Take Control

MendMaker Exercise: Session written and explained by your coach Claire Anstey

Stop The Heart Break Binging

Don’t place your future in someone else’s hands. Your future is yours to shape. Take control. So you got dumped. It’s crap. You feel crap and dealing with this rejection does hurt. But for how long are you going to blame this other person. For how long do you wish to stay in this sorry for yourself state.

It is up to us to create our own destiny.

A few months after the break up from my fiancé, 2 days after my younger brother got engaged and 1 day after I had been to a friend’s wedding I was at home drinking red wine on a Saturday night watching Bridget Jones. It was during the famous scene were Bridget is in dodgy pajamas, drunk and singing the epic tragic love song “ I can’t live if living is without you” that I looked at my parents and drunkenly said ‘the only difference between me and Bridget Jones is that I am currently living with my parents.

The tragedy of it all…

I felt so depressed, I felt so fat as I was eating crap all the time and I was getting so annoyed at myself for getting drunk on bottles of red whilst at home alone, well alone with my parents. I felt like a tragic love story, and my character was even sadder than Bridget Jones. How the heck did that happen I used to think to myself.

And then I realized, it happened because I had let it happen.

Feeling down and blue when all your hopes and dreams have been smashed is normal and part of the process but getting smashed will not make the answers to your happiness come any quicker.

So many of us reach for a glass of wine and/or a cigarette when we are feeling down. Our society and social circles have encouraged us to relate feeling better with feeling pissed or high. Self medication with food, alcohol or drugs will only blot out your emotions for a short time. When you sober up your reality will flood back and you feel lower than you did before. This is because alcohol and drugs are depressants. Food may fill the emotional hole in our tummy when we are feeling down but it will leave behind roles of fat that will make you feel unattractive and down hearted with your single status.

This MendMaker is a little different to our normal style MendMakers as it is more about changing your behaviour long term rather than a short sharp kick up the butt that makes you feel better.

When we use drink, drugs and food to feed our negative emotions rather than deal with them we have lost control. This MendMaker is about gaining back the control of yourself and your life. Once I got rid of these emotional emphasizers it became easier to move towards positivity, as my mind was clear.

Gaining emotional control in general will also enable you to have the skills to work through any low moments when they sneak up on you in the future.

You have enough stuff causing you sadness at the moment you don’t need to add to it by doing stupid things whilst drunk or not remember huge chunks of a night out because you were high. And who is going to fancy you when you act like that anyway?

Drunk, fat and high is not cute, sexy or charming. You want to feel happy and this MendMaker shows you how to take the first steps towards emotional control. I want to make sure that you do not become another tragic Bridget Jones.

It is time for you to get positive about you, no more sorry for yourself states allowed. You are going to help yourself massively by banning the negative crap you throw down your neck and into our soul.

This MendMaker is in 2 parts. It is the start of the new you – A person in control and respectful of their mind and body’s health.

Part 1: Give up the booze and drugs

When wine has become your only company on a Friday night the idea of stopping it completely feels really weird but you can do it. The reason I decided to go on a detox is because I wanted to have complete control over my life. Every time I got drunk I would feel so paranoid about what I said or how I had acted as had lost huge sections of the night. And as for drugs they are always going to be wrong. Being dumped made me feel so rejected so feeling like a social drunk loser after a public drink was not helping. With my emotions all over the place red wine was making me more depressed, I drunk it to forget but would wake up full of regret. Once I stopped I felt so much better. A good way to start this is to stop drinking in public first and then stop at home. I am not Bridget Jones and nor are you. Do you ever fancy the drunken mash head in the corner? Didn’t think so, so lets lose this behavior before it becomes a habit.

Part 2: Get your balanced diet back on track

Eating crap will make you fat, unhealthy and feel nasty. Cleansing your body with a detox is a great way to get back into a more positive way of thinking and feeling. If you don’t care and love your body who else will? By taking care of ourselves we show others what we expect and get respect in return. This is not about you going on a cabbage diet and getting as skinny as a super model this is about you nourishing your body so that you can nourish your soul. My advice would be to start a 7-day detox plan that ties in with the booze ban and then move on into healthy eating. There are loads of plans on the Internet and books a plenty. There are some supermarket websites that offer healthy eating plans and shopping advice that can be organized around your budget, this is just perfect for those with hectic lifestyles.

With the break up behind you it is now time to start looking forward. Show yourself that you love yourself and care for yourself by feeding yourself the health that you deserve. A good diet gets our digestive system moving, we feel light and energized and this immediately allows for a positive attitude and the feeling of a fresh start and new life.