Does feeling self-conscious mean you resist doing something that you know will do you good?

Feeling self-conscious can be about your mood or how you feel about your body, it might be about how you feel IN your body if you are working with an injury or feeling less mobile in your body. Feeling self-conscious can be about many things and it’s the mix of thoughts in your mind and feelings in your body that makes you want to avoid doing something new.

Your mind is highly intelligent and incredibly creative. You experience over 6,000 thoughts throughout the day paying attention to only a few which are often either the most unhelpful ones or the all-singing, all-dancing ones. We humans like to play to extremes. Notice I said, ‘experience’…
It’s important to consider a mental thought as something you experience, observing your thoughts and being witness to them rather than allowing your negative thinking to run the show!

Let me tell you a story… About 5 years ago I started practising mindfulness, in a small way every day because I needed something to focus my mind on and help cultivate more positive thoughts. My internal chatter had become pretty challenging and it was hard to silence the negative self-talk especially at night, I was unhappy but didn’t think I had any justification for feeling the way I did.

My own lived experience of mental illness, grief and the challenges faced by those around me are the very reason I am here today doing the work I choose to do. I changed my whole career to create Big Love Movement although I didn’t realise I’d been shifting towards this change for a long time. Throughout my life I have felt anxious, depressed, disconnected and sometimes, very lost and alone. There have been tremendous highlights along the way, inspirational experiences and people to share it all with however it is the most challenging times that nudged me to create Big Love Movement.

These are my top three breathing techniques that you can implement right now, and which take as little as five minutes of your time.