Here’s how I got unstuck and found #mentalhealth and you can too. If you’re stuck in a rut or procrastinating on things you know you should be doing – check this out. My life just changed in 20 minutes for less than $20 bucks. I wish I knew this months ago.
Listen: How I Got Unstuck And You Can Too
Watch: How I Got Unstuck And You Can Too
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
How I Got Unstuck
Today I’m going to tell you how I got unstuck, and how maybe you can too. There is somebody that wrote in and I want to read this. She says, “I live alone and I work from home, so it’s like I can’t escape the mess, I just sit in it for hours. I’m so overwhelmed with chronic depression. I can’t get organized. There are two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and my work area. Sometimes I just cry. I just move stuff from piles to new piles.
My problem isn’t helping others or being empathetic, I have all the time to clean, I just can’t make myself do it. I can’t even clean myself or wash clothes. The mess doesn’t bug me, I overlook it. I sleep next to piles and I step over broken glass and I wait until maggots appear. I don’t have visitors, so I can’t be motivated to clean something no one will ever see.
I’ve only had two people in my home ever, my boyfriend and my best friend. They both clean when they’re here and they seem just to know where to put stuff. I feel so bad, my boyfriend spent six hours trying to help me last night wash dishes that I’d had sitting there for over a year. I just started throwing them away, I don’t feel like I’ll ever be able to maintain a clean home.”
There are a Lot of People Who are Stuck
All right, the reason I’m sharing this with you is that there are a lot of people that are stuck. As she says, she has all the time to clean, but yet she’s stuck and is not able to do that. There’s something about her that does not make her want to clean.
And if you were to talk to her through the logical reasons, yes, she understands she’s worthy of a clean home, she understands she deserves a clean home. And so on the outside, it would be easy to say, “Oh, here are all the reasons why you should not step over broken glass or have maggots in your home.”
On the outside, the friends that are coming in, the friend and the boyfriend, they know these things, right? They know where to put stuff, or they seem to be able to have a sense of figuring out where that goes. So it’s not like it’s impossible to do, it’s like the person is stuck.
I Have Also Been Stuck In My Business
Okay, now I totally understand this because I too have been stuck in a little bit different way, but it was in my business. Now, I had figured out the cleaning part, so that’s not the thing, but in my business I was stuck. And I was stuck with all the same channels, and the challenge was if I were to give advice to someone else in the exact same situation, I knew what to do. What I needed to do was I needed to let a team member go.
The team member was causing ungodly amounts of chaos in the business, but I didn’t want to let them go because we are in a pandemic, because there is an era of depression and socialization has changed. And if you take away someone’s job while they’re trying to support their family, I felt bad about that.
So I kept rationalizing and giving them chances and giving them extra time. And every week I would say to myself, “I’ll give them one more week.” And then every week I go to my counselor and I say, “Hey, listen, I’m so frustrated.” And they would say to me, “Why haven’t you let this person go already?” Why haven’t I let them go for all these reasons, but I was just stuck and I was holding onto my limitations.
The Pandemic Has Changed Everything
So, interesting story. The pandemic has changed everything. Okay, it’s true that socialization has changed. Lots of people that worked in offices that just kind of had their office family no longer has the office family. All the office families went home to their individual houses, everyone is working from home.
That’s still true a year later, okay. So a year has passed and the common friendships that we had with people have kind of come to a grinding halt. When we go out in public and we see other people, it’s not like, “Oh Hey, how are you doing?”
It’s like, everyone has a face mask. And so they kind of even avoid looking at each other. Then when they are next to each other, they’re standing six feet apart. So there’s this weird, not contact, not talking, not interaction going on in the world around us, and it is really, really depressing for a whole lot of people.
I Am a Huge Dr. Amen Fan
So back to how I got unstuck. I was listening to a podcast the other day while I was working out and Dr. Daniel Amen was being interviewed and it was about his new book that’s coming out called Your Brain Is Always Listening. And I’m a huge Dr. Amen fan because he’s got like 12 bestselling books, but he is known for scanning people’s brains.
He’s done over 170,000 brain scans and what he’s been able to find is why people do things the way they do, based on how their brain and their cognitive functions operate.
So I was fascinated by this book, and he said, of course, he’s marketing his book, you know, buy the book at the end. But he said if you buy the book from my website, there are a bunch of freebies.
I Love Freebies and Contests
Well, I love freebies, right? I love contests, I love winning things. I love freebies, especially from someone I respect as much as Dr. Daniel Amen. So I said, “Okay, I will buy the book through his website.” Now, I wanted to buy it on Amazon because I wanted the Kindle version, but when I got to his website, there was a link where I could buy it from Amazon, get my Kindle version and still get the freebies.
I was like, “Yes, I win.” So I bought the book and when I went to the freebie section, it was a page, and on that page linked to hypnosis tapes. I was like, “Hypnosis, what is this all about?” Well, he had several different topics, there’s one on weight loss, there’s one on stop smoking, there’s one on peak productivity, there’s one on anxiety, there’s one on sleep, there’s one on chronic pain.
I said, “Well, wait a second. I’ve been going through this anxiety thing, I’ve lost a lot of sleep over this particular team member and I’m stuck, I’m going to listen to the anxiety one, this is exactly what I’m going to do.” Because I was tired anyway, because I wasn’t sleeping the night before, super stressed out, not letting myself make the decisions I knew I actually needed to make because I myself was stuck.
I Did His 20 Minute Hypnosis Session
Okay, so I went and I took a nap. As I took a nap, here’s this 20-minute hypnosis session. So I said, “It’s free, it doesn’t cost anything.” And I’ve always been of the belief that if you can show me a better way to live and it doesn’t harm anyone and it’s not physically damaging to my health or the health of anyone else, I’m probably going to give it a try.
Oh, okay, I’m going to give this a try. I get nothing else except to hang on to the anxiety that I already have. So I did this hypnosis session and I fell asleep. Like, he put me in this trance. When I woke up, I knew exactly what I needed to do and I went and I let the person go.
Well, what’s interesting about this is it’s only been about a week, but in the last week I have been more productive than probably the last six months of my business. This huge freeing burden was lifted from my business where I had to stop micromanaging this person that’s caused all this extra chaos in my business.
It Helped My Husband’s Sleep Apnea Too
And I sat there going, “Wait for a second, I just got unstuck.” I got unstuck. So I’m really super excited about it, I was telling my husband about it. My husband has sleep apnea, and I said, “There’s one on sleep. Any chance that you would want to listen to this tape?” Because I thought he’s going to go like, “Woo hoo, that’s kind of weird stuff. What do you say? Let’s listen to it, we’ve got nothing to lose.”
So as we went to bed at night, we listened to the hypnosis in our sleep. Well, the next day I said, “How do you feel?” He said, “You’re not going to believe it.” He’s got the Fitbit with the sleep tracker on it. He said, “I got 92% on my sleep tracker from sleeping last night while I was listening to that tape as I fell asleep.”
And I was like, Whoa, the tape, this hypnosis tape, had unstuck him as well from whatever his issue was. So I don’t know if what you’re going through is you’re stuck, it sounds like you know how to clean and that you understand you deserve a clean home. For some reason, it sounds like you’re just stuck.
This is What Helped Me Get Unstuck
Anyway, I’m going to leave links in the show notes. I’m not a sponsor, he’s not a sponsor, I don’t make any money off of it or anything, but this helped me get unstuck. The book was $11 or $14 or something like that, but some of the best money I’ve ever spent.
I got unstuck, my husband got unstuck. I’ve had the most productive week, I mean, totally worth the money. I’m going to leave links in the show notes and I hope that you have an experience. And if you do, share it with me because I want to hear what your experience was just getting unstuck.
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