Dear Self, Grow Up Already!: Guide To Maturing Your Inner YOU.

By Renee Lowry

Forget the old ideas about how to best deal with your emotions and protect your mental health... There is a better way!

This book is for anyone who has:

-anxieties that repeat. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Renee Lowry
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735829029

Book preview

Growing Up Stronger

How to get the MAXIMUM benefit from this book…

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Grow Up Already is designed to assist you on your journey of self-discovery. Below is an explanation of how you should use the Self-Exploration and Break-Out Thoughts tools in this book. Together, they will guide on an adventure of learning as you work to grow up and become the person you have always wanted to be.

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Self-Exploration:

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In these workbook sections, you will be guided to begin exploring and learning more about yourself. This will help show how you react, feel, and best process information. You will learn to understand the difference between your default responses and the responses that would be most beneficial to you and how to choose for yourself which to use. Answer these questions honestly and with integrity. Facing uncomfortable feelings and being truthful will enable you to explore and appreciate all of the things that make you tick!

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Break-Out Thoughts:

In these sections, you will reflect on your own life and use these questions to flow from one idea to the next. These questions are designed to teach you methods to break out of emotional traps and change unhealthy patterns of thinking. Try to remember these Break-Out Thoughts when you face similar situations in your life. These will help to free you from much of life’s traps and emotional baggage that weighs us down. These will become patterns for a new inner dialog or self-talk.

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Do not be afraid to boldly be, your unique self. We get one life so excitedly live yours, and no one else gets to have an opinion that matters when using these tools.

1

Escaping A Funk

Definition of FUNK- An incredibly awesome style of music that is a mixture of soul, jazz, and R&B. Music made famous by James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, and many more!

Wait… wrong definition of Funk for this story.

Other definition of FUNK - a state of depression, a low, a bad mood, cloud of confusion (maybe listen to funk music while escaping your funk? Couldn't hurt!)

Who, at one time or another has not been caught in the grasp of a horrible funk? A funk often comes unannounced, sneaks up on us at the worst possible moments, and tries to suffocate us in the depths of our own emotions and thoughts… nothing feels safe when you are in its midst. Some of our funks last only hours while still others can drag on for weeks or months.

There is not an adult alive that has never had to overcome a funk. Even toddlers experience funks and now that I think about it, I am pretty sure they often handle them far healthier than many of us adults. The advice people give us is phrases like snap out of it, think positive thoughts, and do something for yourself.

The solutions are as numerous as the sand but none of them work long term, none of them help you escape the funk for good, and none help you to shape and build happiness into your life! Most solutions are band-aids or just ignore that the funk is even there. There is a better way…

This book will give you easy to follow steps to pull yourself out from the depths of any emotional whirlwind. Grow Up Already is designed to guide you through the despair and turmoil of the funk thoughtfully and carefully. This book is for people who struggle to process the emotions of depression and want to not only escape it but also come out on top in life!

You will begin to use your funks and all of your emotions to create BLUEprints for a life completely of your design. At last, you will know how to use the tools you already have to build that happy life you have always dreamed of living and Grow Up Already!

I have worked to hone this practice in my own life. I have used this process to help many others to escape the grips of their funk. Throughout my life, I have helped numerous friends, family members, and coaching clients to use their Emotional Toolbox to create the BLUEprints that build life intentionally.

Being a daughter, wife, mother of two teen girls and a friend comes with many opportunities to learn, grow, and teach emotional health. Every day for me is another lesson in emotions.

After completing this step by step process, you will have all the tools you need to stop repeating the funks that continually cycle in your life. You will be able to free yourself from the drags of emotional whirlwinds, and you will discover deep truths about yourself as you learn to use every funk to your advantage.

Learning to make this process second nature in your life, helps you not only escape a funk but to avoid future funks and grow up already. You will build your life completely and unapologetically designed by you. I can promise you that if you follow this process thoughtfully and honestly, you will not just escape this funk, you will learn how to avoid the next one from surfacing for those same reasons.

You will also have the tools to use every funk you face and begin creating and living a life intentionally designed by you. Living the exact life, you always wanted but did not know was possible! I am confident that once you have completed this process you will learn to love and cherish your funks!

Do not waste another funk. Do not experience one more day lost in an abyss of unchecked emotions. Stop being a victim of your moods, helpless to change your circumstances. Never again push down your emotions and attempt to carry on like they are not bothering you. You deserve better than this.

Instead, decide today to live honestly and intentionally. Live a life that is built by your design and never again allow yourself to be controlled by your funks. Take the control back and Grow Up Already… start now!

One thing you will notice in my writing is that I prefer to use the term a funk instead of the word depression to describe my feelings. The truth of the matter is that a funk is a form of depression. Instead of depression being something bad that happens to you, this book will show you how to use it to your advantage. You will see depression as a valuable tool to build an amazing life. As you get used to using this process your emotional turmoil from depression will get less intense.

As you work through the steps in this book and use them for every stage of depression that you encounter, you will learn to live by them permanently or grow up already. These steps can help your bouts with depression become shorter, lighter, and less frequent. This is the win! This is the end you plan for!

Do not expect depression to never again be part of your life, it is natural and unavoidable. However, you will learn that you can transform depression into something completely different. In fact, you will begin to see that our emotions and depression are not something we should fear, they are something we should anticipate and use to help us on our journey through life.

I divided my depression into four levels and described them below. Please note, I am not a medical professional and do not claim to be. These are the levels that I use personally.

Assigning depression levels has helped many people that I have worked with to drastically reduce uncomfortable emotions and I am confident that it will help you too.

I envision this as if I were driving down the depression highway. The Emotional Discomfort Gauge™ or EDG, tells me how fast I am racing. It is my indicator of what response is required.

Below is my own personal EDG. As often as possible, I try to use The BLUEprint Method™ to escape my emotional discomfort before it accelerates past the area of 0-60. When the gauge goes over 60 and my responses are going to be more challenging to control or escape from quickly.

EDG Emotional Discomfort Gauge

My emotional levels are defined like this: (Your levels may be different than mine, but the important thing is that you identify them and define their limits.)

Bad mood- slight mood change that is unfavorable and usually fleeting.

Funk- serious mood change that seems devastating and can last from hours to months but is always temporary.

Completely Beaten- Laden with heavy burdens that seem insurmountable and too difficult to bear yet I maintain the understanding that this will pass even if I cannot imagine how or when.

Depression- A hopeless and weighty state of being. Being depressed defines me. It is a scary place that is unstable and has no possibility of ending in sight.

Personally, I do not like using the word depression to describe my feelings because of its hopeless, weighty connotation. Words are powerful things. When I tell myself, I am depressed, it resonates at a deeper level of my soul than when I tell myself I am in a funk.

Depression has different levels of abuse in my psyche. A funk, to me, feels like a temporary stop on the depression highway; whereas, the word depression feels like the destination. Funks will come and go but depression is surrendering to something bigger for me, so I choose not to call it something so debilitating and scary unless it is truly deserving of that definition.

Almost nothing is ever deserving of that definition, so I choose to limit my use of buying into that hopelessness for just anything because it is a conscious choice I can make.

Having this choice of words is an easy solution and a simple trick of the mind, but it works! I can proactively choose to never call it depression and instantly not have so far to climb to escape from it. I can experience depression because all of these words are stages of my depression but I can choose to not label myself as depressed. I will not say, I am depressed.

This is the intentional choice I make to not allow the all-encompassing word depression to make my feelings even worse than they are. I choose to not allow depression to define me, this will enable me to acknowledge the depression and still always see that escape is possible.

The power of these words is so great in my mind that I know when I am in a funk, my job becomes planning my escape from it using the steps I am going to share with you. Depression at any stage is temporary, it is a part of my life for a reason. My job is to discover and understand what that reason is.

Using the EDG is the best way to illustrate these concepts. The EDG enables me to break down depression and give each level its own definition. Doing this simple task will allow my brain to react differently to each of these levels. A bad hair day and a rough day at work might fall within 0-20 for me. Then, my brain understands that this is temporary and will not be a problem for long.

Doing so will inflict the correct amount of pressure and sadness on my day. While the death of my grandfather fell square on the 100 of my EDG. This reaction from my brain deserved to be far weightier and more complex. This event deserves a very different response than a bad day or even a bad week at work. These levels enable quick shortcuts to help your brain figure out the healthiest response for each problem that arises.

If I did not assign levels to the emotionally uncomfortable events in my life my brain would respond to all of them equally. Imagine, the arrow on your EDG spinning out of control for the slightest upset to your routine. You spilled the milk all over the kitchen floor and your EDG jumps to 100 causing an emotional breakdown and pandemonium to ensue!

If we fail to provide our brains with limits for our emotional reactions, we risk treating a simple situation as if it were a devastating blow. Rather than calmly acknowledging that we should not cry over spilled milk.

Our brains are an amazing machine, but in this case, it needs a set of instructions to work properly. The EDG is designed to teach needed limits to your brain to keep it from overreacting. Treat situations that arise with the emotional investment that it is deserving of.

Work to define your limits carefully to avoid everything spinning out of control at a 90 or 100 on the EDG. Otherwise, they will become major pile-ups on your depression highway. Learn to enjoy the little hang-ups that happen between 1-50. Treat the simple troubles like the speed bumps they are in life, so you can enjoy more and freak out less!

The EDG stops the pile-ups on the depression highway. If I did not have the levels and instead were to use the