Counterculture Health

Intro: 00:00

Welcome to the Counter Culture Health podcast. I'm doctor Jen McWaters. And I'm coach Kaitlyn Reed. We're here to help high achieving women overcome mental blocks, find freedom from anxiety, create an abundant life, and build the body and life that they deserve and desire. In this weekly podcast, we'll uncover the raw truth about mental health, nutrition, fitness, and beyond.

Intro: 00:22

Let's get to it.

Jen: 00:25

Hey, guys. Welcome back to Counter Culture Health. I am doctor Jennie McWaters. My cohost, Caitlin, is taking a breather for this one. So it'll just be me, but I wanted to pop in here and do something a little bit different to provide us a chance to reflect as we are ramping up for summer and lots of busyness and activities and making sure that we still find a harmony between the busyness of life and the things that we need to take care of ourselves, both our body, also though our spirit and our soul.

Jen: 00:59

So we're gonna talk about that a little

Jen: 01:00

bit today. But before I do, I wanna

Jen: 01:03

let you guys know that we are going to be having this be our last episode of our first season. We're going to be taking a much needed creative sabbatical for the summer and then coming back in September with some fresh new content, some amazing new guests, and hopefully with just fresh eyes and ears and provide you guys another great season of content for season two in the fall. So stay tuned for that. And again, this will be our last one for the summer, and we're all gonna take a little bit of a break as Caitlin also enjoys her time with her newborn and gives us a chance to be creative and refresh for the fall. So with that, let's jump in.

Jen: 01:43

So today, I wanna talk about nurturing the soul. So when we talk about the soul, we're talking about our mind, our will, and our emotions. And the soul and our spirit, this spiritual part of us, the spirit that we each have, and that's what I believe based off of my Christian faith and understanding of God's word, the soul and spirit interact in very unique ways.

Jen: 02:07

But we're gonna focus today on the soul, mind, role, and emotions. And I want you to reflect on how you're doing right now. So where is your soul care at? Are you feeling depleted? Are you feeling full?

Jen: 02:23

And what are some activities that either nurture or deplete your soul? So think about that for a moment.

Jen: 02:32

And I'm gonna offer some ideas here and see what lands with you. So here are some things that I found to be depleting of our soul, our mind, our will, and emotions. And then secondarily, can impact your spirit as well. Number one is overworking. When we engage in overworking or being overly busy, whether that is traditional work or work at home or just busyness of activities even with our kids and families, I really believe and have seen that to be a soul depleting activity and how that impacts us.

Jen: 03:05

There is a reason and a season for rest. Rest is productive. Rest is soul nurturing, soul giving, but overworking is soul depleting. So I encourage you to take that into the summer, especially as we are, again, gearing up with more activities. If your family is anything like ours, I mean, the weather's amazing, so we know we're outside more.

Jen: 03:30

We're getting together with friends more. We are traveling more, all those things. So just a gentle reminder to make sure that you are still finding balance among all those fun things this summer and making sure you still have time for rest. The next thing that's so depleting is heavy screen usage. So no surprise here, but we know with plenty of anecdotal experience and also research that, you know, our screen usage is directly tied to our mental health.

Jen: 03:59

It's also tied to our relational health, and I also believe our spiritual health and, of course, physical health as well. But we know that we have worse mental health outcomes and we are relying heavily on screen usage for entertainment and communication. So social media in particular, we have, you know, stats that show that just small amounts of social media usage, I think it's like ten, fifteen minutes, you know, scrolling shows increase in depression and activity. Oh, sorry. Depression and anxiety among social media users, especially in certain population groups like teenage girls, but really all of us are impacted.

Jen: 04:41

And no one that I have found I have found I'm sorry. Let me rephrase that. I have yet to find someone who has not benefited from taking a sabbatical from screen usage and social media usage. We there was a study recently that looked at how removal of Internet access. So people, I think, were allowed to

Jen: 04:59

call and text, but

Jen: 05:02

they couldn't use social media. They couldn't really use the Internet to browse. When they did that for two weeks, their cognition scores actually improved. So that's a little bit scary to think about how screen usage is actually impacting our cognitive abilities, focus, concentration, memory, etcetera, as adults. So it's very soul depleting, obviously, and body depleting impacts the brain.

Jen: 05:25

And I also feel like social media usage, screen usage, takes time away from other things like family relationships and our spiritual growth and nurturing our spiritual relationship with God. So that's another way that it's depleting there. Okay. Moving on.

Jen: 05:41

We're gonna have a combo here.

Jen: 05:43

We're gonna say addictions, unresolved trauma, toxic relationship. All of those things are depleting of our mind, will, and emotions. So I highly encourage you if you have never received support, counseling from someone who's trained in those areas, please do so because living you don't have to keep living with addiction. You don't have to keep living with unresolved trauma. You don't have to stay in a toxic relationship.

Jen: 06:09

All those things deplete our soul and impact our mental health and, of course, our relationships and our physical health as well. Alright. Here's another one we don't often think of. Staying and living in unforgiveness and bitterness depletes us. It is a depleting thing to stay in anger and resentment even if your anger is justified, even, of course, if what happened to you isn't okay.

Jen: 06:37

We're not saying that you need to condone those things by engaging in forgiveness, but we're saying that by staying in this anger and resentment and bitterness, it is robbing you of peace and joy and of your health even. We know that people that are often angry continually have worse cardiovascular outcomes, mental health outcomes. So it really does matter staying in a place

Jen: 07:01

of unforgiveness and bitterness with someone hurts

Jen: 07:04

us and depletes us ultimately. It doesn't really hurt the person who hurt us at all. So forgiveness is really an act of self care. It's an act to be able to release the anger that you are justified in having, to release that and let that go for your own health and benefit. Alright.

Jen: 07:23

Last one we'll talk about is living in a space of scarcity depletes the mind, will, and emotions. When we are living in a

Jen: 07:29

place of scarcity, which is a sense

Jen: 07:32

of there's never enough, whether that's never enough

Jen: 07:35

money or time resources, relationship, whatever

Jen: 07:41

that is, that puts us in a place of fear. It puts us in a place of fight or flight and living in scarcity is going to rob us of being present, rob us of our joy, rob us of our contentment, and rob us of our ability to be grateful and sustain gratitude. So as you can see, staying in a place of sufficiency, abundance, and gratitude is going to be soul giving rather than depleting. So living in scarcity is something we want to take note of if we're doing that and work on our thought life and work on our our attitude and try to engage in gratitude practices and sufficiency. And if you have a relationship with God, trusting in His sufficiency and His ability to provide as enough for us.

Jen: 08:30

So those are

Jen: 08:31

the activities that are depleting for us. And so, I am just going to list here some things that are soul giving. These are things like prayer, meditation, reading, especially when we

Jen: 08:44

are reading Scripture, sacred texts, time with loved ones, that's incredibly soul giving. We know that people that have more social support actually have lower rates of mortality, so you live longer when you have a strong social support network. We know that time in nature and God's creation is soul giving as well. It is a way that fills us up. We literally have better mental health and physical health.

Jen: 09:10

In Japan, I've read that often providers will actually prescribe a forest bathing because it is so healing to be in the forest. I think it's maybe for a couple days. Don't quote me on that. But an extended amount of time has been shown to lower rates of inflammation just by being around that level of nature and being away from urban areas. So nature is incredibly healing for our bodies, but also we know we have better mental health when we are in nature, looking at nature, looking at water, looking at greenery.

Jen: 09:43

Even those colors are more soothing for us, the greens and the blues. It's soul giving to do that. So that is always an easy, usually free, cheap, accessible thing you can do if you are struggling and feeling stressed out is to step into nature. Step into water. Go gaze at a sunset.

Jen: 10:04

Go be in the forest. Go take a hike and a walk. Those things are very soul nurturing. Journaling and reflecting. That's our next one here.

Jen: 10:14

When we take time to reflect and process, that's like being a little bit like being your own therapist, being able to analyze, you know, your attitude, being able to look at your thought life, being able to take a moment and take a step back and think about your thinking, think about your actions. That is a soul nurturing activity that we can do that's going to help us move towards a healthy response pattern to the things in our life, be able to help our mind align with our values, help us be able to bring our emotions in alignment with our wisdom. All those things can happen through reflection, like journaling, gratitude practices, prayer, but that level of so, yeah, reflecting is is something that most people don't do. Oftentimes, I have to prescribe that to my clients because we just have such a busy, fast paced life. We don't often take the time even if it's for five minutes to sit down and reflect, but there is so much goodness that comes from that to encourage you guys to consider that as an option for you as well.

Jen: 11:20

And as I mentioned a few times here already, but we'll talk again about gratitude practices. We have science that shows us that engaging in daily gratitude practice, and I'll define that in a second, but daily gratitude practice leads to better mental health outcomes. It leads to more even success in certain areas of life. It leads to healthier relationships. It leads to better health outcomes as well.

Jen: 11:45

So gratitude is incredible because it's all it's doing is we're not saying that the hard stuff's not there. We're just shifting our attention to what is there, what we do have, what is working for us, the blessings we do have in our life. And that small but incredible shift completely changes your mental health, your physical health, your relational health, even your maybe success in in your career and work just by shifting towards the gratitude in what you do have rather than focusing on what you don't. So that is an incredible thing that we can do to nurture our soul. And as I mentioned, of course, we are doing healing work, when we are engaging in counseling, coaching, pastoral care, we're getting healing work done, that is going to also be nurturing our soul and helping us heal from the things we talked about earlier like addictions and unresolved trauma and toxic relationships.

Jen: 12:39

And then, of course, as I said there, the counter, the opposite of living in scarcity would be living in sufficiency, living in with an abundance mindset that there is enough, that there will be enough, that God provides enough, and so we can live in that sufficiency and be in

Jen: 12:56

a place of rest and trust and that's also going be nurturing to our soul. And, you know, ultimately, we

Jen: 13:04

want to be able to align our actions with our values and our values are that internal compass that guide us towards becoming the person we want to be in the world and also helps us to create a meaningful way of living. And when we violate our values, we often feel guilty, depleted, and unfulfilled. And when we align with our values and take action steps towards them, even though that's incredibly hard to do and might include some pain and some difficult obstacles, that's when we feel like we are doing things that are in line with our purpose, that are meaningful, that fill us up. So I hope this was encouraging for you today. Just some reflection points to think about as you're moving into this busy season of summer and we hope that you will come back and join us in the fall after our short creative sabbatical and come find us for some more amazing content on holistic health and living.

Jen: 14:00

And we're gonna have some amazing experts and guests as well lined up to share their wisdom with you as well. So with that, we hope you guys have an amazing summer and we will see you guys back for season two of Counter Culture Health. Thanks for joining us on the Counter Culture Health podcast. To support this show, please rate, review and share with your friends and family. If you wanna be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast player.

Jen: 14:27

You can find me, Jen, at awaken.holistic.health and at awakeningholistichealth.com.

Intro: 14:34

And me, Caitlin, at Kaitlyn Reed Wellness and kaitlynreedwellness.com. The content of the show is for educational and informational purposes only. As always, talk to your doctor and health team. See you next time.