Welcome to today’s special feature!
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening—depending on where you are in the world—and welcome back to another blog post! Previously, I shared with you why I believe taking breaks from social media is life-changing and how this has benefited me in my own life tremendously. If you haven’t read it, do check it out here!
Learning to disconnect and return to myself has been a constant challenge, but nevertheless rewarding, even though I may not realize it at the moment. But there’s another piece of the puzzle that I didn’t explore in my previous post, which brings me to today’s topic. One that I’m excited to discuss with you not only because it’s important to me, but because I’m joined by one of my dearest friends, Kate Van Eeuwyk!
Welcome to our very first co-written piece, on what reclaiming your peace and honoring your boundaries truly means to us. Before we dive deeper into it, please allow me to introduce to you this wonderful soul who I’m honoured to call my best friend!
Meet Kate!
Kate: Hi! As much as I promised myself that my introduction wouldn’t resemble a LinkedIn pitch, here I am. I am a recent Business and Communications graduate from Laurier and currently dabbling as an HR Coordinator at a small but mighty marketing company. While that may sound ‘super’ fun to you, I’ve always found myself drawn to storytelling. Whether it was in academics or personal poetry that no one (and I mean no one) has seen, I always felt fulfilled by interjecting my voice and opinion onto some sort of Google Doc. By co-contributing to this blog post, I hope to connect with a community that values taking care of themselves, being present, and of course, enjoying a cocktail or glass of wine every now and again.
Now for the fun stuff. Kundi and I have been best friends for just over 6 years now. We’ve bonded over fashion, certain lifestyle goals, and honestly, our love for food. From the beginning, we have remained on the same page about understanding each other’s boundaries and valuing the genuine care we have for one another. I am truly grateful to have someone who is as passionate, veracious, and kind as a best friend in this lifetime.
Kundi: One of the many things Kate and I bonded over early on in our friendship was mental health. While we can easily lose track of time chatting about fashion, the golden oldies, romance, our ambitions, and everything in between, it’s equally important for us to discuss the difficult things in life that we all face. As recent graduates looking back on the past few years, we’ve had to learn and unlearn certain beliefs we had and unhelpful patterns that were no longer doing us any good.
Kate and I hear and say it to each other all the time. “Protect your peace.” My family and I also preach it to each other on a regular basis. It’s a practice we’ve grown to love and implement into our everyday lives. In case you haven’t heard the phrase, ‘protecting your peace’ is exactly how it sounds. To me, it means building the courage to say no to anything that isn’t for you, and that includes your own limiting beliefs.
We’d be lying, however, if we said it was always easy and didn’t present a few challenges. One thing Kate and I have both experienced and still do experience, is ‘fear of missing out’ or ‘FOMO’.
Fear of missing out (FOMO)
Kate: In a world rooted in digital connection, FOMO is so easy to be consumed by. From mirror selfies to extravagant vacations, it is not hard to feel like you are missing out on the world around you. Even when trying to ‘protect our peace’ and set healthy boundaries, the FOMO on life can’t help but creep in.
If you ask me and Kundi what our Friday nights looked like in university, it didn’t match up to your ideal twenty-something bar hopping and ordering takeout at 3 am. Let’s be honest— academia was exhausting and by the end of the week, we were all drained. Some re-energized by going out and drinking, while others felt more comfortable settling down to watch a Netflix movie. However, the latter option was often met with phrases that made you feel selfish about saying no to going out. As such, it was easy to spiral into self-doubt about being a bad friend, setting boundaries, and frankly, asking ourselves why we weren’t aligning with the ‘normal’ university student identity.
Kundi: The reason why we feel it’s necessary to include FOMO in this conversation is because it can have negative effects on our self-esteem and create obstacles when trying to establish boundaries. FOMO, like any other form of anxiety, impacts people of all ages and all walks of life. For some, FOMO can be as small as feeling left out when you choose to stay home while your peers or loved ones go out. Or perhaps you’ve been invited to multiple engagements on the same day and need to decide which ones to attend and which you’ll miss out on. I’m sure many of us run into scenarios where we aren’t able to be everywhere at once and therefore feel left out.
For others, FOMO is a bit more crippling. Take for instance, society’s expectations on what we ‘should’ achieve once we hit certain milestones. Fears surrounding missing out on life experiences such as finding a romantic partner, traveling the world, turning a dream into reality, starting a family, and so on, can leave us feeling lost and out of touch with our ‘purpose’ in life. It could also look like endlessly scrolling on LinkedIn, feeling like you’ve fallen short in your career. When you feel as though you’ve missed out on a window of opportunity in life to achieve a certain dream, the fear of missing out can affect your mental health.
I’m no stranger to FOMO and FOMO is no stranger to me but having supportive people in my life, like Kate, to lean on and have these conversations with reminds me that I’m not alone and these feelings are normal. One of the first steps to protecting your peace is understanding that we each have our own journeys in life. What’s meant for you, what’s meant for me, and everyone else, will be totally different. Obsessing over what others have will never make things happen sooner for ourselves.
What protecting our peace means to us
Kate: When it comes to wellness and self-care, our minds often veer to ideas of face masks, a glass of wine, and most recently, “hot girl” walks. However, we commonly overlook a foundational element of self-care that promotes safeguarding and setting boundaries for our mental, physical and spiritual selves. Recently, these components have been coined together as “protecting your peace” by a wide range of mental health and wellness experts.
As a twenty-something exploring new avenues of wellness and mental health, protecting my peace has been an everyday struggle of setting boundaries (both professionally and personally), avoiding the urge to compare myself to others on social platforms, and stepping away from the “anti-social” and “introverted” labels that have become associated with simply taking some alone time. Whether it was saying “no” to going out on Friday nights in university or slowly stepping away from ‘just’ hopping online at 8 pm to check a few things for work, protecting my peace felt like an uphill battle.
Personally, I often feared friends wouldn’t think I valued spending time with them or would deem me as that girl who asks “what time does the flow start at” (if you know you know, but for your reference: https://www.tiktok.com/@savannahmillss/video/7090899490948779306). Additionally, the boom of travel and going out post-COVID era hit me hard. I constantly felt like I had to go out every single night and weekend and do something exciting to make up for lost time. Professionally, my chatterbox mind of to-do lists for work or my daily comparison to others LinkedIn updates would consume me.
Kate’s guide to protecting your peace
Kate: Whether you are in school or a young professional, be mindful that disconnecting physically isn’t as productive if you can’t disconnect digitally. In simple terms, turn off that notification button and take a break from your phone for the evening. As hard as it is, if you are constantly bombarded with notifications of Instagram posts or Snapchat stories, you tend to feel a lot lousier about saying ‘no’. Even when you are making the right call, the romanticization of social media has a funny way of creeping into our ‘self-care’ time and overwhelming us with negative associations about ourselves and our friendships.
Here are a few strategies that helped me set some healthy habits for protecting my peace:
- Speak kindly to yourself
- While it is easier said than done, repeating daily affirmations, or speaking to yourself as if you were speaking to a friend does wonders to boost your mood, self-image, and eliminate unwarranted criticism of yourself.
- Relaxing = Productivity
- Ah, yes. The age-old debate about relaxing being counter-productive. The pressure to be productive on our vacation time-off or pack our weekends full of a tight schedule of activities can often do more harm than good. While we may have fun, jamming too many activities into a day or weekend can leave us feeling more stressed than usual as we loom close to Monday of yet another week (often called the Sunday Scaries). Ultimately, if we do too much of this and try to take a break, the guilt of not doing something builds more and we can’t unwind successfully.
- Shedding Mental Weight
- Wonder why you may feel physically lighter after meditating, brain dumping, or taking a walk? It’s because physical activities actually help to shed any mental weight we may be burdening. A strategy I hold near and dear to my heart is to have a ‘brain-dump’ list where I just jot down things as they come to me throughout the day. Whether it’s professional or personal items, physically releasing these items from the brain helps to clear focus and maximize productivity.
- Zoom Out
- Imagine yourself as a drop pin on Google Earth. Now slowly start zooming out as if you were a drone. Zoom out of your room, your neighbourhood, your city, your country, etc. By zooming out and looking at things beyond yourself in a certain moment, this activity can put into perspective how you are feeling and allow you to reflect on all the amazing individuals and places (near and far) that you are grateful for.
Kundi’s guide to protecting your peace
Kundi: In my earlier blog post about taking breaks from social media, I highlighted the struggles that come with being offline when everyone else is online. Especially if you need social media for work or your creative pursuits, you can’t easily disconnect whenever you want to. This means you’ll need to set realistic boundaries like I do. Here are a few ways I’ve learned to disconnect and gain peace throughout the day:
- Stop comparing yourself to others.
- Healthy comparison is good. Sometimes we need to evaluate our progress and performance compared to others to stay inspired and motivated. But remember, especially online, people usually show the parts of themselves that they want you to see. You can’t compare yourself, and your life, to another person’s success story. We all go through ups and downs, and our journeys are all unique.
- Learn to say “no”.
- Don’t confuse being ‘kind’ with being agreeable to everyone. I’ve struggled with being a people-pleaser throughout my life and it’s only until recent years that I’ve faced this hard truth and begun taking steps towards reclaiming my power. I’ve often confused being a ‘nice’ person with overextending myself, over-explaining myself, placing others’ needs above my own, and trying to avoid conflict by being agreeable. It’s okay to pass on going out with friends from time to time, opportunities that don’t align with your values, and anything else that your gut is unsure about.
- Be honest.
- In addition to my previous point, if you don’t feel like participating in something, be honest. It’s easier said than done, but you don’t need to explain to anyone why you’d rather stay home or do something else with your time.
- Turn off notifications.
- Like Kate said above, turning off notifications does wonders. I keep all social media notifications off, even Instagram which I use the most. Not only does this help keep me less distracted throughout the day but I stay focused on whatever it is I’m doing in real life as there aren’t millions of pop-ups on my phone.
- Go phoneless in the morning.
- It’s difficult to completely avoid looking at your phone in the morning when you want to check on family and friends, and when your job requires you to check emails and messages. But I still try to avoid rushing into texting or scrolling soon after waking up as much as possible. A simple article headline, Instagram post, or group chat thread can make you anxious if they’re not in alignment with how you wanted your day to go. You’ll still end up facing them at some point during the day, but first thing in the morning is different from a few hours into your day.
- Allow yourself to set the tone of your day and not let others choose for you.
- Take time to respond to calls, messages, and emails.
- If it’s not an emergency or urgent request, don’t feel bad for not replying to a text or email right away. I’ve spoken to so many friends and family lately who agree that acknowledging texts sometimes feel like impossible tasks, but it is never personal. One thing is certain about Kate and me. At times we may take a few business days to respond to one another, but the love is always there.
- Go phoneless in the evening.
- I don’t have a specific cut-off time, but usually by the evening my phone is somewhere far away from me. I use my phone quite a bit for work and my own personal use, so it’s nice to keep my evenings as quiet as possible. On most days, I go phoneless from around 7pm to 10pm. When I get to bed, I check my phone before I sleep and then prepare for the next day.
- Disconnect from technology when out with friends or family.
- I’m guilty of trying to capture content when I’m out with loved ones and struggling to stay in the moment, however, I still find it very difficult to multitask in social settings. There’s a time and place for everything, but I find it beneficial, especially for your relationships, when you’re present and focused only on each other.
- Take long drives alone.
- I’m the kind of girl who gets into her car and doesn’t want to get out once she starts driving. I looooooooove the feeling of listening to music, steering the wheel (or sitting comfortably in the passenger seat), and getting lost in the journey. I do some of my best thinking when I’m driving alone listening to my favourite songs. There’s a certain clarity you get from being in motion all by yourself. Whether that’s in the car, on a train, a bus, a plane, or a bicycle.
Final thoughts
We want these conversations, especially amongst people our age that are also trying to navigate their twenties, to become normal. It may not seem like it, but vocalizing your boundaries, being honest about your feelings, and taking time to disconnect can simultaneously strengthen your friendships and relationships. We’ve learned that the right people will support and respect your decisions, and the people who aren’t for you, will be threatened by them.
With this post, we hope you find some relatability and comfort to put any concerns you may have at ease when it comes to protecting your peace. We have carefully crafted these words to hold meaning, provide guidance, and support your own wellness journey.
As always, please leave a comment below so we can continue having these conversations and learn from each other. See you next time!
With love,
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To the most amazing, wise, kind, articulate and intelligent young ladies I have the pleasure of knowing: you blow me away! What a beautiful blog post – I wish my younger self could’ve read these incredible pieces of advice. You make me so proud! Absolutely cannot wait for more collabs. Love you!
We love uuuuuu so much and are forever grateful for you!! I wouldn’t be me without my big sis. Thank you for supporting us always ♥♥♥