Life is challenging for most of us. From relationships, bills and bosses to whatever’s happening in the world at any given moment, it seems like there’s always plenty to be worried about.
One of the worst parts of anxiety is not knowing exactly what we’re feeling or how we feel about it — much less what to do about it.
But asking ourselves three questions the moment we wake up could have a huge impact on our moods, how we approach our days, and the trajectory of our lives.
That’s what we learned when we — Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, the co-hosts of HuffPost’s “Am I Doing It Wrong?” podcast —recently chatted with Dr. Esther Boykin, a Washington, D.C.-based psychologist who focuses on creating healthy relationships.
Our conversation focused mostly on forgiveness: what it is, how to do it better, when not to do it, and much more. But Boykin also explained that she’s seen her clients make incredible progress in many parts of their lives when they start the day by checking in with themselves.
“I like to [tell people to] do it before you get out of bed,” Boykin said. “Take three deep breaths, and then [ask yourself], ‘How do I really feel today? What do I need today? How can I be more tender or gentle with myself today?’ — in that order, because figuring out how you really feel will inform the answers to the next two questions.”
By spending just a few minutes thinking about the answers to those questions, we can “pave the path to making it much easier to work on self-forgiveness,” Boykin said.
It might seem simple, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy — especially because many of us spend very little time considering ourselves or our lives in this way.
“I had a really bad morning and I was walking to the subway with Benji, my boyfriend, and our dog, and [Benji] was asking me about my day,” Michelson said. “And the more we talked, the more I was just like, ‘I’m in a horrible mood.’ And I had to start thinking about, ‘How do I feel?’ And then, ‘Why do I feel this way?’ And I started to unpack it, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s this thing I’m thinking about and I’m worried about this,’ and I started to triangulate my life and understand my mood.”
“It is three simple questions, but they’re actually pretty radical,” Michelson noted. “I don’t think a lot of people actually really think, ‘How do I feel right now? How am I feeling this morning?’ … Starting there is such a radical place to start.”
Once we’ve identified how we feel and what we need, we can start figuring out how to be kinder to ourselves.
“There’s obviously, like, forgiveness in the traditional sense, but also forgiveness for ourselves,” Michelson said. “Maybe it’s just kind of saying, ‘I understand why I feel this way, and I’m not going be quite so hard on myself about it.’”
“So, maybe you’re not actively forgiving yourself for something,” he went on, “but you’re just… being more tender, being more gentle, and giving yourself a little more credit, a little more slack.”
Spending three to five minutes identifying how you feel, why, and what you want to do about it — without blaming or lashing out at yourself — can make a major difference in your life.
“I really try very hard to practice it daily myself, in large part because I see how it changes things for people,” Boykin said. “Any of us as therapists, we talk about, like, ‘How do you do the work? How do you sit with your feelings?’ The honest answers tend to be very broad and ambiguous, and it’s hard to wrap your hands around [it], but I’m like ― just these three couple of things, really, there’s this internal shift that happens over time.”
“I’ve had clients come back and just be like, ‘I just did it because you said it was like homework,’” Boykin continued. “[And] six months later, they’re like, ‘I just show up for my life differently.’”
We also chatted with Boykin about when having empathy can actually be a bad thing, why forgiving someone isn’t always the best idea, and much more.
For more from Dr. Boykin, visit her website and her Instagram.
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