Episode 29 Mind Over Muscle: Strengthening Mental Health on Your Fitness Journey
Hey there! 👋 I'm personal trainer Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), personal trainer and host of the Coaching Corner podcast. In this episode, I discuss the importance of focusing on your mental health while working towards your fitness goals.
Many people struggle to stay consistent and prioritize their health due to low self-esteem and limiting beliefs. To stay consistent and make gains, it's important to examine the beliefs that you carry.
In this episode, I talk about how having low self-worth contributes to the most common struggles that I see in clients as a personal trainer. I also give some tips for how you can work on changing your beliefs and improve your self-esteem through cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, mindfulness, and shadow work. We'll dive deeper into these and other strategies in future podcast episodes.
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(00:00):
When you're not in touch with your body and you're not able to listen to your body because you've just been taught not to, then you have a hard time taking care of yourself. It's important to consider your belief systems. If you're not ready to really look at your belief systems and your operating systems, the beliefs that you're operating under, you just really are going to struggle to stick to a fitness and wellness plan, and you're also going to struggle just to be happy with yourself, regardless of whether you make progress or not.
(00:39):
Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. My name is Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I'm a personal trainer and content creator, and I have created this podcast so that I can share tips to help you make gains and stay consistent on your fitness journey. In today's episode, we're going to talk about the role that your self-esteem and your self-worth play in your ability to make gains and stay consistent and ultimately enjoy your gains in your fitness journey. So if you struggle with your self-Worth, this episode is a good one to give a listen to. I also give some tips on things that you can do to help develop more self-worth and self-esteem, and ultimately be able to reach your goals in the gym and actually enjoy the gains that you make. This episode was recorded while I was live on my Twitch channel. That's Twitch.tv/jaydigains. If you would like to join me live and ask questions, give me a follow there. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:42):
So I haven't been super, super active on social media because I've been going back to the drawing board and trying to just refine what it is that I'm going to be offering in my online business rather than just trying to be a generic online personal trainer. I've been in conversation with my clients and the impact that they say I've had on them. And here's what I'm thinking so far is my strength and what sets me apart as a coach is my emphasis on the psychological side of things like the psychology. Because I am trying to make this online coaching thing work. I've noticed there's many, many, many fucking things that get in the way and keep people from being able to stick to their programs. I know that my programs work. I have lots of examples of success of people losing a bunch of weight, building a bunch of muscle.
(02:34):
I know that when someone follows my programs, what I've written for them, they reach their goals. So the programs themselves are good. My programming is good. Where I get hung up in my business and where I get hung up with my clients and why not all of my clients experience that level of success is that they have various, various reasons why they're able to stick to their program. And that's been the main frustration of my business. That's been the main frustration for my clients is it's been difficult to identify why is it that these people cannot stick? Why is it that people have a hard time sticking to their program? So I've been thinking about that a lot and I think I have developed some ideas around that, just having conversations with people about that. So ultimately I think why so many people in the western world, in particular in the United States, which is where most of my clients are, the reason why they're overweight and they have a hard time moving and eating better and eating healthy in the first place is because our society that we've grown up in.
(03:51):
On the one hand, so many of us are basically taught from very, very young age, either in the household or at school that our needs don't matter and we learn to dissociate from our bodies and not listen to our bodies. And in many cases, many of us, especially if you have a DHD or if you have autism or if you had shit going on at home, you were taught at some point to mask or to not listen to what your body's saying that it needs. So we have a lot of people walking around just have this ability to completely disassociate from their bodies. And when you're not in touch with your body and you're not able to listen to your body because you've just been taught not to, then you have a hard time taking care of yourself. It starts as early as you have to ask the teacher to go to the bathroom when you have to go to the bathroom, and they're not always going to say yes.
(04:53):
And so you learn how to just sit with the feeling of having to pee and then you're not going to the bathroom or it starts in the home trigger warning and you have a parent who is mean to you or they just are neglectful and you have needs that your caretaker is not meeting and you learn how to suppress your needs or to just try to have less needs. And so you dissociate from your body and from your own needs. In that way. We're taught to hate ourselves as well, regardless of whether you had a happy home life growing up or not. A lot of what our economy is based off of is creating a problem that probably didn't exist before so that they can sell the solution. That's what the beauty industry is all built on. Give people crippling anxiety around what they look like and make them obsess over how skinny they are or how fat they are or the shape of their face or the texture of their hair. Get people to see themselves as a problem so that they buy all of these solutions, and that's what keeps the economy strong. So messaging from magazines when I was younger, magazines that taught us as little girls beauty routines and stuff, and we were taught to hate our bodies and to be ashamed of our bodies and to starve our bodies.
(06:29):
So there's a lot that we're just kind of raised with that make us hate ourselves, and that's not a bug in the system, that's a feature. It's literally built into it and it goes as deep. I mean, it just goes. It's in every single level of everything that we do as individuals and as a society, including the major religions. I grew up in a very fundamentalist understanding of Christianity, and according to that philosophy, every single person is inherently sinful and flawed and deserves to burn in hell for an eternity. But Jesus came down and saved you. He died for your sins. But that's like a gloss over of the fact that it's like you're taught a worldview of yourself, that your body, that you as a person, no matter how hard you try to be good and kind and empathetic, is you're inherently simple and you deserve to be tortured for eternity.
(07:31):
So it's on so many different levels. We're taught to hate ourselves. And so of course people have trouble eating healthy. Of course, people have trouble just taking care of their bodies, getting up and moving throughout the day. We're going to the gym and getting strong because you believe that you don't deserve to be taken care of and being in that state of mind is what makes it so easy to sell you stuff. Being in that state of mind is what keeps you showing up to that job, got to keep making money so that you can keep buying these things to make you feel a little bit better and give you a little bit of relief from the self-hate that we have taught you. Our society is very, very, very much built on cultivating shame in individuals and putting a lot of onus on the individual to hate themselves.
(08:30):
And so ultimately that's what it comes down to for me as a coach. And that's why I see so many people struggle when they work with me. They want to start working out, they want to start eating healthy, but they struggle just to do the very basic things of going for a walk every day for just 10 minutes. It's just 10 minutes. But people struggle to do that. They struggle to prioritize time to take care of themselves because on some level, they don't think that they deserve to be taken care of on some level. They don't believe that they deserve to be happy with their bodies because I mean, can you think of a time ever in your life that you were actually happy with your body or that you didn't obsessively look at yourself and pick apart all the things that you don't like?
(09:19):
There's a reason why we all struggle with anxiety when we look in the mirror. That's why body dysmorphia is such a constant in our culture. It's feature not a bug. In some ways we've been groomed to think the way that we think, not for our own benefit, but for someone else's, got to keep the economy running what this country's all about. So honestly, I think that if you hate yourself, you're going to have a hard time taking care of yourself. It doesn't matter if you hire a personal trainer, it doesn't matter if you hire a nutritionist, if you hate yourself and you don't do anything to try to deconstruct that self-image, that negative self image that you've cultivated over a lifetime, you're going to have a hard time getting anything to stick. And then once again, here comes our hyper individualism that we have in this culture, and you're going to like, oh, why can't I stick to this?
(10:25):
And then shame yourself even more because you're having trouble sticking to the plan and then you're having trouble making any progress, and so then you hate yourself even more, and then it makes it even harder for you to take care of yourself. I've just seen so many clients struggle with that cycle. It's hard because as a personal trainer, it's like there's only so much I can do. How do I deconstruct patriarchy? How do I deconstruct capitalism in my clients so that they can make gains? Because ultimately that's kind of what needs to happen for the clients who I've seen struggle the most. That's what needs to happen. But deconstruction is not really within the realm or the scope of a personal trainer's job, maybe a life coach, maybe a therapist, but there's very little that I can do on that front with personal training. But I do actually believe that that's the number one hurdle for my clients.
(11:25):
It's the number one hurdle. It's negative self-image shame, internalized capitalism internalized because capitalism also places so much emphasis on a person's value and their productivity that if you struggle, you feel like you have no worth as a person. People feel like their worth as a person is tied to the number on the scale, right? Or the arbitrary number of size clothing that they wear. So it takes a lot of deconstruction if that's a hurdle for you. And I want to be able to help people overcome that hurdle. If someone hates themselves, they've internalized many, many cultural beliefs that just teach them to hate themselves. And until that is addressed, they're going to have a hard time making progress and making use of the coaching programs that I create and making use of the nutrition coaching that I provide. As long as they hate themselves, as long as they're still operating on these very toxic belief systems, they might.
(12:39):
I mean, it happens. It still happens. You see people who are able to achieve a lot of progress while still hating themselves, but they're not happier, right? By the end of the program, by a year or two later, they still hate themselves. They're not actually that much happier. So what's the fucking point? The main reason why people hire a personal trainer is because they want to feel better about themselves. They want to be happier, they want to love their bodies more. And a lot of that is not going to come down to just an exercise plan or nutrition plan, especially if you're not able to stick to it. It's important to consider your belief systems, and a lot of people are just really not ready to question their belief systems. If you're not ready to really look at your belief systems and your operating systems, the beliefs that you're operating under, you just really are going to struggle to stick to a fitness and wellness plan.
(13:38):
And you're also going to struggle just to be happy with yourself regardless of whether you make progress or not. So from my limited scope as just a personal trainer, all I can say and what I can recommend is cognitive behavioral therapy is awesome. Seeking out therapy, working with a therapist can be very, very helpful. But especially cognitive behavioral therapy, I'm a big fan of also EMDR. If you have any kind of PTSD, learn how to listen to your body and be present in your body. Cultivate a practice of mindfulness, really prioritize cultivating self-love. Also, I would highly encourage everybody to do shadow work. Shadow work is the practice of examining the things that subconsciously drive your behavior and your thoughts and how you see yourself and how you see the world. Your shadow is basically the parts. It's basically the rug that you tend to sweep under all the things about yourself that you don't like to think about or things that you don't even realize are a part of you, but they drive your behavior, they impact your behavior, they impact how you see the world.
(14:49):
They impact your happiness and your ability to love. So shadow work is really, really important. You can do shadow work in the context of therapy or you can do it solo. I actually just ordered a shadow work journal for my parents, and we'll see what they do with that. But a little while ago, my dad was talking about how he's been struggling with his mental health lately, and he seemed really receptive to listening to the things that I've learned through shadow work about meeting and taking care of your inner child and doing that work of examining your subconscious belief systems and bringing them to the conscious. So yeah, I've done the Shadow work journal before they've updated it. I'm going to order a new one for myself. The one that I ordered last year that I sent to Paro and I sent to Mal and a couple of other people, they've added a lot more content to it.
(15:45):
Let me give you guys a link to it. So I'm going to order another one. So here's also what I'm thinking of doing because shadow work therapy, all of these things are so important and I think that they are a foundation to actually making progress in your fitness, but also being happy with the results and actually achieving what you're after, which is like I want to actually be okay with myself. I want to actually like myself moving forward. I want to change how I've been showing up online in my social media and also in my email list. Yes, I'm going to continue to create training programs. Yes, I'm going to continue to create nutrition programs, and I'm going to continue to offer personal training and coaching and nutrition coaching. But in this next chapter of my business, I'm going to put a lot of focus on creating content around the interplay between mental health and your fitness.
(16:38):
And I'm going to start a series of discussions on different aspects and different strategies of improving mental health and how they directly apply to fitness and are impacted by fitness. I've already started a couple of writing prompts for myself, and I'm going to be sending them to my email list and posting about them on my TikTok and other social media. But basically we're going to take a look at the different kind of questions that a therapist would ask or that the shadowed work journal asks. And we're going to take a look at how I'm going to talk about how I have seen those questions play out with my clients in the context of their fitness journeys and their just personal growth journeys. And so we're going to go over all kinds of things about what is the type of mindset that you need to have in order to make progress in your fitness.
(17:33):
But I'm not just going to tell you this is what you need to have. I'm going to give some suggestions about how you can cultivate those parts of that mindset, and there's going to be a direct link back to and suggestion back to find a therapist, get the Shadow Work journal. And I want to point you towards other resources to take these things a step further, but I do want to just kind of introduce people to the world of mental health in the context of if you want to improve your fitness, you need to take care of your mental health. I'm going to give you a little baby example of how to do that, but take it further. And here's how. So I am not a therapist. I would love to be a therapist, and I'm thinking about going back and studying cognitive behavioral therapy and getting licensed, but what I can do as a coach is kind of point you in the direction.
(18:22):
So we're going to talk about how to develop a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. Fixed mindset is the mindset where you believe that your traits or your skills, your abilities are fixed. You just are how you are, and it's never going to change. Versus a growth mindset which says, I can actually change and develop these things about myself by working on them, by considering them, by doing shadow work, by working with a therapist, by doing different types of therapy. I can grow and I can change things about myself, or I can grow to accept and work around things about myself. You're not stuck how you are, and that's the kind of limiting belief that a lot of people have about themselves. They're just stuck. You're not stuck. You're limiting yourself, and it's not all your fault because we grew up in this society that kind of teaches you to think that way.
(19:16):
So how to get unstuck and how to cultivate a growth mindset. That's one thing that we're going to talk about. Learning how to listen to your body, getting away from that dissociated state, dissociative state where you're like we talked about before, that example of even in the classroom you were taught to hold your pee or hold having to go to the bathroom. You couldn't go to the bathroom because you had to wait until the teacher said so. And there's all these little ways that we're taught to not listen to our bodies and try to take our attention out of our bodies and not listen to our bodies, and that ultimately feeds into our inability to take care of our bodies later in life when we're adults and we're in charge of our own schedules and everything. Cultivating mindfulness, cultivating being able to be present in your body, listen to your body, love your body, nurture your body, nurture yourself, how to become resilient to failure. Change your relationship with failure. A lot of people are terrified of failure, and that terror of failure holds them back from so much in their life, including making gains in the gym or even starting the journey of taking care of themselves, fear of failure and how to approach failure and how to embrace failure and see failure as something that's good. Failure is a launchpad. Failure is where we learn where we get data and where we can grow from. How to set boundaries for your fitness, but also just for yourself.
(20:51):
One of the things a lot of us have trouble with is boundaries, setting boundaries on ourselves, setting boundaries on other people around what we want and standing up for ourselves and standing up for what we want. A lot of us are kind of trained to not do that. So how to set boundaries. We're going to be talking about that. We're going to be talking about the difference between having a reactive mindset versus a responsive mindset. Instead of being reactive and just constantly just trying to escape something, you're actually going to learn how to move toward a goal, how to desham your fitness, how to approach shame and develop a better relationship with it so that it's not ruling your life and sabotaging your ability to stick to your training program. So a lot of this stuff is similar to a lot of that coaching advice that you'll get from business coaches or self-help, but we're going to look at it specifically in the context of how it impacts your ability to stick to your fitness programs or to your fitness plan, or to your ability to eat healthy and your ability to show up for your workouts or just your basic activity routine.
(22:05):
Yeah, so I created a list of 50 writing prompts that I'm going to be discussing with you guys here on Twitch and on my other socials, and then also on my email list just so that we can all just cultivate a better mindset so that no matter where you are in your fitness journey, whether you are getting ready for a powerlifting competition or you're just struggling to take basic care of yourself and eat vegetables and eat enough protein and go for a walk, or just get more active, no matter what level you are on, mindset is always applicable. It's always helpful to think about your mindset towards yourself and towards your fitness. That's a long-winded way to say that's a way that I can talk to everybody in a way that is helpful for everybody, but also kind of can generate, help me to grow basically on social media because there's not a lot of people who in the fitness spaces, on social media that are talking about these things, and that is something I'm excited to talk about.
(23:09):
That's something that I actually am excited to make content around rather than the generic. How much cardio should you be doing to warm up for your workouts? All of those are important messages, and I'm going to continue making them, and I'm going to continue making content on those things, like how to actually do the fitness thing. But I'm super excited about this marketing and messaging around how to think about your fitness and how to think about yourself in a way that ultimately feel better about yourself regardless of how many pounds you lose, regardless of how much you can lift. Because at the end of the day, that's the most important thing, is how do you feel about yourself, inner gains and outer gains. Exactly. In this reflecting time, what I found is that is why those of you who are sort of like my diehard community members, many of you I think who have really identified with my streams is because of the mental health talks that we have, because there's 1,000,001 fitness streamers and there's 1,000,001 personal trainers.
(24:20):
There's tons of people online who could give generic fitness advice. You can just Google how many steps a day should I walk? You can Google, how often should I change my workouts? You know what I mean? And I think it's good to talk about those things. I still need to create that content for my clients and for people who want want it. But I think what makes this community so special, and I think what sets me, and this is what my clients have told me when I've talked to 'em about it, what makes them love working with me is that we, in individual coaching, but also in my stream, we go deeper to underneath what is at the root of your behaviors and what's at the root of your difficulty in doing the things that we talk about. So I don't want to be like, here, just do this.
(25:15):
If you're struggling to just do this, I want to get to the bottom of like, well, why are you struggling with this? And I just want to offer some of the insight that I've gotten from teaching for 10 years, and also from my own deconstruction journey and how I've grown to see how much shame and self-hate held me back in my own and still do still do to this day. Many of my episodes where I struggle to take care of myself and where I self neglect, which expresses itself in my inability to eat consistently, I self neglect through starvation, and that is how my trauma has manifested. It doesn't help that I'm A DHD and I hyperfocus on stuff too, so I'll dissociate through hyper fixation too, but that has a direct effect on my gains. And so I'm trying to get a 300 pound deadlift by the end of the year for myself.
(26:11):
This is an example of what I'm talking about. I'm trying to get a 300 pound deadlift. I really want it, but in order to get there, I have to grow some more muscle. I need to build bigger glutes and quads. I need bigger legs, and I need to be able to hold that weight. So I need to build muscle, and I have struggled to build muscle over the last few years because my personal manifestation of self abandonment is not eating the amount that I need to eat in order to build that muscle. That's been a blind spot in my own personal self-care. So now using cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, I'm working with myself to try and make sure that I'm keeping myself fed and prioritizing it, prioritizing it in my schedule, and really making it something that I put a lot of importance on, and I'm trying to journal and learn what my triggers are so that I can eat more, so that I can build more muscle so that I can reach my fitness goals.
(27:19):
But when I learn how to take better care of myself and using these cognitive behavioral therapy techniques and learning how to feed myself more consistently, it's not just my gains that are going to benefit from that. My whole life is going to benefit from that because that mindset of I deserve to be taken care of and really trying to deconstruct the things that are blocking me from taking care of myself, everything else is going to benefit. So it's worthwhile. And I think that's why a lot of people say when they go on a fitness journey, I think it's something that a lot of people subconsciously do is they're on a personal growth journey at the same time. But what I want to do, which is the essence of shadow work, is I want to make that unconscious part the personal growth side of things that happens and needs to happen if you want to be successful in your fitness journey.
(28:06):
And if you want to be happy with the results, I want to bring that conscious. I want us to be very conscious of what kinds of things we need to do, what kinds of mindsets we need to attack, what kinds of mindsets we need to cultivate in order to maximize our gains, and also just reach the ultimate gains, which is like I'm happier with myself. I'm really going to be leaning into that a lot more in the podcast and on social media and here on stream moving forward. And I feel really good about it. I feel really good about it. What do you guys think?
(28:45):
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode of The Coaching Corner podcast. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. If you would like to join me while I'm live on my Twitch channel, give me a follow at Twitch.tv/jaydigains. You can also go to my website, jaydigains.com to find more resources on how to start or stay consistent on your fitness journey, and I'll see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you drink some water, eat your veggies, eat your protein, and take care of yourself, and I'll see you soon.
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