Unheard with Janessa Tan

Disclaimer: No material on this podcast is intended to substitute for professional advice, mental illness diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your health professional with any questions you may have regarding any health condition and never disregard professional advice or delay seeking it because of something you have read on this podcast. I have spent over a decade of my life silently battling conditions of poor mental health. The earliest memory I have of self-harm occurred was when I was 8. I never received any official diagnosis nor professional therapy due to a lack of understanding and access. Through years of stumbling around, I found that getting better from any mental illness has a lot to do with management and less with trying to find a perfect cure. So, here are a few tricks I use to make the standing-up process easier.

The flow experience is an important component of creativity, productivity, and well-being. It is a key aspect of human self-actualization and has been proven by researchers to enhance performance in art, sport, organizations, and education. Here, we open the conversation about the elements of flow, why it's important, and four key steps to achieve this effortless, yet extremely rewarding state.  

Patience ultimately is about giving yourself the time you deserve to grow. Everything is better produced with a patient heart and you pushing through moderate doses of sustainable effort. Here we talk about how tech and social media have altered our perception of achieving success. And we also discuss three reasons why your growth is worth your time and patience. 

Navigating the rough waters of life, we undoubtedly need insurmountable strength to get by. But before we can even build our abs and biceps through physical training, there is one very important muscle that has to come through first. And that is our trust muscle. Here we talk about why building strong muscles are so important in this day and age and how we can work on it through three practical steps.  Also, we just launched our community newsletter in.sight where I share weekly exclusive thought-provoking content right to your inbox, sign up here: https://justjanessa.net/newsletter

As someone who's pursuing fitness with a background of eating disorders, I've always been mindful about how I talk about movement and diet. With the vast amount of conflicting health information available online, health has become so subjective and it's easy to take things to extremes without realizing it. For those of us who spiraled down the rabbit hole of turning 3 clean meals into none, and 30-minute jogs into 3-hour cardio sessions, it can be extremely difficult to manage the perplexity of building a good headspace with food and exercise. That's why I'd like to highlight a few things I found helpful when fixing my mindset towards fitness, which helped create an overall enjoyable, relapse-free fitness journey that can support me in the long run.

The majority of us try to run away from difficult emotions and subconscious trauma. As a result, we let our egos do the protecting and reacting. Operating according to our overly protective egos may feel safe, but we also miss out on new possibilities and we lose the ability to grow. The key to taming the ego is therefore to learn how and why you react negatively to certain situations. Only with this awareness of your defense mechanisms will you be able to connect with them and then gracefully let them go. 

For those coming from a past of distorted self-image, definitions of positive and negative body image may be confusing. More so, trends like the body positivity movement still highlight the body as an important element of self-perception, while neglecting other elements of one’s identity. In this episode, I'll be sharing how I overcame body image struggles as someone who has recovered from anorexia. We'll go through a concept called body neutrality, and how it can help us soften the negative narratives surrounding our physical vanity. 

Healthy striving is pursuing a particular routine with positive intentions. It focuses on embracing the journey instead of solely to achieve a particular outcome. Perfectionism, on the other hand, involves compulsive efforts towards an unrealistic end goal. In today's episode, let's explore the psychology between these two concepts, how to identify if we're operating out of unhealthy perfectionism, and how to get back on track to our path of healthy goal attainment. 

Nurturing self-esteem and confidence go beyond successful achievements and positive self-talk. The question is, how? How do we actually nurture a positive sense of self? It’s not easy, I surrender to that fact. Low self-esteem is often rooted deep in poor confidence, childhood conditioning, and lifelong comparison. So, if you find yourself fumbling over which is the “best” method or the most “effective” solution to improving your confidence, I'll be sharing four simple strategies you can start implementing in your life in our episode today. 

Welcome to the Unheard podcast – a space to nurture unheard conversations on mental health, personal growth & experiential perspectives.