Live w/ Dr.Charryse

We're back. Welcome for the first time, or welcome back to live with Doctor Charryse. Different time, different place. For those of you that are usually with me, but same heart, same passion, if this is your first time on alive, I'm Doctor Charryse Johnson, licensed clinical mental health therapist, mindfulness practitioner and authority. I come into this space at least once a week to provide you with tools and resources, motivation, and tonight, a little bit of meditation that will help you really continue to grow to work on your either mental health or your mental fitness.

And the two can be very different. I am a definite proponent, as a licensed therapist, of having strong mental health, but I also recognize that there can be seasons or there are individuals who feel like, hey, my mental health is in pretty decent shape. Noted. But I don't want you to ever feel like mental health is a destination. So when we think about the concept of being mentally fit, we're always looking at what does it mean to be well in the context of life right now. I always love knowing where you are in the world.

Hello, Rachel, Audrey, Nicole, and of course, if you have a tag name that doesn't have your name, feel free to put it in there. Hello, Carlette. So that we can go from there. One thing I'm excited about is I feel like doing it at this time and I was like, hmm, this isn't too bad. I might need to play around with this. Definitely gives an opportunity for some people who can't be with me live in the morning, to be with me in the evening. So I'll play around with it. If you listen to part one around focus, I'd also love for you to chime in and let me know what have you applied?

I'm always going to be pushing you, not just to come and to listen, but to come, to listen and to act. So what was one of your takeaways from Focus part one and what have you noticed or worked on between last week and this week? Tonight for part two, our focus is going to be around what are some safe ways to improve your intention and focus without interfering with your sleep or jump starting anxiety. And you might feel in some ways that you aren't necessarily an anxious person, but also know that anxiety is often subtle and it can be equivalent or parallel to a unrest or not feeling like you can settle yourself down.

Let me give you a few examples. Sometimes there may be situations where you're not feeling the physical anxiety, big heart palpitations beating out your chest, fingers shaking or shaking your leg, but you feel like your mind won't slow down. You are having a difficult time being able to rest and settle yourself. You notice that when you wake up in the morning that the first thing on your mind is your to do list. So if those are things that you've experienced, we would still put you in the category of a level of an anxious mind or an overactive mind.

My neurodivergence, my neuro spices, you're definitely going to experience that. And that's something that you're going to always need to be aware of and really look at. How do you manage that and how do you gauge that? So I want to talk for a moment about unsafe ways that people try to work on their focus. One is often caffeine. I am not anti caffeine in the sense that it's something that you should never have. However, I want you to understand that caffeine blunts your adenosine receptors. Your adenosine receptors are necessary so that you understand the true magnitude of how tired you are or how tired you are not.

So when you have too much caffeine or you're relying on caffeine, you will often find that it raises your heart rate if you have it. For some people past a certain time, it makes it difficult for you to sleep. Or if you're at the place that you started with caffeine because you thought it was something that would give you a boost. And a lot of that is actually kind of mental. And then now you're at the place that you're like, I can have caffeine all day and it doesn't bother me. Then it actually is bothering you.

You're now in the place that your body has become numb to the impacts of caffeine. And the scary part about that is you could have an underlying kind of rush happening within your inner core and not recognize it. And I often find that when people are in that place, then you're consuming caffeine just because it's habit and it's the mental placebo of making you believe that you have more focus and energy, but you're actually not getting a lot done. Another thing that is often common and unsafe is to take any type of stimulant in order to boost yourself into being able to focus.

And I'm not talking about a prescribed stimulant. A prescribed stimulant is something that you work with, with your physician or with a psychiatrist. They are checking on you, they're monitoring your side effects. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about. Although there are some individuals who found that prescribed stimulants were not good for them. I'm more talking about energy drinks, such as a c four or really anything that you are ingesting with the promise that if you have it, it is going to help increase your focus.

A lot of times those drinks or bars or products or stimulants or supplements are really kind of playing around in a very unhealthy way with something that is called cognizant cytokine. I won't, even though I really want to go into all of what that is. But essentially, it's a synthetic factor that you can get naturally that they put in various doses in those items to create that energy boost. The challenge with that is your body. Our bodies are not one size fits all. So I often will encourage you to stay focused on really being attuned to where you are so that you can pay attention.

Here's something that I dare you to try. Have your morning coffee, have your morning green tea, whatever it is. But after that first eight to 10oz, which is really the max that we would need, that would honestly be beneficial. The ounces that you have after that, what's the motivation behind it? What do you notice when you don't have it? Because if you're also recognizing that when you try to reduce the. The amount of caffeine or energy drinks or stimulants that you take, that you have a trail off that is angsty or edgy, then you know that that's not as safe and healthy as you may think.

If you also feel that if tomorrow you decided, you know what, I'm going to come off of all of that for a couple of days, and you find that you crash and burn, there's a level of an addictive connection between what you're taking in and what you're not. Let me also add as a caveat. If you are highly active or an athlete, I have some professional athletes who I know come on these lives with me. Please be careful. If you are in a stressful life situation, please be careful, because a body in stress has to moderate the amount of additional stress that you place on it.

And so when you put in something that is designed to synthetically raise up your energy level because you believe that it's going to help your focus, you believe that it's going to help you get things done, but you're also at a hypervigilant and stressful state. You're not sleeping well, or you find that your sleep is inconsistent. That is a very serious recipe and not only a very serious recipe physically, but it's a serious recipe emotionally because it's going to take you through a lot of highs and lows.

So the encouragement would always be, go for your one cup that's eight to 10oz at a consistent time in the morning and then be done. If you need some type of stimulant to help you focus, help, then we know that there's some other work that you want to look at. How do you implement? And then let's be honest, one of the primary reasons that we get into those things is because we don't want to do the other work. We would rather have something that we believe pushes our brain into action than to actually work on the skills and the managing of our schedule and the discomfort of finding a place of balance.

But that is more sustainable and less disruptive to you. I want you to think about anxiety, stress and focus under these five domains. If you're taking notes, maybe just jot these down and you can kind of reflect on them. So you've got the cognitive domain, the psychological domain, the medical domain, the environmental domain and the lifestyle domain. All five of those domains will impact your focus. So here's the challenge. If you're going through and you're kind of doping yourself up with all of these outside stimulants, and the ones I've talked about so far have just been more things of that you ingest, then it makes it really difficult for us to know.

So the cognitive challenges that you're having on focus, is it because you really have issues with focus, or is it because you have some lifestyle changes that need to happen? Or you have some medical dynamics that are being masked because you are using a stimulant to self medicate instead of using life balance. So part of me giving you those five domains is between now and the next time we connect. I really want you to look at when you struggle with focus, which of the areas do you notice are the most challenging for you?

So if you're someone that's using the mindset matters journal, for example, in the notes page at the very end, or if you're using something on the side, I would encourage you over the next week, you'd write cognitive, psychological, medical, environmental and lifestyle. And then just put a little tick mark each time you recognize, I was struggling to focus today, but I realized it was because of what was happening in my environment. Tick I'm struggling to focus at this point in the day, but I'm realizing that I don't feel physically well.

Tick I was struggling to focus, but I realized that I haven't exercised in three days. So my body feels very low and heavy and inflamed. Tick mark. And then what you do over time is it allows you to collect data to go, okay, wait a minute. My issues with focus have more to do with my lifestyle than they do that my brain is not wired the way I need it to be. I'm not being consistent in the areas and in the habits. The other thing that I want to put into place is sometimes the things that you're doing that are unsafe aren't just things that you're putting in your mouth.

They can be things that you are allowing in your mind. You can break down and create barriers to your focus by having poor cognitive habits, such as catastrophizing, where you think the worst of every possible thing. Another one could be all or nothing thinking. These are all cognitive distortions. I could do a whole session on that. I will another time, but I just want to give you a few examples. But you can have cognitive patterns of thought imposter syndrome. Speaking negatively to yourself. Negative thinking is one area that will destroy your ability to focus because you will struggle to attune your attention to a task, because you're spending so much time trying to battle what you believe about yourself.

The other one that I want to mention is rumination. So if you find that you're the kind of person that you go and you have conversations with people, and then you come back home and you run through those conversations over and over, rethinking everything that you said, how they looked at you, what they were wearing, did they shrug their shoulders, and all the things. Then that places you in a situation where that level of rumination will end, impact your ability to focus and to be at rest, because you're always trying to stay ahead of things.

You could also have a history of trauma and a history of unresolved trauma, where your way of managing the traumas in your life has been to internalize it and keep it in your mind is going to create a limited capacity for you to be able to focus. So there could also be dynamics where your struggle to focus is because you have some junk in your trunk that needs, and not the trunk behind you, this one that needs to be uprooted and pulled out. There are two kinds of temperaments. For the most part.

One kind of temperament is the individual who they go through difficult moments. They're able to work through it, but they kind of move past it, and they can kind of tell you what happened and how the situation went. But they're not keeping a record of everything. Then you have a temperament of thought where the individual can tell you every single thing that has happened to them in their life. Where they were, what they were wearing, what day it was, who drove up, who came to the party. Way too many details.

And while you may pride yourself as being that kind of person and thinking, well, I remember what's happened to me, so it can't ever happen again, if you think about it like a file cabinet, your file cabinet is about to tip over. So yes, you're going to struggle to focus, because when things are coming in or when it's time to sit down, you've got to get through all of these old, outdated files that you've kept because you think that holding on to the past keeps you safe. And while I have a lot more that I can say, I actually want to leave it there.

Holding on to past hurts will destroy your ability to focus, will limit your creativity, your clarity, your openness to what's possible and believing for more. And we often don't think about the fact that our past can impact both our present and our future. Focus is all about your ability to be able to the moment. But if you're constantly thinking about what happened in your past and constantly anticipating what's happening in your future, then you miss the moment and you struggle. So one of the things that I always want to encourage you to do when you live in the past, that sets you up towards depression and sadness and loneliness and rejection and abandonment when you live in the future, it pushes you towards anxiety and fear, because you're trying to control variables that aren't yours to control.

And none of us are in control anyway. The safest place that you will ever be is right here, right now, in this moment. I want to give you one last nugget. It's a pretty big one. There are ways to support your brain, which I'll talk about a lot in session four, but I want to hit this one. Now. When it comes to regulating your ability to focus, and one of the primary ways that we regulate our focus is what we put in our mouth. So paying attention to the things that you're eating, your health matters, your nutrition matters, poor nutrition will impact your focus regardless of how strong you are, regardless of how much weight you can lift, regardless of how much you can exercise.

You might exercise for 90 minutes a day and you are on it. You might get into a cold ice bath and get your circulation going and help your immunity. But if you then get out of those moments and those insights instances and you are not nourishing yourself in alignment with what your brain needs in order to focus. Then you're going to find that you struggle. There's a substance called ceticholine. It's often called choline. In terms of layman's terms, it is found in several different foods. And the important thing about cytokoline is that it creates these powerful neurotransmitters that your digestion and your brain, because we know that they're intersected and connected, need in order to help you focus.

So did some research and preparation and want to give you a list of twelve various foods that help support your ability to establish and create focused neurons in your brain. Organ meats before you knock it, there are some people who still eat organ meats in terms of their culture or like liver. I actually like liver. Liver and onions is good. I'm also very indigenous, so grew up on a lot of organ meats. Eggs, chicken, fish, dairy foods, pasta, rice and oats, peanuts, broccoli, cauliflower, chickpeas and blueberries are all very helpful to the production of choline, which then increases the neurotransmitters that help you to cognitively focus.

So notice what's on the list and notice what's not. As I get into some future weeks, I'll go through different pieces that then disrupt that. So what do you do from here? I want you to take the information that I gave you, continue to work on the things from part one, and you might decide for yourself. I'm good with part one. That's what I want to continue to focus on throughout the month. Beautiful. But you also might want to implement some things that we focused on tonight. Look at those five domains.

Start taking a tick mark and start learning yourself and learning your patterns and recognizing which of those domains are your biggest challenge or your top one to two biggest challenges. When it comes to your ability to focus and then take a look at what you're eating and notice, does your focus shift based on the nutrients that you are putting in your body? The answer is always going to be yes. You are what you eat in many capacities. So it's always important to support yourself by adequate nutrition, adequate sleep, adequate water, and the whole combination of adequate movement.

Now, it has been right at the 20 minutes mark if you need to go, it's so good to see you. Those of you that want to stay around for a moment, I'm just going to do a quick meditation. I said tonight would be motivation and meditation. It's been a minute, so place yourself into a comfortable situation. Situationship. Let me know if you can hear the music that I'm playing. This is my first time doing this here, but I don't want it to be too loud. I just want you to start by taking a few deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth.

And I am using my hands because it allows us to bring in that somatic movement in through the nose and then out through the mouth. And so then once you have the movement down, you can keep your eyes open or closed, do what's comfortable for your body, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and then find a comfortable position of your hands. Sometimes it's up if you're in a place that you want to receive or down when you're in a place that you need to feel grounded and calm and stable. Allow your back to be straight and flat if it's leaning up against something, shoulders coming down and back, but heart open, I want to invite you to release and let go.

No matter what part of your day it is right now. Can you give yourself permission to move from doing to being? Can you believe in your heart and in your body and in your posture that today you've done enough? Know that you are worthy of rest. Rest is something that you deserve, but it's also something that restores and enlightens. I want to go through a few affirmations and as I speak them, either say them in your mind, in your life, heart, or say them aloud. You decide where you want to go. So repeat after me.

I am enough. I am capable. All is not lost. I give myself permission to change. I'm attracting better for my life and I deserve to experience peace in every area of my life. And then, if you're comfortable, I want you to take one of your hands and take the palm of your hand and place it in the middle of your chest, right at the core of your clavicle. Apply a little pressure there. Place the other hand if you're comfortable, on your belly and notice if there's any discomfort. And if this isn't comfortable for you, you decide where you are and place your hands and press both hands in just enough to remind yourself that being with yourself is one of the safest places you will always be.

Feel the strength and the care that is radiating from your energy, from the spirit that is around you. Continue to allow your breath to deepen in its own place and direct your breath into any part of your body that feels tense or tight or tired. We'll take a few cleansing breaths together to close up our time. The cleansing breath is in through the nose. Your stomach will distend. Out. Out mouth. The belly comes in navel towards spine. In through the nose. Belly. Rise and exhale through the mouth.

Your eyes were closed. Slowly open them or bring your gaze back to the screen. As always, I love every moment that we get to spend together. What you just did is so powerful. Allowing yourself to be in the here and now. And it's always there, and it's always accessible. Don't rush. From this moment, continue it however you need to. But know that quiet and strength and goodness resides and runs throughout your veins. I care for you deeply. You matter. And until we meet again, have a wonderful, wonderful week.

I'll see you soon.