Yesterday, the plan was to film the next episode of my latest Podcast series and talk about Market Research… but The Universe had other ideas.
For the first time in *years* I experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in the morning and it completely f*cked me up.
(Sleep paralysis is a state in which one is conscious but in a complete state of full-body paralysis, unable to move. It also triggers dream loops for me where I dream that I’ve got up and gone about my day… only to realise I’m dreaming again. And then I repeat the process feeling completely trapped in my own body. If you’ve ever seen the movie Inception, it’s kinda like that.)
If there’s no one or nothing around to break me out of it, then the only thing I can do is wait until I reach a point of such heightened physical anxiety that the panic eventually startles me to full consciousness.
It is not fun.
I tried to self-soothe & regulate in all my normal ways (journalling, music, meditation, food & drink) but it took me until about 3pm when I felt completely frozen with indecision about everything and anything to realise I hadn’t dealt with it.
Instead, I’d fallen back into my old coping mechanism of distracting myself from difficult emotions by throwing myself into work, but that same underlying panic was trickling into it & making me doubt things I felt so sure of just yesterday.
I can’t tell you why exactly, but following an internal nudge of intuition, I decided to dust off my yoga mat & tapped Yoga With Adrience into the search bar of YouTube. Yoga for Panic and Anxiety was the second result.
15mins later, feeling a tiny bit calmer… I got another internal nudge.
“Becky, film a video about it. Share your experience. There’s a really important message here and maybe it’ll help you feel better?”
So I did, and you can watch it here:
It’s raw. It’s real. It’s mostly unedited except to tighten up the gaps & make it more watchable!
And while yes, primarily I recorded it because it helps me process my emotions but also because I believe it’s crucial that we show the reality of what it’s really like when “you” are the business.
So if you’ve ever struggled with your mental or emotional well-being f*cking up your business plans and then feeling like a failure because of it… hopefully watching this might make you feel a little less alone 💕
Messages of solidarity also welcome.
