← Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Reset Overwhelm With a Simple Therapy Tool for People Pleasers & High Achievers
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Rebecca Hunter
In today's episode, you'll discover a super simple therapy tool that will help you assess your overwhelm, reground, regroup and begin again with way more energy. Welcome to Takeout Therapy, the podcast for empathic high achievers who are done with overworking, overthinking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety expert and therapist who helps high achievers find real mental calm. If you're ready to stop people ple pleasing, take control of your mental health and create real work life balance, you're in the right place. Thanks for listening. Well, hello there friend. I'm so happy you decided to stop in today. Today's episode I'm pulling from the vault. You know, I have done over 220 episodes of the podcast and this episode was maybe two years ago. Is the simplest therapy based tool for figuring out how you're doing in your life, why you might be so overwhelmed, and a great game that you can play to get yourself reset, rebalanced and ready to roll again. So I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you back here on Monday for a brand new episode. I thought I'd just do a really quick episode today to talk with you about a therapy tool that I've been using a lot in therapy lately, but also in my own life. I call this silly tool that a lot of therapists use the same concept, and maybe you already use the same concept in your life, but I call it my token rule. And here's the deal. Sometimes in life we get kind of strung out. We do too much. We're always moving from one thing to the next to the next and it can really cause our whole system to go into alarm. And we call this burnout, or we call it overwhelm, or we say I'm super stressed out. But basically what's happening is that we're using more resources to live our lives than we actually have. It's kind of like spending money we don't have. So I think this token system is really a good system to use because it's easy and it's fast and it can help you just assess where you're at in your life. And here's how you do it. So the game is this. Every day you wake up and you get a certain amount of tokens. I don't know how many you get. You get to decide. There are a lot of rules to this game and you get to decide all of them. Yeah, this is how it works. So you get so many tokens a day. Right. And every Time you give of yourself in some way or another, you spend a token. So whether that's in caring for the people in your life or doing things around your house or going to work, sometimes these things don't take a ton of tokens, right? Sometimes it's conshill. Other times we have interactions that take a lot of tokens. They take a lot of physical energy sometimes or mental and emotional energy, right? So I think of the tokens as like, this is your money to spend. These tokens are yours to spend on what you spend them on. And if you are spending tokens on things that you don't want to be spending tokens on, then it's your job to clean that up. And I think the system really helps because tokens are not infinite. We get a few every morning, but throughout the day we spend and spend and spend. They're not infinite. We don't have as many tokens as we want, which closely resembles real life, which is that we don't have as many resources as we think we ought to. Like, we don't have as much energy as we want to have. We can't engage in all the things that we think we can engage in. It's too much. We become overwhelmed. We become stressed out and, and burned out. And so when you start thinking about this in terms of this finite amount of tokens, you start to really understand there is no bank that you could go and get a loan. If you spend more than you have, you're running in a deficit, which is why you feel crappy, which is why I myself tend to get sick when I'm in my burnout cycle. I run myself into the ground and then I just get something. I pick something up, whatever, some horrible whatever that puts me down. Because then your body is like, okay, well now we have to rest because we don't have any tokens. Actually, we're in a deficit of tokens. So we will just lay here now until the tokens are replenished. See where I'm getting at? So the other part of the game is that you can replenish your tokens. And the way you do that is not by helping others and saying yes to all the things that you shouldn't be saying yes to. It's actually the opposite. Every time you choose to nurture yourself with the understanding that you have enough respect for yourself not to run yourself into the ground with the understanding that you have finite resources, you have finite energy, you have finite mental capacity, you have finite patience. If you're anything like me, Right. Like we don't have all we want of anything that's part of the game. So every time you nurture yourself and every time you give to yourself in some way that you deem is caring, nurturing or fill to your cup, a lot of people say then you can add a token and you know, you have a little bit of extra resources. But here's the thing, people aren't going to just be knocking on your door, friend, and giving you tokens because they need their own damn tokens. We're token hoggers. In this game, you are responsible for maintaining a decent level of tokens so that when the shit hits the fan, because it will, it always does. Perhaps you have a few in the bank or perhaps you know how to generate more tokens so that you have more capacity to handle life's up and downs. This is my gift to you today, this very short little introduction to the game of the token exchange of life. I don't even know how I came up with tokens. I think that there's some therapists that use spoons, but I was always like, well, what the hell do I need spoons for? Like, I don't want to carry spoons around. So me, I'm over here, I got a few tokens in my pocket and I know how to make more. How about you, how's your level of tokens feeling today? Is there anything that you can do for yourself to give you what you need? Is there any way you could possibly say no to something and save the token for something that is an absolute yes? Okay, good luck with it. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. I really appreciate you being here and doing your work. New sessions are released on Fridays and I've recently added a mini sesh on Monday morning. So be sure to subscribe and do a quick review so more people can get this kind of help. Speaking of which, if you haven't taken my free newly revamped class that helps you stop overthinking everything to death, just grab it on my website. It's@takeouttherapy.com I'd love to teach you what actually works. And remember, while takeout therapy is a great educational resource, always get the level of support you need for your situation. Head to takeouttherapy.com to stay in the loop. And until next time, take really good care of yourself, friend.