Let's be honest, being super positive all the time kind of feels like this weird online cult. Harsh? Maybe. True, also maybe? In this week's podcast, I'm talking about why you don't have to be so positive all the time, the harm in trying to constantly seek happiness, the BIGGEST myths about happiness and positivity, and a solid 4-step process to cultivate more feel-good-ness in your life!

You may notice that there’s often a constant push toward positivity, endless happiness, and seeing the “bright side.” But what if all this focus on positivity is actually limiting our experiences? In this episode, I explore the pressure to be relentlessly happy and why I’m choosing not to chase happiness anymore. Let’s dig into why it's perfectly okay to feel negative emotions and experience life in all its messy, beautiful reality.

The Pressure to Be “Happy”

We all know the feeling: smiling through frustration, sharing only our “good side” on social media, or hearing phrases like, “It’ll all work out” or “You should be more positive.” It’s as if we’re not allowed to be anything but happy, which can become isolating when life doesn’t feel bright. But here’s the truth: humans are meant to feel a whole range of emotions, and suppressing negative feelings actually leads to more problems down the road.

Why Constant Positivity Can Be Harmful

The rise of positive psychology and social media culture can make us feel like we’re expected to be happy all the time. But when we only focus on “good vibes,” we’re denying the real and valuable role of emotions like anger, sadness, and frustration. According to Mark Manson, “Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a solution to life’s problems.” By trying to avoid negative emotions, we’re missing the chance to learn from them, grow, and become more resilient.

Myths About Happiness and Positivity

Here are some common myths about happiness that hold us back from fully experiencing life:

Myth: If you have something good, you can’t have something bad.
Reality: You can have gratitude and still experience frustration. Life isn’t all-or-nothing.
Myth: If it won’t matter in five years, it shouldn’t matter now.
Reality: Sometimes small, frustrating things add up and deserve attention, even if they aren’t “life-changing.”
Myth: Choosing happiness is easy.
Reality: Choosing happiness is complex and doesn’t mean suppressing other emotions.

By busting these myths, we can stop putting unnecessary pressure on ourselves to “always be happy.”

An Alternative to Gratitude Lists: The Effort List

Sometimes gratitude lists don’t resonate, especially when we’re processing difficult emotions. Here’s a four-step “Effort List” approach to help you address those tough feelings in a healthy, productive way:

Write an F-it List: List everything that’s bothering you. No censoring. This lets you release negative feelings without guilt.
Cross Off Immediate Let-Go Items: Identify things that, after acknowledging, you can release. The act of crossing off items can feel freeing.
Highlight What’s Stuck: Circle or highlight things that are still weighing on you.
Create a Sub-List of Actionable Steps: Pick the top three “stuck” items and outline actions to address them. This helps you move from overwhelm to empowerment.

Final Thoughts

Embracing all emotions, rather than striving for endless positivity, leads to a more balanced and fulfilling life. By honoring your true feelings, you’re allowing for genuine happiness when it arises—and letting yourself be human along the way.

Memorable Quotes

Resources Mentioned:

You are listening to episode seven of the Mindful Productivity podcast. And today I'm getting a little bit controversial. Oh, my God. Not really, but a little bit. I'm going to be talking about why you don't have to be so damn positive all the time and why am no longer seeking happiness. Stay tuned.
Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me. As we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live.
And it all starts now for my entire life. I wouldn't say that I'm a pessimist, but I would say that I'm more of a realist my entire life. I've just been really, really honest about how I feel at any given moment. And I'm very, very authentic at any given time. And I also have the sense of being able to kind of read people. And if someone comes up to me and I'm like, How's it going. And they're like, I'm doing great, I'll be like, you feel like shit, don't you?
I'll just call it out, call it out for what it is. And people have always told me that it's kind of like they love it or they hate it. I have a lot of friends who say, Sarah, I really love that you don't sugarcoat anything. And then sometimes I have people that are like.
Who do you think you are?
You can't just walk around saying things that are true. And so I mean, you can't please everybody, please all, please.
None.
Right. But the point is that a lot of people expect us to always be positive. And I actually got in trouble semi in trouble when I was 16, and I had my first job at the dry cleaners, all these customers would come in, and they'd be like, How's it going? And I'd be like, oh, it's not so great. And my manager was like, you can't actually be honest with people. You just need to say good and carry on. And it was really interesting because I knew that.
But I always am kind of, like, rebellious and stubborn. And I kind of wanted to challenge that. And I think in a lot of ways I want to challenge that now on a deeper level, in a deeper way, because we expect everyone around us to constantly be walking around almost like these, like, Stepford wife robots, like, oh, I'm fine. Everything's fine. Have you seen that meme where the dog is in this burning building, and he's just drinking coffee. And he's like, It's fine. Everything's fine. Sometimes I feel that way in my life.
And with all these positivity quotes, and there's all this research for positive psychology and it's amazing, right? But it's almost been taken to this extreme where we have to be so happy and positive all the time. And then women are always told to smile. Are you smiling? Smile more like, no, that's not our job. And I think too, it doesn't help with social media. It doesn't help that we get a lot of likes or loves or a lot of attention when we are being really positive or it's almost kind of this positivity porn.
It's like I'm going through something really hard in my life, but I'm going to be positive about it and, like, seriously, more power to you. But let me take a quick segue and talk about something real quick. So I think I've mentioned before that when I was 23, I lost my dad. He died of heart failure, complications, all kinds of stuff. Anyway, I've grieved through it. I'm now able to talk about it without crying and smearing my mascara. And I'm in no way belittling the experience.
But here's something that happened to me when it happened. I suddenly had a lot of eyes on me. I was young, 23. It's a younger age to lose a parent, and it was awful. And it was devastating. And I went through a lot of shock and grief and all kinds of things. And I'm sure I'll go deep more deeply into this in another podcast episode. But all of a sudden, I felt all this pressure to be positive. I would look up all these quotes, like one quote that actually really helped me was something along the lines of we must embrace pain and use it as fuel for our journey ahead.
Right? But I almost took it to this extreme, and I was constantly posting on Facebook. I was constantly going on runs and really channeling my grief into energy to better my health, which was great. But it turned into this marathon of trying to impress other people or make people believe that even though this tragic thing had happened to me and my family, I was still going to be super positive about it. I look back at my Facebook post from around that time, and it almost makes me gag because it's like I didn't hold space, really, truly hold space, to feel my feelings, to feel upset, to feel negative.
And that all came back about five years later when I fell into, like, the deepest, darkest depression of my life. And I'll go into that another time as well. But the point is that we are as a society. It's like we're so scared of talking with other people about negative feelings or negative emotions because that brings up those feelings in ourselves. And we don't know collectively as a society, how to deal with that. Like how you deal with that personally in your own personal life. You may have a really good grasp on that, but there's still this constant pressure.
It's like Pinterest pressure to live this life where we are always constantly happy. And so today I want to talk about that. And I'm actually going to be referring back to one of my most popular blog posts all about why you don't have to be so positive and why I no longer focus on gratitude list, and I will link that to blog post in the show notes. But I am going to be making a lot of reference to it because it's gold guys. Like, I wrote some good stuff in there, and I really want to start there and talk about this whole idea of Positivity and how it can actually damage how we feel and how we are able to handle various emotions within our lives.
So, like I mentioned, like, most people like you, I'm sure we've all been through a slew of ups and downs. We've had horrible experiences. We've had terrible times. We've had really low lows. Maybe we've had some really high highs. But what I've noticed something. I've noticed this about the way others treat me or have treated me through all these things. And maybe this is something you've witnessed as well or experienced is how we react to others. And we do this, too. When people aren't being super positive, super grateful, and they're not, like, spreading light and love all over the place.
We almost have this culturally societally based visceral reaction to negative things. Like, I remember when I first moved across the country and I didn't like where I was living, and I was just really honest about it. I wasn't like, every day, like, but when people would be like, do you like it? I'd be like, no.
And they'd be like, Well, that's just your mindset. That's just something you need to work on.
That you need to be more grateful. And yeah, okay. But the thing is that sometimes we just don't like things, and that's okay. That's okay. And you don't always have to Bloom where you're planted you guys. Oh, my gosh. I hate that quote so much here's. Why? Because if the soil is crap and the stuff around you is not serving you, it doesn't matter. You're not going to be able to balloon because you're not getting the nutrients you need, so to speak. Right? That's my little parallel point is there's all these, like, and I'm not dissing stuff, like, there's organizations now and websites devoted to good and positive only stories.
I think that's so needed, especially in the times we're in. And you see a lot of these, like, good vibes only thing. But here's the danger with that. When we only want to accept one emotion or one feeling, we are not setting ourselves up, and we're not preparing ourselves for when we have any feeling. Here's the actual problem. Here's the issue. I have it's that we've taken a full swing into a dangerous territory with Positivity because there's a sense of safety and comfort in only listening to the good, only focusing on the positive.
And quite frankly, in doing this, a lot of people are avoiding the negatives. They're avoiding what's actually happening and sometimes even avoiding the actual reality of things. So I want to quote Mark Manson in his book The Settler of Not Giving Enough, and he says Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a solution to life's problems. And I think that hits the nail right on the head. So chances are that you've experienced this, too. If you don't post something super positive or in line with the mainstream happiness, then suddenly you feel almost like you're not getting a whole lot of support.
If you're real about something, if you express frustration about something, people get uncomfortable, people go, oh, well, it'll work out. Or let's just focus on the good or let's talk about something else. And the thing is that that really feels limiting to me. I want to be able to hold space for anything I experience because if I suddenly just reject any uncomfortable or negative feeling, that's no way to live that's like because you're not going to be able to deal with things and we Canva compartmentalize everything forever.
I want to list off some quotes, mantras that you may have heard when you are struggling or you're feeling frustrated. People mean the best. I think when I say this, but it's things like, look at the bright side or this won't matter in five years. So don't worry about it now, or you should be more positive or you really have nothing to complain about compared to this person. You should be grateful for what you have. And all of these comments tend to come from a really good place, and sometimes they can be really humbling.
Sometimes when I'm having a really grabby day and I hear and I remember like people are dying, it's like, okay, suddenly I'm glad that I have these problems, right. But even though these comments come from a good place and bring up a lot of good points, let's kind of examine the root a little bit more of why they exist. So here's the thing. Here's the truth. These statements are ego driven. And what I mean by that is we typically want other people to feel better, and this may sting a little, but it's not because of their situation, but more often because their negativity or the ways in which they are sharing their personal experience is uncomfortable to us.
Soak that in I know it stings a little bit, right. It's not fun to swallow, but it's kind of true, even when we think that we're saying something to help someone else. A lot of times we're saying something to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable now, to come back to when I was 23 and I just lost my dad and I put all of my energy into losing £50 into being the most positive, inspirational person I could be. It worked I kept thinking, I am choosing to be happy.
I am choosing it every day, and it worked for a while. Kind of here's the problem. The trouble began when I realized that I was actually suppressing certain emotions. I was dealing in quotations with my grief instead of experiencing it and allowing it because what happened is all these healthy distractions that I needed at the beginning of my grief when it's so overwhelming and overbearing, like, you can't sit with it, I'd go running. But then even though these things were healthy, it turned into an escape.
So instead of actually sitting with my emotions and sitting with my grief, I'd be like, Bella, I just can't think about it. And I'd put on some techno and go running. And so things started happening. The first couple of times. I was back from staying with my mom, and I was done with my bereavement leave from work. I would break out in hives any time I was alone. And this was from stress and grief. And I had to take Benadryl, and I had to keep looking at Pinterest quotes, and I ended up having such extreme stomach pain that I had to go to the doctor and I couldn't eat anything.
And I look back at this now and I go, you know, I can see how this was a manifestation of not really dealing with certain emotions. I don't bring this story up to make my past self feel bad. I'm not trying to shame myself because I had to go through this experience. I had to experience it for myself, but it does bring up a really good point. And here's the thing about human emotions. They exist. And one kind of a human emotion isn't any better than any other emotion.
Also, all of them are fleeting now. They may sometimes last for a matter of hours, or you can feel that way for weeks on end kind of. But they are fleeting. So when we say things like happiness is a choice, it's kind of silly, because in a lot of ways, that choice often results in the denial of other emotions that are present. Now, I had someone recently say, Well, actually, I do believe that happiness is the choice because it's a choice to hold space for all emotions and happiness, too.
Okay, sure, I like that reframe. But at the core, I think a lot of people don't realize that in order to be happy, that doesn't mean suppressing other emotions also, too. I just want to say that it's a lot easier to be and feel happier when you realize that you don't have to be happy all the time. In fact, humans, by our very nature, are not designed to feel any one emotion constantly. It kind of takes the pressure off a little bit, doesn't it? I mean, choosing to be happy.
It's kind of a lot like saying, holding your breath is a choice. Like, yeah, you can hold your breath right now. You can hold your breath anytime when you're sad, when you hear something you don't like when you stub your toe. When someone dies. It's always your choice to do so, but you're also cutting off your oxygen supply and you can't hold your breath forever. So there are some great ways to reframe things, and gratitude plays an important role in creating more sustainable happiness in our lives.
But if it's done in a way that excludes all of our other endless human emotions and experiences, then we're really doing ourselves a disservice. It's really hard to run, for example, while holding your breath. And it's really hard to move through grief, to adapt, to change and work through frustration. If you try to sugarcoat it with striving to choose happiness over giving yourself permission to feel various emotions, thoughts and feelings. So my husband and I move a great deal. I've moved. I think it's even more now than 17 times in the past ten years, and every time we experience change in general, I'm talking about everyone now.
Anytime we remove someone from our lives, add someone new. Meet someone new. Try something new. Start a new job, move to a new part of the country or out of the country, for that matter, our mind, our body and our soul. They all need time to adjust. Even if you never move, life is going to present situations and circumstances that put you outside of your comfort zone. And when those things happen and all you're hearing from everyone else is be more positive or keep your newsfeed clear of negative things, it becomes increasingly isolating and depressing to try and navigate this new place.
If you're not able to express openly that you're frustrated or that you're angry or that you're displeased without judgment, it's really hard to adapt. It's really hard to move into that space of awareness and acceptance. In fact, I would argue that we can't really, truly bring ourselves to acceptance of something frustrating and bring more happiness into our lives. If we don't allow ourselves to vent and to be frustrated and to express those things. So I see this happen often. People are posting the good things on social media and they're never sharing the bad, but not just on social media, but also in real life.
We have this belief. I think that people will only value our existence or welcome our presence if we're always positive. If we never complain, if we always have something good to share and bring to the conversation and think about it too, think about the people that you think of and you're like, oh, Cindy, she's great. She never has a bad day. She's always turning things around and that's great. But there's also something to be said about just being real with our emotions and really giving ourselves and allowing ourselves to feel how we feel.
So here's a quote that I say often, and it's that true happiness isn't the act of choosing to be happy. It's the art and allowance of accepting human emotions, observing them and being okay with them being a part of our lives because emotions are beautiful signs and signals from our bodies and our minds, and they are letting us know when boundaries are being pushed that we didn't know existed. Right. And I talk about this a little bit in the couple of episodes back and how to establish clear personal boundaries.
So emotions. They also alert us to pain that still needs to be taken care of mended. They remind us that suffering and sadness are just as much a part of existing as joy, compassion, and love. Let's talk about some myths when it comes to happiness and positivity and life in general.
We'Re going to bust myths now. Myth busting time. Myth number one, if you have something good, you can't have something bad.
Okay, here's the thing about this myth. Just because you have things to be grateful for doesn't mean you can't have things that feel off or upsetting or uncomfortable or not aligned with what you truly want.
Myth number two, if you have something that someone else doesn't, you should never complain.
Okay, here's the thing. After losing my dad, I had people apologize to me when they complain or mention their alcoholic father or the lack of relationship they had with their dad. They'd say things like, oh, crap. I'm sorry. Here I am complaining. I'm about my dad and he's still alive. And here's the thing I would say, just because your dad is still alive doesn't mean that you can't experience grief from your relationship or lack of relationship with him. And it also doesn't mean that your feelings aren't valid.
A lot of times we think we play this kind of comparison game that who has the worst experience and therefore their feelings are valid and anyone else's aren't. And I'm going to call BS on that. Here's.
Myth number three, the best way to feel better is to focus on the positive.
Okay, I've talked about a little bit about this before, but while there are solid and scientifically founded ways to create neural pathways in our brains that habitually lean toward the positive, this is called neuroplasticity. The only way out of things is also through them. So your broken leg is not going to heal itself by merely wishing it to do so. Although maybe that would help heal it faster, right? Who knows? But incorporating the positive can definitely boost your experience. But focusing on the positive and ignoring the rest takes away the experience of learning how to cope, learning how to adapt and improve on handling difficult emotions and circumstances.
There's a great book by Susan David called Emotional Agility, and she talks more about the tyranny of her of positivity there, and I'll link that in the show notes here's.
Myth number four, if you're not happy, something is wrong with you.
There's such a big push for happiness these days. There's endless books on how to be happier and how to be a certain percentage happier how to be happier in different locations. And while I don't discredit the merit within these books and that there are many of those things, do, in fact, help and improve our lives, it can start to make you feel like there's something wrong with you if you're not happy or when you're not happy. I mean, how often do you hear your own self saying?
I just feel so off. I don't know what's wrong with me or what is wrong with me. I don't feel happy today. Like, what a miserable question to ask yourself. We don't ask ourselves why we're not feeling angry. We don't ask ourselves why we're not crying, but for some reason we expect ourselves to be happy all the time while we don't expect ourselves to be any one other emotion all the time. And also big hint here, there's nothing wrong with you. You're a human being who is a human being feeling and experiencing.
And here's the thing. I'm guilty of this, too. We assume that feeling upset or irritable or aggravated or less than stellar means we're doing something wrong. And I have so much to be grateful for. How in the world could I ever be feeling anything but happy? And there's things to consider, too, like, yes, we're going to feel more irritable if we eat a bunch of sugar or we don't drink enough water and get enough sleep. Right? Like those not feeling our optimum selves. That can definitely be a sign that something else is off.
But here's the big takeaway is that happiness is an emotion, not a destination, because if you're striving for endless happiness and in doing so, in fact, it's going to make you more unhappy because being in denial that other emotions and human experiences exist will make you endlessly miserable. Here's myth number five.
If you're not happy, you're choosing it.
I really don't know if there's a sentiment I hate more than choose happiness. And I know I've already talked about this in this episode. It just sounds so easy, so fluffy and so naive. And I'm sure people will disagree with me. Maybe you even do. I'd love to hear what you have to say about it. But here's the thing. I know there are ways to manifest abundance and happiness, but if you think for one moment that if you're not happy, it's always your choice. You're forgetting about the fact that the world also does happen to you.
And yes, I'm pushing back on this. I've read endless books about how the universe is always happening for us, and shifting your perspective can make a huge difference, and they truly believe in manifesting things. I've manifested things in my own life. However, a lot of people take this to another extreme where they think that if anything bad happens at all it's their fault or that they've attracted it somehow it's this self fulfilling prophecy is a hell of a lot different than tragedy, psychopaths and circumstances that flat out suck.
In other words, thinking you can't do something and then not trying is a way of attracting result or a lack of one, whereas someone being an asshole or hitting your car is a circumstance and an event. I think you get what I'm saying here, and this could be a whole other episode, too. But my point is that we cannot choose our emotions. What we can do is experience them and then choose how to respond to them instead of reacting to them. It's a lot like choosing what thought patterns we're going to accept and sit with for longer periods of time and which ones we're going to open the door and say, hey, you're free to go and flow and leave and venture out into the world without me.
All these thoughts, emotions, they happen, but we get to choose how we react to them. So in a nutshell, I'm arguing that you cannot choose happiness, but you can choose how you respond to emotions that lead to a more fulfilling life. It's a matter of prolonging a state of mind when we feel good and observing, resolving and letting go of things when they don't serve us. So one thing Brian Hanson says, who wrote Buddha's Brain, and he talks more about neuroplasticity in there. It's a great read, great reference tool.
I highly, highly recommend. It is that if you are experiencing a happy experience, a positive moment, let yourself sit with it like, so get in as if you're eating a bite of chocolate cake and you're just savoring the moment like, oh my gosh, this is so good. Do that when you experience happy thoughts and you will in fact, feel happier, because here's the truth, too. And here's a moment where maybe you can choose happiness, right? It's when you are experiencing a happy moment, it's being able to really savor it.
And I know it sounds like I'm kind of contradicting myself here, but I think you understand what I'm saying. There are things that are going to happen to us, and then there's how we respond. So when something good happens, if you can really sit with it, and soak it in, then amazing things are going to happen, and we are just wired to focus on the bad things and focus on the dramatic things and blow it out of proportion, sometimes in our heads. And that's why sometimes we want to avoid negative feelings because we don't know how to sit with them and let go of them.
And we don't always practice really sitting with happy thoughts, with joy, with feeling really good. So you can shift that you cannot reject uncomfortable thoughts but not cling to them, not feed them, not fuel them. Right? And then you can really fuel those moments of joy in those moments of when you feel good. So I've got one more myth here that I want to cover myth number six. If it won't matter five years from now, it shouldn't matter now. I had no idea I could do such a good transatlantic accent.
It's probably horrible. I always joke that I can do an impression of Samuel L. Jackson from Snakes on a Plane. No, I can't. I'm not even going to do it here. I won't embarrass myself. I always do it in front of my husband, and he's like, Please stop. So I think I'm way better at impressions than I actually am. So thanks for listening. Here's the thing. I've started saying this more lately, and then I realized how crappy it can sound on the other end. So the whole, if it won't matter for five years, it shouldn't matter now.
There are definitely things that don't need to be complained about small things, things that you can choose to let go of. That don't involve ignoring signals from your psyche, like some jerk cutting in front of you in line. But then there are also things that in the present moment really do suck. And that do require time to process, and sometimes means sharing that experience. And that becomes a lot more difficult when others tell us we shouldn't be feeling or expressing it sometimes, too, depending on what you're going through or how tough or stressful your week has been.
There may be a time when something small does bother you a lot more than it normally would, and that's okay, too real quick, too. I want to call something out. So the act that people do, the things that people say, when people just blanket statements say, be more positive or think about how you attracted this into your life. Or my all time favorite is, I'm so sorry for your loss, but they are in a better place now that has the definition and the name, and I want to call it out, and it's called lightwashing or white washing, and it's pretty crappy.
It's a pretty crappy way of victim blaming, especially when people are going through heavy emotions, tragic events, or need time to process. And a lot of times people say these things and they're not trying to be that way. But I bring this up, not because I think people that say these cliche statements not that they're bad people, but because I think we need to raise awareness that there's a collective fear again of the negative, when really it's just a human experience, and it's not all that bad.
I've said some of these things before, like, fear doesn't serve us when really it actually does. So does guilt. So does anger, resentment. And so on. The key here is knowing how to observe them, how long to stay with them and learning how to navigate them instead of letting them take over the steering wheel. So today we talked about why you don't have to be so positive all the time. I also talked about some of the biggest myths when it comes to happiness and positivity, but I also want to talk a little bit about gratitude lists and why it's not something that I am completely focused on all the time.
I still practice gratitude. I still sit longer with happiness and joy and those feelings that really make me light up. But sometimes I don't feel like writing a gratitude list, or sometimes I just don't know how to start or finish a sentence that says I'm grateful for it doesn't kind of flow from me as well. And sometimes I can't get to this place of gratitude because I'm still frustrated and I'm still in this mindset of disappointment, of upset, of feeling misunderstood either by myself or other people or the situation.
So what do you do instead of making gratitude list or what can you do before you're able to get to that point? So instead of sugar coding everything with positivity or ignoring the difficult things, I get real with the reality of them, and I want to share my process with you. So here's the process, and it's something I have actually been doing since I was about ten years old. I have notebooks full of this, and I've kind of developed and kind of fine tuned it into a more adult type of process that I like to Journal through.
So there's four steps in here, and the first step is to write an effort list and this complete process. There's a complete worksheet that you can download for free. It's in the podcast show notes. You can always find those at myselprodactivityblog. Compodcast. The first step is to write an effort list, and sometimes these lists get really long. So what I do here is a list of all the things that really bother me, things I can't seem to get unanimous about the things I wish I would change, the things I don't like about my current situation, my new place that I'm living, or whatever it is how I'm being treated.
I mean, I go wild here, no apologies, no worry over feeling guilty about being so negative. I just let it all out. And you guys, it feels so good to put that pen to paper and just let it flow and there's, like an immediate release. I immediately start to feel better. So that's step one, step two, is to then cross off the things that I can immediately let go of after acknowledging them. So after going through this process, like I said, I already feel lighter. I feel more at ease.
And after a few minutes of huffing and puffing, I have a solid awareness of what I can really let go of and what really doesn't matter. So in other words, things I don't have to care about as much or give enough about. As I always say, I don't have to give any more mental energy to and that act of just physically crossing those things off that big list really does feel like I'm letting them go. And maybe for you, that means of writing them on post it notes and crumbling them up and throwing them in the trash, hopefully recycling them or burning them in a fire like whatever it is that makes you feel like I am truly letting this go here's.
Step three, you are then going to highlight the things that are still there that still bug you. So I go through and I'm like, these things are still bothering me like I can't let them go, and I just highlight them. And I bring awareness to the fact that they still bother me. They're still taking up energy in my body. They're still mentally taking up space in my mind. And so then in the fourth step, I make a sub list for what I can do about these things that are still stuck, these highlighted things.
And from here, I take the top three things that are really presenting off or really frustrating me that I still really am giving enough about. And I write down ways that I can feel better or things that I can do to take action toward improving them. So this does a few things. It puts me back into a state of empowerment. It gives me the power of choice and decisiveness, which reduces overwhelm, and it shows me what's possible and takes away most feelings of this beach for helplessness.
And I have a feeling this exact process will do the same for you so you can grab your free. I call it the Effort Process Guide. You can grab it for free. It's a three page PDF that you can fill out online or download and fill in on your computer or print off rather. And yeah, you can grab it there. So thank you so much for listening today. It's been so fun. I love doing these podcasts. If you've been enjoying the show, please leave a review.
Leave a comment. Share it with a friend. The more people that view this, I think the better. So thank you so much for being here and enjoy the Effortless Process Guide, which you can find at mindful. Productivity Podcast podcast.