The whisper from inside

Time comes in life when you are not feeling your best in your own skin and in your body. When you don’t feel good physically and mentally. It can be only an hour or a day, but sometimes this can be a much longer period of time. All of this because we forgot how to listen to ourselves, so we are just ignoring what our body is telling us.

Few years ago I had a very super busy year. I was a student, working full time job and running few big and few small projects next to that. I was busy from morning to late evening. My social life was “working” coffees or lunches, if a person was not related to some project I was working on, then I probably didn’t have time for hanging out. I was away from home whole days, from the early morning until late evening and even when I came home, I sat by computer and worked some more. I was eating on the go, so junk food, sandwiches and everything that was cheap and quick to eat, and of course I did not exercise, where would I find time for that?

Already in the middle of the year I was worn out. But I kept going! I was telling myself, I don’t have time to stop, and everything was so important and needed to be done. Everything except myself. My body started to whisper that something is not ok, well in the end it was already shouting! Mojca stop, stop you are tired and you need to take a rest. I was gaining weight and being more and more tired, until my doctor sent me for a thyroid blood test.

Since then I know I have thyroid problems. I’m taking pills to get these very needed hormones but I need a lot more of sleep, I’m tired all the time and have hard time losing weight.

There are some things that I can do to make my life better: eat healthy and exercise, but I somehow learned to live with this tiredness rather than listen to myself and start leaving healthy. Here and then I tried to be more strict on a healthy living, but these were more smaller and unsuccessful attempts than anything else. So I just kept pushing and living unhealthy, I was thinking mostly: who has time for that.

But it is very important that we listen to ourselves! When we are not tired and thinking all the time about sleep, we are who we are, full of energy, otherwise we are just an empty shell of ourselves. I know that this is a mistake that I was making, and sometimes still am, so recently I’m really trying improve things for myself.

The problem I see is, that after such a long time of not listening to ourselves, it’s very difficult to hear the voice again, to recognize it again. Also it is much, much harder to act on it, because you are used to ignoring it. But when you hear it and act on it and then you see a positive change when you wake up in the morning quite well rested, well this becomes first big victory!

Lately this happened to me few times, that I woke up rested and not tired, that I had energy for a whole day and this was something I didn’t feel for such a long time that I can’t remember when it was the last time.

When you have problems like I do because of the thyroid, you really appreciate things like this.

So I’m trying, I’m eating healthier, am exercising but mostly trying to listen to myself carefully, to what my body is saying to me. Slowly I’m learning how to say no to chores and say yes to myself, how to make better choices in life and take time for myself. I’m not there yet, far from it, but it seems like a very nice start that gave me just enough of motivation to keep going.

It’s very important to listen to yourself, to feel good and to know when to say no. We only have one body to live in the whole life, so we have to take care of it.