keep us safe.

These changes will usually result in a change in our reaction and behaviour, this phenomenon is called the fight or flight syndrome. It is triggered when something happens that you consider scary either mentally or physically. The response is triggered by the release of hormones that prepare your body to either stay and deal with a threat or to run away to safety. An example of how this works; you are walking down a dark alleyway and start to hear footsteps behind you which makes you think you are being followed, you become afraid and your body responds by releasing the hormones adrenalin and noradrenalin into your blood stream which causes a number of reactions. These reactions includes making your heart beat faster, blood being pumped quicker around your body, your blood pressure and rate of breathing also increases. These changes results in your pupils become dilated, your digestive system may slow down or even shut down, you get butterflies in your tummy and may even feel nauseous, you may start to tremble and shake, the purpose of these reactions is that the body prepares you to either flee from the perceived danger or to decide to stay and fight in which case it gives you more energy to do so.

This ability for the body to react in this way was very useful in ancient times when ancient man could suddenly be faced with having to fight an animal to stay alive and therefore needing to react quite decisively. However, in modern day times, the things we perceive as dangers are not necessarily life threatening or dangerous e.g. a fear of closed spaces. Unfortunately, even where there is no real danger but we believe that something is dangerous e.g in the case of an irrational fear (phobia), this can still trigger this physiological reaction in our bodies leaving us in a heightened state of alert and stress.

Irrational fears can cause the exact same response in the body as a real danger. The problem with this is that if our fear is triggered by an everyday action that is not really a danger to our physical wellbeing then we can end up being in a constant state of stress which in the long run can be very damaging to the body. In addition as I mentioned in my intro paragraph, fear can also stop us from living life fully when we become trapped in a vicious cycle of panic attacks linked to our phobias.

It is not enough for us to be told that we should face the fear or there is nothing to be afraid of as this will not help matters. We need to learn that in some instances in life, we may have to take brave steps forward even while we are afraid. In other words, face the fear head on.

There are so many people who live a life of anxiety and stress, constantly in fear of different things, such as fear of the dark, fear of crowds, fear of food, fear of heights, fear of flying, fear of people, fear of needles, animals such as insects and so on, the list is endless it seems. I have long suffered from a fear of flying. For a long time, I let it affect my choices, I would avoid holidays that meant flying or flying for long distances. Eventually, I realised that avoiding something is not a way of dealing with it and more so, I realised I was missing out on the opportunity to see other parts of the world, to have more adventure and to visit family and friends who lived abroad. I tried everything to talk myself out of the fear including some cognitive behaviour therapy but all that did is remind me of the logical reasons why I shouldn’t fear flying such as the safety numbers, that more people die in car accidents and flying is safer than any other form of travel etc. This is logical and of course, I knew that deep down. But get this, fear is usually illogical and trying to reason your way out of it doesn’t always work. So I made the decision, that I would not let this fear stop me from experiencing new things. That I would travel even though I was afraid.

So now I travel, yes I am still afraid but I remind myself of all the facts first of all and secondly, focus on the experience that I am going to have when I get to my destination. Usually I tend to forget the fear until a few days before the flight then I start to worry so I usually try to practice more meditation and prayer around that time and make it a time of looking forward to something instead of dreading.

So yes, I face my fear and I do it anyway, I do it afraid and I have to say it feels pretty good when I actually get through it and one thing I can tell you is the more you face your fear, the more you do it afraid, the easier it gets. So I would like to encourage you if you have a fear of something, don’t let it stop you living your life, be afraid and do whatever it is you are afraid of anyway.