Roadside Repairs for your Wellbeing

September 7, 2015

Have you ever taken your car to the garage and been offered the option of a cheap repair that will just see you through, or a full repair that will cost more but overcome the problem once and for all?

If it’s a cheap runabout that you only want to keep for a short time and the full repair is expensive, it’s unlikely that you’ll spend the extra cash. So when does it become worth doing the job properly?

When we consider a car there are some clear-cut parameters that we can work to:

• If you can buy a new car for less than the cost of the repair, there’s very little point in carrying out the repair.
• If you want to keep the car long term and make sure it’s fully reliable then a full repair would be a better option.
• If you’re away from home and want to get back to a familiar garage, a quick fix would be logical.

 

These decisions, although financially painful, are fairly straight forward, but how do you approach the same type of decision when it comes to health and wellbeing?

When things start to creak a little either emotionally or physically, which option do you take? Do you go for the quick fix to just get you through or do you look for a more long-term solution? Do you even recognise the difference so that you can make a choice?

Gaffer Tape and Chewing Gum

There are many times that a quick fix to health and wellbeing issues is the best way forward. If we think in terms of the car analogy, it’s those moments that you just have to get through this part of the journey so that you can address the underlying problem thoroughly when you get back to a more familiar place.

In a business environment the ‘difficult part of the journey’ might be a tight deadline or a difficult project. It will be some kind of transitory pressure that requires you to find the kind of strength that you can only really maintain for a short period of time.

We’ve all been in these scenarios and we all have our own ways of dealing with the stress, perhaps we have an extra glass of wine of an evening, maybe we immerse ourselves in exercise or perhaps find time to sit quietly with a good book, the options are endless but they have one thing in common; they are all coping strategies, they are quick fixes that distract us and help to see us through.

The Full Repair

Coping strategies certainly have their place, we can all gain that bit of breathing space and respite from the benefits that they offer, but when is a more permanent solution the better option? and what is a more permanent solution in health and wellbeing terms?

The answer to the first question, ‘When is a more permanent solution the better option?’, there are really two answers.

1. When you find that there is no space between one ‘difficult part of the journey’ and the next.
2. When you find that you have completed one ‘difficult part of the journey’ and you have some time for personal development.

The second question ‘what is a more permanent solution in health and wellbeing terms?’, also has two answers but unlike the previous question, these are not mutually exclusive:

1. It’s a technique that doesn’t distract you from the underlying issue, in the way that coping strategies do, it addresses the disruption to your wellbeing at its source without drawing a negative focus to the issue.
2. It is something that can fully integrated into your life so that you don’t have to take time out to do ‘it’; the technique becomes a habitual response, a healthy new habit.

These healthy new habits can be a variety of things that help us to change self limiting responses within ourselves, but what they have in common is an ability to negate the damaging aspects of our inappropriate emotional, physical and biological responses. In simple terms, they smooth over the hiccups and prevent them becoming glitches.

Conclusion:

As with the analogy of the car, we only tend to address health and wellbeing issues when we notice something going wrong. At that point the most obvious response is the quick fix, but what would it be like if you could prevent these glitches by taking a proactive approach to your health and wellbeing?

To find out more about developing healthy new habits, contact info@thegreenchair.co.uk