Why Micro Habits Matter More Than You Think with Danika Brysha
When it comes to self-care, we often overcomplicate things, thinking we have to make huge changes to actually feel a change. Our guest this week, Danika Brysha, Wellness Entrepreneur, Body Positive Fashion Model signed with IMG Models, and a Self-Care + Lifestyle Design Coach, is the perfect person to explain why self-care starts small. She shares how her own journey led to the creation of the self-care checklist and why we should take things one day at a time. Danika encourages us to look inside ourselves and start asking the important questions because we actually already have the answers inside us.
Who is Danika Brysha?
Today we are welcoming an incredibly special guest Danika Brysha. She’s a Wellness Entrepreneur, Body Positive Fashion Model signed with IMG Models, and a Self-Care + Lifestyle Design Coach. While leading her three companies Self-Care Society*, Model Meals, and Danika Brysha Inc., and modeling for such brands as Bare Minerals, Lands’ End, Old Navy, and Target, she guides others to find the wellness routines that create the foundation for the life they dream of.
Danika has worked with thousands of people to spread wellness and cultivate self-care routines and systems that stick, and is passionate about empowering others to come back home to themselves. Through her journey of recovery from disordered eating, food addiction, body issues, excessive alcohol and drug use, deep debt, and an overall lack of confidence and purpose, Danika uses her own experience to help others transform and thrive.
She’s TRULY special because not only was one of the first plus-size models to represent women that weren’t a size 0. She’s also pioneering the movement to build a business without burnout. She’s truly a force to be reckoned with and someone you’ll want to learn from and watch change how we define success.
Integrating Self-Care
For Danika, getting to where she is presently comes from a foundation of support and self-care. She was lucky enough to sort of fall into “self-care as an effort to heal my disordered eating. And I think that that really set a foundation, I needed it to survive. If I hadn't found self-care, and all those different ways of kind of staying accountable to myself, I don't know that I'd be here and I definitely wouldn't be in this place, you know, juggling all that I do.” The most surprising this about this for her has been that, despite what many of us often believe, self-care doesn’t have to take over your entire life, but that they can “really support absolutely anything you dream of, and anything you want to create.”
One of Danika’s favorite sayings is that “self-care doesn't take time, it makes time.” So when we do put in the time and effort, we make “a lot less mistakes, we make choices that serve us better, we're more intentional, more intuitive.” She’s also adapted strategies from addiction programs, like the one day at a time philosophy can be applied from a perspective of “creating a great life. So for me, I think I've sort of cracked that equation to a certain extent of what is what are the little intricacies of my day, at least at this stage of my life? And the self-care habits? And where do I take breaks, and what kind of work Am I doing and all these different pieces, that when I look back, and I string all those days together, it's a great life, right?” All we really strive for as human beings is a happy life, and all it really takes is breaking things down into what Danika calls “micro habits,” which are essentially just small choices that add up into our great life.
So how did Danika start integrating these micro self-care habits into her own life? While she was living in her parent’s garage, she created what she calls the “self-care checklist” as a way to “hopefully get to the end of the day and not binge eat 10,000 calories in secret because that was my drug of choice at the time. And it was just you know, I was just checking little boxes saying you know, I eat sleep journaling, meditation, just a few of the little self-care things that I knew help me. And I realized that just the accountability of checking those boxes made such a massive difference.” Since then, the checklist has evolved and grown to include things like affirmations and manifesting exercises and still proves to be one of the most impactful things in Danika’s journey.
By integrating these habits into her life, Danika realized that self-care isn’t just something we should do every now and then, it needs to be “practiced every single day. Which is why I started Self Care Society* to bridge that gap between knowledge and integration. So we built a platform where people can come just like they would come to a fitness membership and take the class where they can take these quick self-care classes and do these sorts of exercises that help us dig a bit deeper. And actually integrate this work that's so important and so impactful.”
You Already Have the Answers
I think it's super important to point out that a lot of this change that people are seeking, it just requires asking the right questions, and then being willing to look at yourself and being aware rather than remaining on autopilot. Asking those questions is the foundation for “so many people when it comes to healing and creating a life that they love.” In Self Care Society*, this is the exact reason they call the people who teach their class, “guides” instead of teachers or coaches. The entire reasoning behind this is to lead “leading people back to themselves. Ultimately, what I've realized on my journey is that, like, it wasn't that I was missing anything, it was that I was not creating space to listen in. Like I always say, you have your answers inside of you, you just have to create space to listen. And I think that's the biggest challenge because we've all grown up in this world where we're taught to seek advice everywhere else, and seek answers everywhere else.”
And I always try to remind people to seek their like, you can be inspired by everything. And that's great, because what that does is starts our internal creativity. But we have to seek our answers inside of us, and we have them. But so many people have been, you know, by whether you want, whether it's the marketing, advertising industry, whatever it is, we've been conditioned to think that we can't be we can't trust ourselves, to make choices that support us, we need everyone else's opinion, or we need this gadget or this thing. And, you know, I think what it comes down to is re instilling self trust into people so that they can trust that when they make choices that they are right for themselves. And then we can respect that people should make choices for themselves. And that it might not always be the choice that we're going to make ourselves. So I actually don't remember what the question was, but somehow it got me here.
The Habit of Self-Care
It’s important to point out that practicing self-care, and any habits in general, can’t and won’t always be a perfect journey. Many people struggle with shame or guilt triggers around missing a day or not checking something off of a list, even Danika. We live in a hamster wheel, keeping ourselves “busy, busy, busy and we can't pause and listen, it's just it's really hard to get out of it.” Whether you’re a parent, working full time, maybe both, or whatever is going on in your life, it’s so easy to feel like you’re constantly needed in some direction or the other.
For Danika, as someone running multiple companies, it was important to find ways to actually prioritize herself. So she started doing this first thing in the morning, the first moments of the day, even if it's 15 minutes, even if it's 30 minutes, whatever you can do, and allow yourself that time to set your foundation. For me, that has been absolutely huge. Even if it's a simple five minutes to just breathe and to maybe remind yourself of who you are and where you're going and get yourself in that vibration of who you are growing into, it makes it so that you will, subconsciously without thinking, make choices throughout the day that support this version of you. And I think that's what really worked for me, it's not one specific thing, it was just that every day I reminded myself of who I was becoming.”
Don’t think you have to integrate everything at once though, if this is new to you or you’re starting again, taking it one thing at a time, add something new each week or month. That’s exactly about what Danika had to do for years, she would "add a new “self-care challenge or micro habit challenge, and I would decide every day for a month I'm gonna meditate and see how it impacts me. And gradually, I just kept adding to this list and those things became autopilot because I did them long enough.”
This also requires the commitment to showing up for ourselves, to care for ourselves, and this becomes the “connection between self-love and self-care. Because we love something we care for it. I know it takes time. And I know it can be challenging in the culture we live in today. But the more we cultivate self-love, the less tactical self-care has to be because the choices are really natural. And I think that that's the same thing in terms of feeling like oh, I'm in this rut, I'm in this situation, focus your energy on where you're going where you want to be, don't worry about how you're going to get there, but commit every single day to remind yourself of where you're going and slow and that you deserve that. And slowly but surely, I think it sorts itself out.”
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Affirmation
I expand in abundance and joy every time I do the simple things that support a healthier me.
Links From the Show
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