Make Your Damn Bed

Day 21 - This is your life. Be mindful. Feel empowered by changing your perspective without changing your surroundings. Make Your Damn Bed is a real talk, daily motivation podcast to play while you make your bed every morning. Each season is 66 days long to incorporate a healthy habit of your choosing into your daily life. Build momentum - better your life.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(REMASTERED AUG 2020) You can't light yourself on fire to keep others warm.GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(remastered August 2023) If you have never had the chance to be alone - really alone - and you are presented with the opportunity, TAKE IT.  Whether it be for only a few hours or over the course of several years, I suggest you take it. There is nothing more valuable than being afforded time to be all by yourself and solely charge of your own wellbeing. You will get the opportunity to return to your sensed of community, eventually but for the moments of solitude you do find - embrace them. Relax and breathe in the feeling of genuine freedom to discover and decode who you really are by making decisions for yourself, by yourself.We live in a world where choices are seemingly endless and  Decision fatigue has become a genuine struggle for some of us. Spending time alone forces you to make decision after decision without distractions which can define important parameters for making said decisions in the future. Every time I am able to spend time alone - I feel myself grow more confident in my ability to make the appropriate choices. The break from considering other people’s feelings or voices, - bc I still account for everyone’s personality, regardless of how flexible they have claimed to be when we are in a group -  and Through choosing things only for yourself you become more aware of what you really truly want to do, more often. If you are brave enough to try everything once - while you are alone - you can more easily build structure and solidify what you really do and don’t want - so you don’t have to worry so much about making decisions in the future. Spend time by yourself and try everything once to discover what you really want. “By spending time with yourself and gaining a better understanding of who you are and what you desire in life, you’re more likely to make better choices about who you want to be around.” - Dr. Sherrie Bourg CarterGET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(REMASTERED AUGUST 2023) Forgiveness is an essential part in finding your happiness. This  doesn't mean to let everyone off the hook for hurting you or crossing boundaries. It simply means you aren’t harboring those toxic feelings about it, anymore. You must come to terms with the fact that people who love you will show love to you in ways that don’t feel like love sometimes. Sure sometimes people hurt us on purpose, but more often people will hurt us even though they love us, because they don’t know how else to show that love. It doesn’t mean to accept it as they present it, it just means you shouldn’t take it so personally when it isn’t done like you initially would have wanted or expected. Stop expecting you from other people. If you go in believing people typically mean well and don’t set out to hurt you - you will take a lot of that burden off of yourself - that expectation that everyone else will show up for you in the way you need without you communicating is unreasonable. It doesn’t mean you don’t deserve it. It means it’s out of most people’s abilities to do so. Forgive others and make space for them to show love in a way that they know how.  I wanna add that this doesn’t mean everyone deserves your forgiveness but if you can let go of the anger and resentment? You’re gonna feel so much more vindicated. Grudges are only painful for the one holding them. GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(REMASTERED AUGUST 2023) There is nothing wrong with you. If you pursue self help in the search of fixing yourself, you will never be satisfied because you aren’t a car - you aren’t broken and don’t need to be fixed. Self love shouldn’t be an aspiration. It should be the bare minimum. You are a miracle made of star stuff and if the bones and heart beating in your chest isn’t enough to impress you than the fact that you have survived in an often very overwhelming world should be. Stop waiting for others to validate you where only you can. Start treating yourself like the love of your life. Write love notes for you. Buy yourself the flowers. You have spent so much time waiting for someone else to show you the love that you show them - why not cut out the middle-man? Show yourself the love you crave so deeply. When you love yourself fully - you can give yourself space to heal properly but only when you remember you are not broken. You never were. You are as whole and perfect as the day you entered this world - you just need to uncover that feeling that has been buried for so long in an attempt to self-preserve.  GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(REMASTERED AUGUST 2023) Utilize the asset that is reading energy. Study it. Learn it like a language, because that is exactly what it is. Begin to recognize who your energy shifts around. Notice when it changes and teach yourself how to adapt it. Unfollow anyone that makes you feel weird energy, unless it’s something you feel you should be challenged in. Curate your relationships, social media feeds, and home to reflect the energy that you would like to embody most often. Energy will ebb and flow but it is a valuable skill to be able to identify these shifts on a daily basis. This way you can ride the waves of action, build foundations, so when you need to rest and recharge, you can jump right back in where you left off - and return to that energetic place without starting from scratch. Energy is our most powerful and effective communicator. It passes messages much more quickly and subtly than our conscious mind could ever identify. This is why it is so important to pay attention. Learn to read energy so you can identify the sources that deplete and grow yours. Understand that you can impact your energy as Obviously life isn’t about all good vibrations and good energy all the time, but there are ways to optimize your experience to increase your times of good/positive energy to make better use of your time here. Don’t allow people in your life that only deplete your energy and never return it. Don’t become someone who only deplete’s energy and never returns it. Energy is a give and take. Like everything, balance is key. With practice, you can get good at knowing if it is time to share your energy or if it is time to be open to receiving energy, which is a superpower if you ask me.   GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(REMASTERED AUGUST 2023) This may be hard to admit - but you deserve the occasional day off to just relax. To do nothing at all. To binge watch. To sit and waste time. Recharge and replenish. And then practice forgiving yourself for not being productive. We have been conditioned our whole lives to believe that productivity is the only way to be valuable in a society based on capitalism and industriousness. We have never been taught that rest is not a reward. It is work. A thing we must do. Especially if we aim to ever be productive. We are expected to perform every single day, regardless of our energy levels or anything that is happening in our lives, yet most of us still feel guilty when we take days off. Lions are the king of the jungle yet they spend 20 hours of the day - sleeping. Shit, computers need to go to sleep, and even shut down occasionally. You have been so hard on yourself even though the expectations are often unreasonable so You are exhausted. You often end up wasting more time than you needed to because you are avoiding resting fully. Allow yourself to rest so you can get back to the productivity we have all been conditioned to aspire to. Any time you feel guilty for resting - remember, you are not a machine but even if you were - even machines need to be recharged. You are no different. Don’t add to the pressure that already exists + is pressuring you already. If you need to rest anyway, intentionally try to remove the guilt. GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(REMASTERED AUGUST 2023)DAY 14: MEDITATIONI’m not religious, but it isn't lost on me that most religions and even agnostic sects of spirituality center around some form of prayer or meditation or introspection. Regardless of your faith or lack thereof, it’s crucial to offer ourselves the space and time to decompress. Time away from screens, family, friends, work, and even away from your own thoughts. Plans, anxieties, fears can lead us to cycle in our mind and by practicing mindfulness, we’ll notice and can refocus back on our present moment. The present is where our power lies. That’s where the magic happens + if we can practice staying there, we can get better at it and need less of the redirection. Guided meditations are a great way to start, and tiny commitments like three minutes at a time are way easier to commit to than massive changes in your routine, meditating is less about clearing our thoughts and rather, learning how to sit with them comfortably. If we imagine our mind as the sky, each thought is a cloud, and we can get caught into them, but if we allow them to pass and focus on the sky as a whole, we will realize just how temporary weather conditions are. One strategy I’ve benefited from is returning to the question: “what will I think of next” and focusing on the peace that comes from the moments between your question and the next arising thought. The gaps become more comfortable and we can grow them as we practice mindfulness. But it doesn't have to be formal. Try washing dishes or walking with intention + no distractions. Try focusing on your breath or counting. I sometimes dread my practice and take breaks or change my own techniques. I am not sure why I still find it difficult to show up for myself and sit with my own thoughts, knowing they only get easier to sit with as i do - but here we are. That said, making it a “to-do” check mark is not helpful, either, because then i just want to do it and forget that there are benefits to doing. Regardless of if a meditation is good or not, or you enjoy it or not, we can all probably benefit from a few moments away from our phones. A few moments with ourselves. Meditation is an immediate stress relief and can lead to more control over our thought patterns and behaviors. There’s science behind the benefits and stress relief that comes from mindfulness and breath work practices. Most people go on thinking our thoughts control us, with practice and mindfulness, we can regain our sense of control - but we learn how to get comfortable letting go, first. GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(remastered August 2023)DAY 13: NEGATIVE SELF TALK  If your inner voice manifested into a human form today, would you be friends with it? I think a lot of us would have to teach our new friend some manners before going into the real world. Which is wild to think about - that the most common voice, our most reliable narrator, our internal operator is kind of an asshole? Is really sad to me. If the voice we live with, and listen to the most, is not nice? What does that mean?Negative self talk quickly trains your brain to believe that the criticisms of it are true. This is why it’s so crucial to train your brain that the good shit can be true, instead. If you cuss yourself out every time you drop something, or call yourself names when you make mistakes, I highly recommend this tactic: EVERY time you catch yourself thinking or saying something negative about yourself (or someone else) you MUST say OUT LOUD two unique positive things to counteract that thought. And take a second to absorb it and try to believe it. Train your brain that there are alternate ways of thinking and believing and perceiving. Now I fully recognize that reframing isn’t a miracle cure for everyone and everything, but this one, with enough practice and redirection - does work. And the less we complain, the less we see the world as a thing to complain about, and find a lot of the shit we were complaining about was not that big of a deal to begin with. Notice it. Then replace it with more positive thoughts. Then reward yourself with a lil hell yeah. And if this sounds hokey and too much for a simple thought - the magic of the practice is because it IS too much, it doesn’t reallllly take that long to stick in theory. Think about it, nobody is gonna wanna self correct and think of new original and unique compliments all day, especially if we struggle with positive self talk, so it’s  a real solid rebuttal strategy! The brain is a giant computer. Computer needs updates + reprogramming occasionally. We should be keeping up with this shit anyway. We need to “sleep and shut down” to keep the battery healthy. But this is a great way to do so. I recommend you start recognizing the negative speak first, then highlighting it by redirecting when you can - just to see how often you’re falling victim to your own bullying but not noticing because you’ve been living with them for so long. GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

(remastered August 2023)DAY 12: Critics gonna critique We really gotta get over the fear of being seen. We should never feel bad for trying. The only people who feel comfortable criticizing others for trying are typically envious of your fearlessness, or washed up from their time in the spotlight, and they have nothing against you but everything against them for not being you at that moment. Excuse my language but FUCK EM. Every professional in the history of professions has failed and begun again and failed and begun again. Its between those failures where we define and find our own versions of success. Give yourself a chance to “fail” freely and eventually you’re going to redefine failure. Because you cant call something a failure that was simply practice. It’s not a failure til you quit. Until you give up, everything is just practice. Also, there is such POWER in a beginner’s mind. Starting anything with fresh eyes, and hopeful excitement can remind us of why we begin anything! It’s a dopamine hit when we can approach shit without second guessing ourselves because we’re learning and know we’ll get better after our first go-round. There will be people that criticize you if you do anything publicly, but that will happen even if you are publicly not moving (Mitch McConnell) so you may as well be getting critiqued for showing up. That way you can weed out any of the critics who you don’t care about impressing + you can put your efforts into the coaches who want to help you improve your game. Who knows, maybe they’ll become a lifelong fan. People talk shit, no matter what we do, so isn’t it best to show up as ourselves at the 100% we’re capable of on any given day, and let that be enough? It’s not worth missing out on opportunities that could make us feel alive/free/joy because we’re afraid of looking “stupid”.Plus, unless they’re in the ring with us, what the hell does their opinion matter? Focus on your game, don’t worry if it’s trash - because improvement is inevitable if you show up with that on your mind. GET AN OCCASIONAL PERSONAL EMAIL FROM ME: www.makeyourdamnbedpodcast.comTUNE IN ON INSTAGRAM FOR COOL CONTENT: www.instagram.com/mydbpodcastOR BE A REAL GEM + TUNE IN ON PATREON: www.patreon.com/MYDBpodcastOR WATCH ON YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/juliemerica The opinions expressed by Julie Merica and Make Your Damn Bed Podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. Make Your Damn Bed podcast is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/make-your-damn-bed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.