Your Peace Is Your Main Job

Most people don’t need more motivation, they need a simple way to stop carrying everything alone. When you put your own needs first for the sake of your mental well-being, you feel calmer, think clearer, and show up better in your everyday life.

We start with emotional expression: how to stop holding things in, why you should never apologize for crying, and why your feelings don’t need permission to exist. We also talk about invalidation, including the subtle ways it happens, and what a genuine apology sounds like when you care more about impact than defending your intent. If you’ve ever felt dismissed or unsure how to respond when someone says you hurt them, this part gives you a cleaner path.

From there, we move into the power of asking for help. Think of every life event as weight added to a backpack. Over time, that load affects your body, your mood, and your relationships, especially when you try to “be strong” by yourself. We connect that to real self-care, not just treats or a day off, but the daily basics: rest, nutrition, movement, prayer or meditation, and time to simply exist without rushing. You hear why silence breaks can improve productivity and stress management, plus how journaling and writing your thoughts down can untangle anxiety and make problems feel solvable.

If any of this hits home, subscribe, share it with someone you want to see doing well, and leave a review so more people can find these mental health tools.]

Transcript

Opening Song On Chasing Goals

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Losing myself and finding my strength came to the conclusion that I want it all. Feeling that pressure of tryna do better. I wanna reach heights, but too scared to fall. Too scared of failure, way more scared of feeling regret. I'm not even trying, that's terrifying. I understand that chasing my goals, I bury my clocks because it takes time. I gotta go. I already know if I wanna grow, you reap what you sow. That be the case. Planting my seeds and water my base. Yeah, I made mistakes. Yeah, I know you grow in your garden, but watch for the snakes. The people that act like you're crazy, but trying this, they far away. They don't think it's possible. I think it's possible. That is just hate. If they hate themselves, cause they on the shelf. While you create a life that you love. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A life that you love. Loving the fact to improving yourself. Decided that you would not settle. Decided that you got the drive to do it. The road got bumping your foot on the pedal. You go up a level, you turn up whenever. It's time for you to go put in that work. I know my worth, huh? I know it ain't gonna be easy, yeah. I know it hurt, but thing is for sure. Yeah. Until it put me in this earth. Before I ride in that hearse, I'm chasing my goals. I'm chasing my goals. Love enough that you're improving yourself. Alright, welcome back to another episode. Thank y'all so much for being here and kicking it with me on this episode. If you are on YouTube, go ahead and like and subscribe to my channel. If you are on a podcast platform, be sure to leave me a review. Also, most importantly, become a monthly supporter of this podcast. You can choose the monthly amount, and I left links in the description to be able to do so. You can choose the monthly amount, it can either be three, five, eight, or ten dollars. You can cancel at any time that you choose to, but why would you ever do that? Let's go ahead and jump into this episode. Today, we're gonna go over five tips, five things to do to improve your mental health. And of course, this is a really important one and something that more people should really start to talk about for themselves. And before I get to this list, I want you to know and understand that you are the most important person in your life. There is no one who is more important to you. Now you might be thinking about your kids or maybe your significant other is your mama. Of course they're very important. But the better you are, the better you can be at taking care of them and being there for those important people in your life. And if you don't take care of yourself mentally, then you won't be able to be the best person you can for them. So, with that, let's go ahead and jump in. Number one, and we start off with a touchy feely one, pun intended, but number one is to get better at expressing your feelings. One of the most beautiful things about us as humans is that we have this large range of emotions. You can feel the most joy and happiness and ecstasy and just on top of the world. And you can also feel horrible, depressed, angry, heartbroken, hopeless. And the fact that we are able to feel and express all these emotions as really impressive. When you compare all living things, all other life on the planet, there is no other animal on earth that has that spectrum of emotions that humans do. So if you're feeling something and you feel like it needs to be let go, then you need to let it out. If you feel anger about something, you gotta let it out. If you feel sadness about something, you gotta let it out. If you feel frustration towards somebody or something, you gotta let it out. We have to stop holding things in. And I will be the first person to tell you that I am guilty as hell with that one. I hold so much stuff inside me, so much. But the fact of it is your body is at peace when your emotions are at ease. And when your emotions are at dis-ease, then emotions inside you that you're not letting go of, if you are at dis-ease, it can cause disease in your body. And that's a fact. Emotions can cause sickness. Another thing I want to say is don't apologize for your feelings. And I'm not saying it's okay to get angry and be violent and fight or hit somebody or punch a hole in the wall. That's an issue. But if you get angry because of something that happened and you have that feeling, don't apologize for the feeling. Not for feeling it. And don't apologize for expressing that you're angry, that you have that feeling. Don't apologize for expressing your feelings. And again, I'm not saying to express your feelings in a violent way or for you to be angry and yell at people and cuss folks out. But if you feel sadness because something sad happened, don't apologize for feeling it. If you're mad and you tell somebody you're mad about something, that's fine. Don't apologize for feeling that. Another thing folks do is apologize for crying. Never apologize for crying. That's something that you've been holding inside you and you need to let that cry out. Whether that's about something that's just happened to you or something that happened to you years ago, because that's the thing about that's that's the thing that makes us cry the most, right? In front of somebody when we can't hold it in because it's something we've been carrying for so long. And a lot of times we don't even realize we've been carrying it. It just bubbles up and we can't stop it from coming out. Don't apologize for that. And the last part I'm going to touch on is don't ever let anybody invalidate your feelings. And I'm guilty of this, but on the other end, and my ex will tell you too. I used to be guilty of invalidating her feelings. I had to check myself on that end and I had to learn about it. It doesn't matter if I think somebody is wrong or if I think the situation ain't a big deal, I can't deny somebody else's feelings towards that same thing. If somebody tells you or you tell somebody that this thing is a big deal to you, then it impacted you the way it did. Whether they think it is or not. Your feelings are still your feelings. And you shouldn't let anybody disregard or tell you how you should or shouldn't feel just because they don't feel the same way you do. People will invalidate, excuse me, people will invalidate your feelings, and here's how it usually happens. Somebody says, Hey, what you said hurt my feelings. What you said made me upset. Then the other person says, Oh, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. That's not what I meant. Here's what I meant. Here's the reason why I said that. And that's invalidating. And I had to learn that. And to some of y'all, you might not see anything wrong with that exchange. But the correct the correct answer is just to say, I'm sorry what I said hurt you. And that's it. I'm sorry that I did something to make you feel the way you did. And whether or not it was my intention to make you feel that way, it still made you feel that way, and you didn't deserve that. So I'm sorry. Boom. That is genuine. That is not invalidating. So don't be the invalidator and don't let other folks invalidate yours. That's number one. Get better at expressing your feelings and stop holding it in. Number two, make sure you ask for help. We all need help, and this is something I definitely have had to work on and still need to work on. I'm getting better at it. But ask for help. For a lot of folks, it can be so hard to ask for help. But again, we all need it. Every single one of us. We all will need help at some point. A lot of folks will want to start this journey that we're on, right? This journey of working on ourselves, and then start and try and make a difference, try to make a difference, try to make a change, but they end up slipping back into their old ways, and they don't realize that, oh damn, I've been trying to do this by myself. Instead of reading or listening to a podcast or asking other folks how they sustain their happiness or mental state or get counseling. There are so many things out there to help us. And we try to do it on our own. For whatever that reason may be, the reasons can be damn near limitless, right? I can be this way when it comes to making music, especially when it comes to writing this hip-hop plan working on. Because y'all, listen, I got ideas. I got ideas and creativity for days. And what I'm trying to pull off with this thing, it's a really big I really big idea. And I would really get stuck on what I should write next or how I should go about attacking the scene or a story I want to tell. And one thing that's been helping me out a whole lot is some advice I got from a friend of mine. She's a successful playwright. About to get one of her scripts produced in the fall. And the advice she gave me was so simple. And actually, the advice that I kind of talk about on this podcast, but she said to just write it all down. Just vomit right, or something like that. Just write out any and all ideas I have for that scene to not fit to myself and just write. And I won't lie, at first, I didn't think it was the best idea. Not the way I work. I like to try and be way more structured and I struggle with perfectionism sometimes, right? So that was getting in my way because I was trying to write it as if it was the final draft. So after feeling stuck, feeling way down, I decided to try her advice, and I'd be damned if it wasn't exactly what I needed. I started knocking scenes out left and right. But I didn't, if I didn't ask for help, I would be so far behind, right? So ask for help. Think about it like this. Imagine if everything you ever went through in life has a little bit of weight to it. And you go through one thing, and that's like putting a small weight in your backpack. You go through something else, it's like adding another weight. Then another thing, and you add more weight. Small weights, some big, some medium, most of them small, but weight nonetheless, and you try to work all this out on your own. And the whole time, there are folks around you who would be willing to take some of that weight off you, but you don't ask them. You don't ask them to take a little bit of it, and you decide to do it alone. And over time, you just start to feel weighed down, right? Physically, emotionally, and mentally weighed down by all the things you've been carrying throughout your life. At some point, you gotta look at this backpack and realize that you've been carrying all this damn weight. Weight from 15 years ago, four years ago, six months ago. You have all this damn weight, and if you don't put it down or hand some of it off to somebody else to let them help you, it's gonna come crashing down. And it's gonna take a hell of a lot more of an effort to get yourself back on your feet again. So that's number two. Get better at asking for help. You have people around you who are willing and who want to help you. Number three, is to treat yourself like someone you're responsible for taking care of. Treat yourself like someone you're responsible for taking care of. And you literally are. That's the funny part about it. You are responsible for taking care of yourself. Stop taking care of everybody else and forgetting to take care of your damn self. Or quote unquote, running out of time to take care of yourself. Don't say that you don't have enough time for yourself. Make time. Make that time for yourself because it's important. You don't just forget to take care of your kids, right? You don't be like, oh damn, I forgot to feed my kids again. No. You do what you have to do to take care of your children. When was the last time you actually took care of yourself? And I used to be so bad at this. Oh my God. I'm working on it because history shows that I did not used to do this nearly enough. Safe self-care is important. And that ain't saying, oh, hey, self-care day, I'm gonna get my nails done, gonna get my hair done, get a massage. And yes, all that sounds great, and it can be self-care, but that's not all of what self-care is. Self-care can be meditation, eating healthy, working out is self-care, journaling, praying is self-care, giving yourself time to just exist, to catch up mentally with all the things you got going on. That's the most important one, instead of just going and going and going and going, right? And that was my weakness. I have a hard time just taking a rest, having those days where I do nothing, because that's self-care too. Having a day, ever so often that you don't do anything. That is necessary. You ain't serving nobody by ignoring your self-care. As a matter of fact, the people around you are worse off if you don't practice self-care. The better you are, the more time you take for yourself, the better you will be for those people around you. Any coffee drinkers listening? We done all seen that joke on TV, right? When somebody gets to work real early and they say, Don't talk to me before I have my coffee. Obviously, you ain't like that. That's not you, right? Never you, obviously. But it is a thing to be crabby in the morning, to be pissed off that you have to be somewhere early as hell. We done all been in a bad mood because we have to be somewhere early, or we can be more likely to be in a bad mood just having to be somewhere in that at that time of day, right? Now the flip side of that is when you wake up with enough time to eat, enough time to shower, enough time to relax, to have a cup of coffee, maybe meditate if you're a meditator or pray. You ain't rushing at all because you have enough time to get to work to get to work comfortably. You can't tell me that you won't be in a better mood if your morning went like that. You're gonna be a better person to be around. You'll be in a better mood. Same thing with self-care, same analogy. You'll be a better person if you work on yourself and give yourself that self-care. Maybe your temper ain't as short. Maybe you have more energy for your kids. Same thing for your friends and family. You'll be a better friend and a family member, all areas of your life, if you take care of yourself. You can't pour from an empty cup. You're not serving anybody if you don't serve yourself. So that's number three. Treat yourself like someone you're responsible for taking care of. Number four, give yourself more time of just silence. Just silence. If that means meditation or just sitting outside, drinking a cup of coffee or a cup of tea in the morning, just taking a moment in the middle of the day to just sit for 10 minutes with no work, no responsibilities. Whatever it may be, give yourself that silence. We live in a world of just go and go and go and go and go and go. And we find out is what we find out is the key is to go and go and go and go, then silence. It's go, go, go, go, go, then silence. That's the key. And the irony is if you can do that, if you can take that time to do nothing, you're gonna realize that you actually get more done and have more mental space if you give yourself those mental breaks throughout the day. And there are studies that prove this. And most of us don't need a study to figure that part out. I figured this one out on my damn self, the hard way. I would just go and go and go and go until I needed that silence. And my body would crash, my brain would get stuck, and it kept happening. I kept needing the silence until finally I was like, you know what? Let me plan some breaks for myself. And I literally, I literally plan breaks throughout my day. As a matter of fact, I'm taking one right after I record this episode. Your brain works better when you have a break in between going long periods of time of working hard. If you give yourself some silence, right, to read, to meditate, sit and do nothing, however, you sit in silence, right? You will be so much more peaceful, especially if you go on a walk outside. That's literally science. The visual of things slowly passing by your peripheral vision is calming for your brain. So if you can be outside in the woods, around trees, especially, it'll help even more. But walking in general does this. So try that. Having those things pass by you. So that's number four. Give yourself more silence. And number five, the last thing, put your thoughts down on paper. Write them out. Instead of having to try and figure them out all in your head. Just like my friend told me to do with my writing, right? Because thoughts can be really complex. So whether that's journaling or joting things down, when you think things or feel things, start writing them down on pen and paper. This will make it so much easier to work on them and so much easier to let go of the things that are no longer serving you. Right? So put things down on paper. So those are the five things. Again, this wasn't rocket science. This wasn't rocket science school, but all things that will help you on this journey and all things that I do as well, because again, I'm on this journey with you. So number one, get better at expressing your feelings. Two, get better at asking for help. Three, treat yourself like somebody you're responsible for taking care of. Number four, give yourself more time in silence. Number five, put down your thoughts on paper. So that's what I got for you today. Hopefully, y'all enjoyed this message. If you did, please share this message on your social media or with a friend or family member who you think would benefit from hearing this. Um, also become a monthly supporter of the show. Like I said, you can choose a monthly amount, it can either be three, five, eight, or ten dollars, and you can cancel at any time. Let's get to this music. The song I got for y'all today is an unreleased song. This song is called Stubborn. Let's ride out. Just watch how you talk to me, it's matter for discussion. Really probably better off if you just don't enough. Call it what you call it, get okay to what I'm stuck, uh. Call it what you call it, get okay to what I'm stuck, get on my way, uh. I shoot for the moon, end up turning into a star. Now I'm on the stage. So no, you can't put me in my place. Out of the maze, I feel it like I ain't liking the taste, uh. We put you so, yeah. Planning my seeds and water my base. Stay out of my way. I'ma calm, but you're not the day. Leave me alone, that's all I'm a stage. Something that stumbling, get a mummy. Stop in that stuff, the way that I'm feeling if you demand wrong, I'm catching the case. Summon that stumbling, but I'm not care about your stop as a story, go have a good day. Summer that stomach. Dream chasing got a nigga sleepy out days. We had way too many bad days. You can see it, I'm in my face. I'm living stressin' on top of depression, but I don't say nothing. Let them keep guessing. Got some chick textin' me, are you okay? I said I'm good, are you on the way? They live in the hustle and faster, it was my goal to pick up the pennies. Then I stole I'm in they make me bread. I'm like I know, I'm a first place. I ain't wanna shine it, huh? Wanna get bread, but don't wanna climb it, huh? That's sound like death, uh. My only regret was wasting my time. My second regret was being so stubborn. My two paper world is fucking. I know when I'm all that fuck, I know when I'm all at. Just watch how you talk to me if I'm not footing. I'm in with you, call it, yeah, oh, it's the word I'm stuck, um I'm in with you, call it, yeah, oh, it's the word's dumb. Shut up when you talk to me. Shut up when you talk to me. I don't wanna hear your mouth but see your face. I don't need your help anyway. Believe I will be stray. I put it all on my plate, get it done in plenty ways, plenty days. I'm outdoing the myth, but I keep it cool, I don't even flip. You ain't a threat. I'm humble, so all I require from you is respect. Put some my kids. That's how I play my cards, get off my deck. Keep telling me you too close out. I see you sound like my ex, not a disc. I'm learning some things about me now. I need to check, but I need some text. Let's talk about me later. I need some rest, I am the best. And devoted and expressing my feelings, protecting my feelings, especially when it's this time of my life and I'm working on me. And this guy is my witness, I'm working to death. Uh, let me close down. Rollin' the top, uh, wait on me to say I'm stubborn. Look, my nigga, I'm good. I swear I don't need no advice. Yep, I'm my ape, yeah. Watch how you talk to me, it's not up for discussion. I'm in what you call it, yeah, okay, what I'm stumped, uh I'm in what you call it, yeah, okay. I shoot for the moon, ended up turning into a star. Now I'm out of space, yeah. So no, you can't put me in my face, yeah.