July: Adapting to Change
Posted July 5, 2023
Once we hit the Summer Solstice, we are officially at the year’s halfway point. But it doesn’t feel as productive to wait until the entire year has ended to reflect. We are moving from the darkest time of year at the Winter Solstice, to the lightest day of the year. This shift marks a time of transition and adjustment. It is also the entrance of Summer and Cancer season (I know some of the folks reading here may not be astrology fans, but stay with me!).
At YoJo, we like to emphasize and acknowledge these shifts. In the fast paced ‘hustle culture’ that we live in, we lack a sense of ritual to mark the changing of seasons in our lives or to rest. This doesn’t allow the body and mind to build the natural resilience we can tap into when we have tools like ritual to process change.
Resilience doesn’t come from never falling down but in knowing what to do when you get knocked out, when you’re tired, or when the tides change.
This month our content is designed to give you tools for adjusting to change and for understanding the emotions that are involved…
Too much change can burn us out.
The amount of stimulation your nervous system can process at any given time is your window of tolerance. Once you exceed that amount and leave your window of tolerance, your nervous system starts to break down. Change in particular gives us a lot more stress and stimulation to process and we end up easily leaving our window of tolerance. We associate this nervous system exhaustion connected to change as change fatigue
The way we handle change is connected to our personal stress response
The stress responses are fight, flight, fawn and freeze. We all exhibit a different combination of these responses. Some of them can mask as productive for instance when we fight to hit deadlines and are just heads down working, it may look productive even though it is our stress response as a mechanism to avoid painful feelings.
Grief and loss are often part of change
Whenever we go through change, we are leaving one thing behind to enter another chapter. This can either bring a lot of loss or trigger our feelings of loss and change.
It’s totally normal to feel a sense of grief during periods of change.
When we are going through a loss together as a family, team or company we are co-grieving
It’s important that if the change that you are going through is something that is happening to the group as a whole vs. just to you to acknowledge that you are co-grieving with the other people. This means it is likely that you and others will be in a stress response and this can impact the quality of your interactions.
The best motto when co-grieving is Be Gentle!
Change and growth are woven together
The upside of change is that it doesn’t just come with grief, it also comes with growth! Whether the changes we are adapting to our positive or negative, they force us to handle new circumstances and to think differently. We will always be in a moment of learning and growing when we are changing.
Some of those changes are move overt and others are more subtle.
Resilience starts with awareness
When we are going through changes it’s important that we take the time to sit with the impact of all that is changing for us. It’s important to look at the grief and the growth. As we acknowledge all that we are feeling and digesting, we are able to care for ourselves, for others and for our lives.