The Mental Side: Making your own a priority
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This article is a special edition from Rachel Goldman, a Team Continuum athlete who also works as a psychologist and she talks about how to balance your own health and the demands on your life. Enjoy!
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We all have choices to make. You chose to run a marathon or perhaps you chose to change your life and live a healthy lifestyle- that choice is the beginning of a journey towards healthy. We wake up each day with a choice of how we want to spend each day. We may wake up and decide to do our morning run, or we may decide to skip it; we may decide to eat a healthy breakfast, or an unhealthy breakfast. There are many decisions that we make in life and each day we are confronted with several decisions. YOU decided to run a marathon and/or to get healthy, but now YOU have to decide to continue on that journey.
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Sometimes your decisions may seem appropriate at the time, and others may not. We need to accept the decisions that we make, but we also need to constantly be revisiting our decisions and allow ourselves to be flexible. Maybe you decide to run on a Saturday morning, but then you feel guilty for some reason, for taking that time away from other things- maybe from your family, work, school, or other responsibilities that you could have been attended to. First, it was your decision – so own it. Secondly, think about why you made that decision to begin with. Did you do it because it seemed appropriate at the time? Did you do it to make yourself feel better? We all deserve to do things in life that make us feel better and that promote physical and emotional health. We have needs and are entitled to fulfill them. This is a “healthy selfishness;” knowing what you need to do and allowing yourself to achieve it. You need to take control of your health and your life. Ask those around you for support and to cooperate with your efforts. It is not easy, there can be rocks in the road, but we can always step over them, or take another path to get to the same place.
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This is the beginning of your journey; don’t let those rocks become boulders; don’t allow others to take control of your life. You decided to run the marathon for a reason. Inevitably you chose to make changes to your life to become healthy and to achieve your goal. Further, you chose to run this marathon with Team Continuum and to raise money for pediatric cancer patients and their families. You are doing this for those that are unable to. You made a decision one day to do this and in order to run a marathon you need to be mentally and physically prepared; you need to participate in healthy behaviors. Therefore, you made a decision to make changes in order to do that. So, make a decision to be okay with your choice of becoming healthy, committing to running a marathon, and having a healthy selfishness. Accept it, own it, and do it!
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You CAN do this!
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Rachel Goldman, PhD, Sports Psychologist, AskDr.Rachel@gmail.com