3 Ways Someone Robs You of Time

Can you relate?

Lisa wants desperately to feel good in her body. She wants to feel confident, stop fighting how she looks, and most-of-all, she wants to stop questioning her food choices and cravings and if she’s getting enough – and the right kind – of exercise. 

Lisa would love to stop the long run of injuries she’s been nursing pretty much since we have worked together (four years). She wants to get her seven hours of sleep, find time for stress resilience tools like box breathing, strength training at least three times each week, meal plan, and so much more. She knows when she does practice these strategies, she feels better in her body. When she can’t find the time for them…well, you know the answer. She doesn’t feel great in her body. 

Lisa has a very full life. She is the mom of VERY active teens. (Translation: she is driving them around A LOT and often out of the DC area for athletic events most weekends.)

She is also an executive for a large corporation. 

Lisa admits that she struggles every day to find time for what she truly believes is important - her wellness.  

Oh, yes, and Lisa is just beginning Menopause! Night sweats, hot flashes, lack of sleep, and anxiety feel chronic.  

Lisa is a veteran member of our method. Over time, she has developed a list of practices that work for her – 80 percent of the time (no one is perfect!), and best of all…she figured out this one HUGE challenge. 

Lisa’s time was being stolen. 

By her. 

What? Yes, Lisa didn’t realize that her time was being stolen right in front of her very own eyes. 

After we started working together in our concierge small group program, Lisa’s eyes brightened with many “ah ha” moments. She realized she was wasting precious time on activities that did not align with her core values and that literally was stealing from her wellness. Wellness can take anywhere from 10 seconds to an hour. Yet sometimes, we don’t realize that spending three minutes here and nine there takes away beautiful opportunities for wellness. 

Wellness opportunities like the following get compromised:

• A brief meditation can take less than two minutes

• A five-minute flow

• Chopping veggies and protein for one meal can take ten minutes

While time can be stolen by engaging in the following:

• Mindless online shopping

• Scrolling social media 

• Email chains that go nowhere fast

Time is our most valuable asset. It gives us the ability to give the world our best. Utilizing our time to focus on those things that matter most brings satisfaction, a sense of calm, and, yes, that body you want – like Lisa.

Lisa’s time was being stolen in these three ways. 

1. Email: Lisa was using email as a primary method of communication. Email is a true addiction. Checking off that box and deleting email gives our brain a huge rush of dopamine – our feel-good hormone. Yet continual email keeps our stress high, and we resort to “conversation by email.” The back-and-forth emails can lead to no answers and, yet, take up a lot of our time.

Lisa’s hack: She sets aside specific times during the day to check her inbox. She limits any other time we’re tempted to check it out. Trust me; it is always going to be there! She now boundaries her time on email and puts a three-to-five-minute walk on her schedule every day after each of those blocks. The walk can even be in her living room! She gained a walk by structuring her calendar.

2. Social media: Let’s face it - those engineers designing our favorite social media apps are some of the best in the world. They know how to keep us hooked. While we may intend to check it out for five minutes, often, we can lose ten, fifteen, or more. That ten minutes is the equivalent of meal prep, 1000 steps, a lovely meditation, and other self-care.

Lisa’s hack: She sets a time limit on her social accounts and sticks to it. She also refrains 

from mindless scrolling before sleep. Instead, most days, she sticks to a wellness-centric bedtime routine.

3. Lack of preparation: Not preparing for the following day the evening before can result in chaotic days where wellness doesn’t seem to be an option. Preparing the night before for upcoming work deadlines, meals, meetings, family activities, workouts, etc., saves us time, reduces stress, and allows us to be proactive in including wellness into our days. 

Lisa’s hack: She spends 15 minutes at the end of each day reviewing her calendar for the following day. She makes sure she is prepared for meetings, has buffers between appointments, and blocks of time for meals, movement, and self-care.

When we think about our wellness as the foundation for how we can lead the busy life we’ve chosen, we are better able to tend to it. Add Menopause symptoms to the myriad of choices we make, and the last thing we think about is our calendar. I hope Lisa’s story leads you to consider your calendar is just as important as your diet for your wellness. 

A full module of our concierge small group program focuses on how to calendarize our wellness. So often, we plan things, and they just don’t happen. 

Why?

Because our time has been stolen away by distractions, caring for others, worry and fretting, and the little things I call “schedule thieves.” “Schedule thieves” are the distractions that we can’t even see – or fathom – are the culprits that prevent us from meal planning, quality sleep, and other wellness tools that can take as little as 30 seconds to one minute. While they may feel minor, adding them up often shows they are the true culprit. 

To master our calendar, we must become aware of what is stealing our time so we can prioritize what matters – our wellness. In Concierge Small Groups, members become master “priority protectors.” 

Are you struggling to feel good in your body and looking for answers to your questions about perimenopause and Menopause? We are beginning to collect names for our waitlist for three new concierge small groups in the fall. Go to our new website, subscribe to our newsletter, and send us a line if you’re interested in chatting about the highly successful program. I’ve also created an online course to help women THRIVE during midlife. Be one of the first to get access to my 5-module course, coming this fall, that teaches the importance of holistic wellness and lays out core strategies to help you MASTER Menopause NOW!