Welcome to episode 180 7 of the Smooth Stones Podcast, where we are going to talk about three ways to stop overreacting. Where I’m living now, it is spring and the trees are gorgeous. They are popping out with like these popcorn looking flowers. We’ve got cotton candy, we’ve got pink ones, we’ve got yellow, um, what do they call ’em?

Like these fire Anyways, burning bush. They’re amazing. Also, almost all of my family is suffering and having to take some allergy medication because our bodies are not happy with all of these flowers. And I did not grow up with allergies. I was just fine for most of my life. And then we lived in a place that had insane amounts of pollen.

They had a ton of like sagebrush and weeds and all these trees. And anyways. I started getting allergies and I was so annoyed and I still am every spring and fall. I think in my mind, maybe I have like allergy dysmorphia because in my mind I don’t have allergies and, but I do. And unfortunately some of my kids, which it’s, I hate to see them suffer, but they start sneezing and rubbing their eyes and so we are just up to our eyeballs in all the allergy medication and really.

It’s interesting because the pollen, these little fluffy, like yellow specks of dust from flowers are not actually dangerous to our body. It’s not gonna kill us. It doesn’t give us a disease. It’s not gonna suffocate us. But our body overreacts and our body starts to try to defend us from this pollen and.

That’s literally what allergies are, and I’m so grateful that we have modern medicine that we can help with some of the symptoms. I really wish we could get to the root cause of why our bodies overreact, but I am going to be able to help you today even though I cannot solve allergies, and I know there are people out there who have methods that seem to work, but in general, we haven’t found a cure for allergies.

I do have a bit of a cure for our own overreactions, so not our histamine response, but our emotional overreactions because this happens a lot, especially in grief. So let’s talk about it and I wanna give you some good concrete ideas, some examples, and get you going on your way to start thinking about this and start implementing.

And I do wanna start always by saying. Give yourself so much love and compassion. Sometimes like the ways we overreact are deeply built into us. Um, there’s some deep patterns, there’s some deep grooves in our mind. There’s some. You know, things that we’ve learned in order to survive that might be coming into play here.

So be really compassionate and understand this is always a journey. This is a step by step, day by day, minute by minute thing that we’re doing together. Living and being a human here on the earth. And so you don’t have to master this. And I definitely don’t want you to feel bad if you overreact, or especially if you listen to this and you’re like, yes, this sounds so good.

I totally resonate with this. And then you find yourself still overreacting. Okay, we are gonna let ourselves be human through all of this. The first thing I wanna talk about is. Watch out for defensiveness. Now again, that is what allergies are. It’s our body thinking. It needs to defend ourselves from little tiny specks of yellow dust you in your life and you can maybe, if you’re a visual person, just imagine what are these little specks and they’re not even shooting at you.

Sometimes we think it’s like arrows or like punches coming at us really fast. But I want you to think. What are the kind of little pollen dusts that are floating into your life that you feel like you have to defend against? And you might not be doing it consciously, but unconsciously. What. Are you over defending yourself from what is actually not dangerous if you take a step back?

So I will give a real common example, which is pregnant people existing in the world. We got bellies, we got babies. They’re just living their lives. We have no idea their backstory, their family, like what their deal is. But a lot of people, especially after they’ve lost a baby. They’re going to see these as danger and have an overreaction.

Now you are absolutely allowed to feel any emotion. That is okay. That is more than welcome here. In fact, I want you to feel big emotions, but. We’re talking about is when we feel defensive, it’s like, well, my friend texted me to let me know that they’re pregnant and they know how sad I am. And so now I don’t think I can be friends with them anymore and I never wanna talk to them again.

And I can’t believe they did that. And we go on and on and on, right? So what I’m saying is, can you pause? Can you take a deep breath? Can you notice? Whoa, hold up. I think I’m a little defensive here. What is going on with me? We wanna get curious, we wanna ask lots of questions. We wanna take lots of deep breaths and we wanna say, is my friend having a little tiny, cute baby, miracle in their belly?

Dangerous to me. Is it an attack on me or is it just a cute little baby in somebody’s belly? It can be hard to untangle that. And I’m not saying it’s easy to untangle that, but I am saying pay attention. ’cause I do think it’s possible to notice when you’re being defensive and when you’re overreacting.

We live in a world where things are reproducing all the time. There’s baby calves in the field. There’s baby lambs where we are. There’s probably some fun. Our neighborhood has all these stray cats. I’m sure there’s gonna be kittens running around, right? Like things reproduce. That’s not dangerous to you, but something inside of you is saying that it is.

So watch out for that when you can notice it. You can pause and you can work on healing it. Now, that’s where you might wanna come work with me, , in my program, we talk a lot about this. It’s just like recognizing what’s going on for you. What are some triggers, how we can help you work through that.

So definitely if you’re thinking about it, come on over. Talk to me. Reach out to me on Instagram. Send me an email. Uh, I would love to help you, but watch for defensiveness. And then. Give yourself a pause and recognize, maybe I’m wrong, maybe this isn’t actually dangerous, and I don’t have to have a no reaction.

So number two is get to know your grief. Grief is very raw. I always say that. It’s like all your skin throughout your body has been torn off and your nerves are just exposed and. Anything that even brushes up against you or touches you is gonna hurt. When you understand that grief heightens some of our reactions, grief heightens some of our feelings, you can stop overreacting because you can say, oh, that’s grief.

This is why when my, I started getting emails and like flyers home from my living kids about kindergarten registration, the year that my daughter who died would have been going into kindergarten. I could notice like, oh, I’m feeling a lot inside of me. I’m having a big reaction to these little reminders about kindergarten registration because my daughter would’ve been five, but.

I had to take a pause. It took me a while. I recognized what was happening. I recognized like, why am I feeling this way? This is weird. And then I was like, oh, this would’ve been her kindergarten Regi registration, and I. Because I knew and understood that grief waves can happen and that there’s no timeline, that it makes a lot of sense that this reminder and this big milestone of going to school would bring up some feelings.

I was able to calm that reaction down. I was able to do things to take care of my reaction. I was able to express it. I was able to cry. I was able to maybe, I don’t even know, I probably like maybe journaled about it, talked about it, posts about it on Facebook. Um, yeah, just do things to take care of me.

But if you don’t know it’s grief, you just keep overreacting. You just. Keep feeling terrible and then you feel terrible about feeling terrible and it just snowballs. And that’s what I want you to do is learn how to interrupt the snowball before it gets unmanageable. Uh, I was actually helping out at a school, uh, a couple months ago and we had a big snowfall and these little children.

Wanted to build some really big snow men, and they had rolled these balls and it’s like they couldn’t pick it up. They couldn’t actually do what they wanted to do because they got going a little too much and they got a little too excited and didn’t realize how heavy it was. And that’s how we are, right?

We get rolling, we get reacting, we get like spiraling and, and you know, freaking out a little bit. And all of a sudden it’s really unmanageable. I don’t want it to be unmanageable. I want you to learn the skill of pausing and recognizing this is grief. Say it out loud. Say it in your head. Say, this is grief.

This is grief. That’s why that baby shower invitation is sending me over the edge. I can bring it back. I can pull it back. I can ground myself. I can come back into myself and calm down. You don’t need to overreact when you understand grief. Grief is a very universal process. There’s a lot of similarities across any type of grief.

It can be death of a person, a pet, a loved one, a celebrity. It can be a divorce, it can be the change in a relationship. It can be moving, like there is grief in so many places when you understand that this is what we’re supposed to be doing. This is what we’re supposed to be feeling. You don’t let it get big and crazy.

Okay, and my third tip for you today is it’s not about you. Another thing about grief is it’s very, very self-centered. So as humans, we are already programmed to be self-centered because we need to survive. So we need to do what we need to do to survive. That helps us in a lot of ways. We also live in our own mind.

We live in our own body. Of course, we’re gonna be thinking about ourselves most of the time. Then you add grief. Grief is incredibly self-centered because it needs to be. Grief sometimes sets us back into that survival mode where we really do need to block out everything. In order to handle the trauma, the huge emotions, the devastation, the brain fog, like all the things that have to be done when someone dies.

It’s normal to be self-centered in grief, but understand. It’s not all about you. Life is not all about you. You are not the sun with everyone kind of going around you. Each person has their own life and we, thankfully, we all interconnect and we’re able to be in community with each other. But a lot of what I see in overreaction comes from thinking that other people should be as concerned with you as you are concerned with you.

The truth is nobody is as concerned with you as you are. Nobody, not even if you have like an overbearing mother, parent who just like is all in your business and all concerned and trying to take care of you, and really like codependent, they’re actually acting that way because of how it makes them feel, because it makes them feel better to make sure that you’re better, that you’re okay.

To take care of you. So even though it seems selfless and that they’re giving, giving, giving, giving for you, it’s actually for them. And you can also take that note if you are one that’s a little, uh, I don’t wanna say overbearing, but you know, if you’re a little into other people’s business or a lot into other people’s business, if you’re very concerned about what everyone else is doing and feeling.

You think that it’s your job to control all of that for them, uh, you’re doing that for you, not for them. Okay, so that’s another little side tip. But when you can recognize like, why am I saying this? It’s not about you. Why is this so important to keep reminding yourself? Especially in life after loss. If you find yourself overreacting and you can think of a specific thing in your life right now, like what is really bothering you?

When was the last time you felt like you overreacted or where are you just like really worked up when you remember it’s not about me? You can take that part of you that thinks other people should be catering to your emotions all the time and just let it go. When people say things, when people do things, when people don’t do things, when people don’t say things, it’s just because they’re human and they’re taking care of themselves and they’ve got a lot on their mind and it’s not about you.

And when they do things that feel maybe hurtful, honestly, it’s not about you. Right? That baby shower invite. Isn’t to hurt you or how they told you about it, or how you found out, or what order you found out in. It’s not about you. It’s about them. They get to do what they wanna do, just like you get to do what you wanna do and when you can literally just let go of the idea that it’s other people’s job to take care of how you feel.

You might get a lot of freedom. Now, I don’t wanna say that like it’s entirely your job and you’re alone in this and that. We don’t have conversations that we don’t like bring things up if they need to be brought up. I’m just saying give people grace. Notice when you’re being self-centered and it’s not a bad thing.

We’re taught so much that being self-centered is terrible. Being self-centered is natural. And especially in grief, it’s extra natural, but you still have the power within you to be intentional, to notice when you’re overreacting, to notice, when you’re making it all about you, and to just, again, pause. No judgment.

You don’t even have to change what you’re doing. You don’t have to change what you’re feeling. Just recognize and remind yourself, this is not about me. They didn’t do this to hurt me. They didn’t like all the things that run through our mind, like they don’t care about me, they don’t care about my baby, they don’t care about how I feel.

Those are lies that your brain is telling you, or maybe you’re right. They don’t care. So if they don’t care, why are you spending so much energy, feeling miserable about something that someone did or said that doesn’t even care about you? In my humble opinion, it’s a bit of a waste of our time and energy.

Now, you might have to go through those feelings. You might have to go through the process. You might have to expend some energy. I’m just saying, don’t stay stuck there. Don’t stay all worked up over someone who doesn’t care about how you feel. We don’t need to give our power away to people in our life who are like that.

I. Still think it’s better to just choose that, you know, humans are human. They make mistakes. They, they’re just going through life doing their best and I’m doing my best and love them. Give them loads of like, give compassion and leeway and be flexible, and you are gonna feel a lot better. Because it doesn’t feel good to be overreacting.

A lot of times we will end up being almost like this version of ourself that we don’t like, even in our like self-righteousness and, and feeling like, you know, it’s like we wanna blame someone else and we wanna like get all worked up. It doesn’t feel good. To continually do that, to hold onto that for a long time or to be noticing it everywhere.

’cause that’s the thing, once we get in this pattern of overreacting, especially in grief, when we’re in the pattern of like feeling like the whole world is out to get us and is hurting us and doesn’t care about us and our pain and our baby. It’s a hard cycle to get out of, so you have to learn how to pause it.

You have to learn how to take back your power and really open up, and that’s my bonus tip, is open up to the full human experience. The human experiences, we are not perfect. The people around us are not perfect. Life is not perfect. Life on earth is really hard. Sometimes we have just infinite emotions.

Available to us. I want you to feel those emotions on purpose.

That is a full human experience. We’re not supposed to be happy all the time. We’re not supposed to. Never overreact. Whatever that is. I mean, really that’s just a construct. How do we even know? It’s like a overreaction versus a, an appropriate reaction. That’s another like rabbit hole we could go down is really how we’re describing ourselves or other people.

But what I’m saying is a lot of times what I notice when we are overreacting, what we’re actually doing is avoiding what we really feel inside. It’s easier to be angry at a friend who posted their baby announcement without telling you first than it is to just miss your baby than to just be sad, than to just be devastated, than to just even be jealous, right?

You might just be jealous, but we’re not supposed to be jealous. So it’s easier to just focus on them and what they did and how they’re wrong instead of just feeling what we feel.

Anger is a secondary emotion. A lot of overreactions is actually us trying to avoid feeling, even though it feels really emotional, but we’re avoiding the root. That’s where work, trying to put this like really uncomfortable bandaid and this, you know, allergy medicine that makes us feel terrible, but kind of does the job on top of the real and true experience that we could be having if we just let ourselves feel feelings.

Instead of trying to deflect it, trying to defend ourselves and trying to pin a lot of blame on people and things around us, you have so much power. There is so much hope. In any area of your life where you feel like you’re overreacting, I just wanna leave by saying, number one, check in with your nervous system.

We always wanna check in with our nervous system. Why might this be creating a big reaction for you? And what can you do to help support and heal yourself in that? What are some patterns you might have? Some patterns of thinking they might be from a long time. They might be new since your baby died. But what are some patterns that are not serving you, that are keeping you in the defensive mode, that are keeping you overreacting?

It is a habit. We all know people, right? It’s easier to see in other people, but we all know people. We feel like everything that happens in the world is an attack on them. Like everyone’s picking on them all the time. They’re not usually the most fun to be with. Because they’re not taking accountability, right, and they can’t see that.

It’s not about them. It’s not about you. Everyone is just doing their best. So let’s take a pause. If you’ve been in this pattern, this is your reminder and you’re opportunity to pause and just say, you know what? I don’t wanna keep doing this to myself because in the end, you’re the one that hurts, right?

When you’re in your mind, can’t sleep all night thinking about all this stuff, you’re hurting yourself.

I want you to have the chance to stop, and I believe that you can if you need help. Figuring out why you’re overreacting, what the root cause is, and then healing that so that we don’t just keep putting band-aids on it. Come and talk to me. That’s what I do in my coaching program. Uh, that’s what I do and love to do, and I’m really, really good at it.

I’ve got the Mother’s Day Challenge that is starting right now. If you want in, get in there. Go in the show notes, get the link, but Smooth Stones coaching.com/mom, MOM, or just go to smooth stones coaching.com. It should be right there. Come and join me in the Mother’s Day, embracing Mother’s Day challenge.

We are gonna talk about this, how to not overreact about Mother’s Day. It’s a huge trigger for so many people. I want you in there. I’m inviting you personally. No matter where you are on your grief journey. You will learn skills and get to practice them over this next month that are gonna help you forever, that you’re gonna keep with you every day from now on, and every time there’s a grief milestone coming up, you are gonna know what to do because you join this challenge, I promise you that we’re gonna get a prompt every day for a month.

You’re also gonna get weekly. Group coaching calls, which you do not wanna miss, so go over there. But I just wanna, again, reiterate, you can stop overreacting if you’ve noticed this about yourself. Give yourself some love and then trust that we’re gonna figure this out together. I’ll see you next time.