Listen to your gut- over your guilt - to relish this season

When the going gets tough, the tough get going- And no matter what holidays you celebrate, during this next week, the going is fast and furious- just getting from work to home, from home to family gatherings or parties of friends can be a high pressure race.

And let’s face it, the pressure is on to perform- to be the perfect host, the perfect gift-chooser and gift-wrapper, the perfect employer or employee or colleague when it comes to dishing out the right gift, to be the perfect significant other or friend or parent or child or sibling who always says the right thing at the right time. Whoa- I can feel my own heart speeding and my shoulders tensing just uttering these words in my head as my fingers do the walking. Well, actually with this pressure on, my digits gave up walking- they are sprinting.

‘Tis the season- there is not doubt about it. No matter what your beliefs or what is your holiday of choice, during this season of holidays along with end of year and new year celebrations and all of the festivities and visitors- friends and family- that accompany all of this, ‘tis the season of great expectations.

Great expectations - we set them for ourselves and we set them for others. And, when we allow ourselves to slow down enough to get a more realistic view, we can usually admit that, for the most part, those great expectations are just plain unrealistic. In some instances, with weather cutting into our ability to get from here to there, with clogged arteries (I’m talking about the roadways frozen in traffic jams of holiday shoppers, not the clogged arteries created within our bodies by too many eons of holiday cheer) ensuring that we arrive late to every destination, the internal pressures naturally mount.

In such high-pressure challenges, it is natural for heartbeats to race as legs move in fast-forward. It’s also natural for our guts to wrench or to churn or to feel as if flocks of butterflies have taken up residence.

At times like this, listening to your gut, including the thunder of the wings of those ever-multiplying butterflies, may be a wiser idea than listening to your guilt.

In fact, your gut may provide just the right early warning messages to alert you that it is time to breathe, time to slow down enough to think and see straight so you can readjust the expectations to more realistic and humane level that will spare the effects of heavy doses of stress chemicals dousing your brain and body, ramping your heart up to cardiac arrest levels, clogging your arteries, and wreaking havoc on your gut during a season when you need that gut to be at its best to digest all that you throw at it- the real food and the emotional stuff, born of family and friend expectations, that gives birth to those butterflies.

The What:

On the fifth day of New You, my true self gave to me- the power to listen up to and honor the wisdom of my gut.

You are going to learn how to tune in to the messages from your gut- and to listen to and heed what they are telling you to do.

The Why Behind the Wisdom of The Gut

Okay, so you have probably had more than a few people tell you to trust your gut even in this culture when, in doing so, many of those same people will then ask you, often in front of others, why you based a decision on your gut feelings.

And I would bet, too, that there have been many situations when you have followed your own advice and benefited from the wisdom of your gut and others in which you have chosen to ignore your gut smarts and made some dumb moves that you later regretted. We can all recall those instances of looking back and wondering ‘why didn’t I trust my gut?’

From this moment on, I want you to understand that our guts are smart – they may be brilliant. And listening to the smarts coming from your gut may help you to let some of the pressure off of yourself.

I want to confirm that your gut is a valid source of intelligence and it is more than just a feeling- it is actually a reliable and valid source of wisdom. There is a true ‘smarts’ to the gut. In fact, gut IQ may rival the wisdom that streams from our brains and our hearts, according to highly esteemed researcher and expert in this field, Dr. Michael Gershon.

There is a ‘gut brain’ according to Dr. Gershon who is the research guru in this field. Dr. Michael Gershon, has shown that we actually have two brains. One brain resides in our heads and the other resides in the millions of nerve cells in our guts – and that includes the nerve cells in our esophagus (like when something leaves a bad taste in your mouth), and your stomach (remember those butterflies), small intestine and colon too. In fact, most of the naturally occurring chemicals that control the head-housed brain (neurotransmitters, hormones) also reside in these organs that we refer to as the gut. This gut brain, residing in the millions of nerve cells in the gut organs, is called the enteric nervous system.

According to Dr. Gershon, our guts may be smarter and a better read on feelings than our hearts. The gut provides a valid source of wisdom – intellectual and emotional. And it is smart enough to be a force on its own, independent from the other brain housed in your head.

The How to Harness The Wisdom of The Gut: The Winner’s Way* System to ‘REALLY DO IT!’*

Tuning in to the wisdom of your gut starts with letting go of tuning it out.

Most of us tune out the messages coming from our guts – whether it is physical distress alerting us that we are hungry or physical stomach overdrive alerting us that we are full, or full-blown shouts when our guts scream at us to halt any further food stuffs.

In some instances, in fact, let’s face it, during times of family feuds at holiday festivities, we may, in fact, choose to fill our guts as a means to ignore its messages that we are anxious or feel endangered by the daggered looks or barbed words being hurled around at family gatherings when everyone regresses to childlike rivalries.

And while I will not deny the solace and comfort of food during such stressful times- and given the abundance of really good food around during this next week, I encourage you to treat yourself to culinary delights and just darn good tastes – we can still honor the messages from our guts that go beyond food.

Gut wrenching tension, butterflies, a feeling that you simply can not stomach another nanosecond of a conversation, any other number of sensations and phrases tell us that something is not right.

Often, because these messages clearly originate in our guts, we either ignore them or we diminish their validity.

But tuning out your gut’s messages can be deadly. There are many case studies of people who felt a strange sensation that something was not right, that something was downright wrong, but ignored this message as a sensation – and were physically attacked shortly thereafter. In other instances, people have ignored a gut sense that they should make a particular choice but decided against it only to realize later that had they trusted their gut instinct- which I am now telling you is your gut intelligence- they could have created an outcome that they wanted whether it was in the financial, professional, personal or other arena of life.

TRASHIT AND PACKIT!TM – let go of the distrust of your gut and choose to listen to the messages emanating from that other brain, your gut.

‘REALLY DO IT!’ – the ball’s in your court daily play (also known as exercise)

Now here is the REALLY DO IT! DAILY CHALLENGE:

Next time you sense something is up, a message emanating from down below in your gut - STOP! Look! And Listen!

The sensation may be an uneasy feeling in your stomach, the beating wings of one butterfly and then two, a slight cramp in a corner of your stomach that starts down that path toward a full-blown fist-like tension engulfing your entire stomach, or a sensation or gut feeling that you can’t quite give words do – but you know it is there.

Stop! Take a deep breath and then another, breathing deeply on the in and out. TRASH any suspicion or distrust of the sensation. Breathe it right out of you - TRASHIT!TM

PACKIT!TM – Look and Listen – to the sensation from your gut. Breathing deeply still, simply experience the sensation. Allow it to be real. Savor it. Listen to it. What is it telling you?

Then choose to heed this wisdom – remembering that it is real, valid intelligence that may be smarter than some of our intellectual smarts and intuitions – or make a well-informed decision, using the wisdom of the gut, to do something else.

Either way, put the wisdom of the gut to use as a trustworthy source for decision-making whether it is to proceed with the plan to change marketing strategy at work or to proceed with the plan to get married or unmarried in your personal life.

Now you REALLY DO IT! – and follow-through.
It is the same tip from the other day- take a friend or relative with you on this journey.

And let me know how it went.

And tune in for the next step- beyond Re-solutions to Solutions for Life!!!

Looking forward with gratitude,
Pam Brill

* TRASHIT AND PACKIT!TM and “REALLY DO IT!” are concepts published in The Winner’s Way: A Proven Method for Achieving Your Personal Best in Any Situation (McGraw-Hill, 2004)

Come and play more with these concepts with food-for-thought for your brain at:
www.inthezoneinc.com

*Dr. Michael Gershon is the author of The Second Brain (Harper Collins, 1998)