Transcripts:
What’s up team, Coach here, and I want to talk to you about deeper relationships and how regulation impacts our opportunity to cultivate and experience those deeper relationships. Remember, as we think about regulation, we think about the sine waves of life, and we understand that life is a series of ups and downs. And with those ups and downs, we have two options: we can lean into that healthy—that green—sine wave that has guardrails, that has boundaries, those support networks and our three to five and mentors in our lives on one side, and wellness practices on the other. Or we can lean into that unhealthy sine wave, that red sine wave, that erratic heartbeat of life, the roller coaster of life that’s up and down and up and down and up and down, and my only hope is that someday I’ll get back to the middle. Unhealthy sine waves of life are exacerbated by bad habits and those unhealthy influencers in our lives—those people in our lives that goad us on to do things that we know we shouldn’t be doing.
Regulation is key to leaning into that healthy sine wave. Regulation helps us choose which version we live, and it gives us the opportunity to choose to do the things that help us become and continue to be the best version of ourselves.
We get to choose our response versus being relegated to reaction. We get to understand the important abilities we have when it comes to deepening relationships—the opportunities that we have to have meaningful, intentional, deep relationships in our life. Our ability to respond instead of react directly impacts those relationships. You think about living that unhealthy sine wave, and you think back to the negative spiral—the sneaky little hate spiral—where something happens, there’s an action, and I only have the capacity to react. Action, reaction. Then judgment. Judging myself, being judged by other people. And that leads to self-medication. Again, self-medication doesn’t have to be just booze, pills, illicit relationships. It can be anything that we do in excess to numb how we’re feeling. And after that, what we come around to isolation. Because if I’m not in community with people, then I can’t hurt them.
So regulation provides the opportunity to take an offramp from that reaction spiral and create a response cycle, where there are still those things that happen—there’s still an action that happens—and now, because I’m regulating my system, because I have wellness practices, because I have healthy people in my life, I get to have a response instead of a reaction. I get to reflect on what’s happened instead of judge myself or being judged by others. And instead of self-medicating, I lean into my regulation practices and ensure that after I regulate myself, I go back to being connected with other people.
So instead of living a life of action, reaction, judgment, self-medication, and isolation, I’m living a life of action, response, reflection, regulation, and connection.
Regulation is one of the main things that allows us to choose our response. It’s the offramp to the negative spiral and the on-ramp to the response cycle. Practices and people we have in our lives help us stay in that response cycle as much as possible. I want you to think back to one of the longest running studies in history—the Harvard studies—that resulted in the same answer over and over and over again no matter who was being looked at, evaluated in that study. The one thing we need to be happy and fulfilled in life is connection—connection to other people.
As you think about deeper relationships and the role that regulation plays, I want you to answer the following questions: What wellness practices do you have that enable you to create and maintain deeper relationships? Who are the people in your life that allow you to create and maintain deeper relationships on a regular basis? So you’ve got wellness practices on one side that give you the capacity to choose to have deeper relationships, to invest in deeper relationships, and the people on the other side that you have those deeper relationships with. You also need to think about the other side of this coin—that’s unhealthy habits and bad influencers. Who are those people in your life and the habits that you might have that inhibit your ability to create and maintain deeper relationships?
Because at the end of the day, we’re going to live in both arenas. So regulation provides us the opportunity to choose where our energy and effort goes.
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