47| Constantly Stressed? Rewire Your Thoughts & Find Peace as a SAHM
Download MP3Hi friends! Welcome to Intentional Motherhood, the podcast for already overwhelmed and exhausted Christian moms who want to create a beautiful life not by working harder or adding more to their to do list, but by aligning their energy with God through prayer, meditation, and intentional living practices. I'm your host, Kelsey Redd. Let's get started. In the last episode, we talked about this idea that everything is energy.
Kelsey Redd:All of the things that we experience as being solid are actually just a collection of atoms that are moving very coherently and in stable patterns. But still, if we get down to the atomic level, we see that most of what makes up those atoms is empty space. This is where the energy is. All of that empty space is energetic potential. And it's just waiting for instructions to be told how to organize itself in order to create something.
Kelsey Redd:So today, I want to take this a step farther into the science and a step closer into our everyday life experience by talking about our thoughts as something that our body and our nervous system are constantly responding to. When people talk about thought frequency, they're typically pointing at two different things, and they may not even realize it. One comes from a neuroscience perspective, and the other comes from a more spiritual or metaphysical language. And both are really helpful to understand what they are and what they're not. So first, from a scientific perspective, our thoughts come from neurons and neural pathways in our brain communicating through electrical signals.
Kelsey Redd:Everything that we experience in our mind and even in our heart is electrical signals. When a group of neurons fire together, they create patterns that eventually we call brainwaves. We can see these patterns shifting. When you monitor your brain, you can see that you may be in a delta wave, or a beta wave, or alpha wave. These are different thought patterns and frequencies that your brain is experiencing, depending on rest or wakefulness or the way you're thinking.
Kelsey Redd:But even deeper than that, they're also connected to chemical reactions which we experience as emotions. When we're stressed, when we're rushing, or multitasking, our brain is often in a fast and high alert state. Whereas when we're calm or reflective or present, our brain naturally slows down and we shift into a different brainwave pattern. And it's not to say that some are good and others are bad, they're just different internal environments that are affecting your entire nervous system and biology. And what's most important to understand is that our brain and our body like to find homeostasis.
Kelsey Redd:They like to find very familiar states and then spend all of our time coming back to those states. So if we're living most often in a state of pressure or stress or mental noise, our system starts to treat this as the normal default. That's because our nervous system is designed to repeat what it knows and what it's familiar with. But do you see how living with certain thought patterns, creating certain thought frequencies and communicating that to the rest of your body and nervous system can create an experienced reality, an external experience that is actually being shaped by the repeated thought patterns. These repeated thought patterns strengthen our neural pathways in the brain.
Kelsey Redd:The more often you think the same thought, the easier it is for your brain to return to that same pattern automatically. This is why change feels hard. It's not because you lack discipline, it's because your system is designed to be efficient. It repeats what is familiar. I like to use the analogy of a freeway versus a dirt road.
Kelsey Redd:The thoughts that you think most often create a freeway of high speed transportation. Those thoughts jump on the freeway and transport as fast as possible. However, when we're starting to try to change our thoughts, it feels like we're driving on a dirt road. It feels bumpy and clunky and windy, and it doesn't feel efficient because we haven't created the path, the smooth and efficient path. But the more we practice a new neural pathway, the more defined that trail or that road becomes, and eventually the freeway of old familiar thoughts will start to disintegrate and that will become less efficient and the new path that we've been practicing will become our more efficient freeway of thought patterns.
Kelsey Redd:So this is why you can sometimes wake up and feel like you're already stressed or feel like you're already behind in all the things that you have to do today before the day has even started. It's your brain predicting what it's going to experience based on the patterns that it has been practicing before and what it's used to experiencing. But I want you to think of your mind like a radio. The radio isn't creating the stations, but it is tuning into stations. All the stations exist out there at the same time, and you have to choose to tune in to whichever one you want to fill the room, whichever sound you want to fill the room.
Kelsey Redd:If your radio dial is constantly set to the station for stress and scarcity, that becomes the soundtrack of your day and eventually your life. But if you turn the dial a little bit and tune your radio to the station of calm and trust and abundance, then that becomes the external circumstance that you start to experience on a daily basis. This is how your thoughts and emotions work. They tune your attention. They shape what you notice and how you interpret events.
Kelsey Redd:And of course, then how you respond to events. Everything is a reflection of our internal experience. The world is a mirror. Over time, we start to experience whatever station we're tuned into as reality itself. If you're constantly looking for negatives, you will come to the point where you solely and truly experience a very negative world and that's the world you live in.
Kelsey Redd:On the other hand, if you intentionally focus on positivity and things to be grateful for and the abundant mindset, you will find that you live in an abundant world with beautiful things to be grateful for every day. And that reality will become stronger and stronger as you continue to shape it. So this is where we start to get into the spiritual language that often talks about frequency and vibrations in the sense that your internal mental state organizes your outer experience from the inside using the mental frequencies that you tune into to send instructions to the energy around you. One of the most amazing ways to see this principle in action is through Doctor. Imoto's water crystal science experiment where he took water molecules and he froze them but he spoke different words to the different containers of water.
Kelsey Redd:Some he said really kind things like thank you expressing gratitude, expressing love and compassion, or even just playing beautiful classical music. To other water containers he spoke really negative or hateful words. And when the water froze he found something incredible. The water that had had beautiful, kind, loving words spoken to it had frozen into gorgeous snowflake like water crystals. Whereas the water that had these negative words spoken to it had formed disorganized and distorted clumps of ice that had no coherence.
Kelsey Redd:Now, if the words that are spoken to a container of water can affect the geometrical organization of those water crystals when they freeze, think about how the words that we speak to ourselves in our mind day after day affect our body which we know is actually comprised of mostly water. This is why understanding that our thoughts have energetic frequencies is so important And this is why I'm teaching you guys these kinds of principles so that you can understand that if you have, if you're stuck in these neural pathways or these thought frequencies that are creating a reality of negativity and stress and pressure and fatigue and exhaustion. Sometimes we feel like all we need to do is work harder, push through, get more done. If I can just have more time to do all the things I need to do, then finally the pressure will let off. But actually we have to start understanding that it works in the opposite direction.
Kelsey Redd:Rather than trying to work harder to solve our problems, we need to actually go inside, change our mental reality, change the frequency and energy of our mind, align it to the life we want, which is a life of peace and calm and presence. And then from the inside out, create that reality. If our minds are tuned to the station of peace and gratitude, then we're gonna go about our day in a very different way. We still have to get all the things done. We still have to take care of our kids.
Kelsey Redd:We still have to run our businesses, but we do it from a place of abundance rather than waking up and saying, I'm already behind. There's not enough time. I can't get it all done today. If we wake up in that mindset of scarcity, what do you think your day is gonna look like? It's gonna look like not enough time, stressed out, frustration.
Kelsey Redd:But if we intentionally change our thoughts, use practices like prayer and meditation to actually build mental muscles and spiritual muscles to create an abundant mindset of waking up in the morning and saying, I have more than enough time to do everything that I need to do today. Or even, I'm grateful to wake up to have a day to spend with my children. Then that creates a whole different reality and that changes the way we show up without necessarily having to do anything extra or work harder or force things that feel full of pressure and stress. I want you guys to start to understand that the hustle culture tells us that you just have to do more, do more, do more, work harder to get what you want. And what I'm trying to tell you is surrender more, trust in God more, rest in abundance, and then experience the life that you were wanting to create.
Kelsey Redd:This week's meditation will be a companion to this episode so that you can actually put this into practice. But for now, I encourage you to just be aware of your thoughts. Start noticing what thoughts that you have first thing in the morning when you wake up. Start noticing the thoughts that repeat the neural pathways that are the freeways for you and start to notice what new road you would like to build, what new pathway you would like to build so that it becomes automatic for you and start letting go of some of those automatic thoughts that are not serving you and start changing your thought frequencies to be more aligned with love and peace and trust and abundance. Even if it feels unnatural at first, just know it's because you're taking the path less traveled.
Kelsey Redd:But as you practice, it will become more natural and it will become more automatic. U. S. Anderson, one of my favorite authors that you guys are going to hear me reference all the time, talks about doing a thirty day mental detox. And he describes it as where for thirty days you work intentionally to stop any negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts and to just see how your life changes in those thirty days.
Kelsey Redd:You may not be ready for such an extreme mental detox exercise, but just for the next twenty four hours or just for the next week, Pay attention to what negative thoughts are most automatic to you and see if you can start choosing a different pathway, putting a stop to the negative thoughts and replacing them with a positive high frequency thought that will help you create the life that you want. If you found any value in this information or these practices, don't forget to rate and review the podcast, like and subscribe and share the show with someone else who could benefit from it. I appreciate you being here with me and I will see you next time on Intentional Motherhood.
