Hormones and Thoughts

I was having a conversation with a past client recently. She was saying how she had just been feeling down for a couple of days, but she didn’t know why. She didn’t think that she was thinking thoughts that were making her feel down, she thought that she just was having a couple down days.

I reminded her that we have so many thoughts a day that it isn’t possible to be aware of each and every one. Our brains are like well oiled machines, and the majority of the thoughts that we think are just on default. We don’t even recognize that we are having them. 

When our hormones are off, of course it’s easier to have darker thoughts and heavier feelings. This is where depression and anxiety, especially postpartum, come into play.

It becomes easier to get stuck in these thought loops and believe them to be true, because they feel so true.

But when we blame it all on our hormones, that leaves us feeling like a victim. That’s where we think we have no control over how we feel, because it’s our hormones that are causing us to feel this way.

When we don’t have control over something, it leads us to not do anything about it. When we don’t do anything about it, we stay stuck in our patterns.

We could also decide that hormones are what they are, and still take responsibility for how we think and feel. There are things that we can do to help our hormone health – whether it’s working with a naturopath, getting bloodwork done, watching our diet, etc – but hormones are also a part of life. We are meant to have ebbs and flows of hormones depending on what stage of life we are in.

There is a purpose for these hormonal changes.
They aren’t a problem.

This is where we can have compassion and understanding for where we are at. It also puts us back in charge of how we feel.

Being in charge of how we feel is very different from judging these dark thoughts and feelings that we have. It's very different from judging ourselves for thinking them - for “being this way”.

Many times this is why we don’t want to look at what’s going on inside of us – we’re so used to blaming things outside of our control, that when we take that blame off of them, then we begin to blame ourselves instead.

When we decide that we are always responsible for how we are thinking and feeling, we choose deliberately what is happening. We accept the negative thoughts and feelings that we have, and allow them to be here because we know that this is part of being a human.
And acceptance, as we know, is one of the main foundations for change.
We can’t change what we aren’t aware of, and we definitely can’t change what we are resisting.

Which one do you need to focus on this week? Is it beginning to take responsibility and let go of blame?
Or do you need to stop resisting and judging, and begin to have more compassion and understanding?

Start with recognizing where you are at, and just being with it.
That in itself goes a long ways.

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