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How to stay afloat during a “Sea Change”

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How to stay afloat during a “Sea Change” 

*Advice for highly sensitive people who are feeling things are a bit much right now.*

Do you feel like you are adrift, unmoored right now? Like the waves are sloshing angrily around your boat, threatening to upset it? Or are you not even in a boat? Are you barely holding your head above water?

This is for you.

First – pause.  Exhale first, to get rid of stale air.  Then inhale gently.  Exhale thoroughly.  Repeat.  Move your neck and shoulders.  I bet you are holding tension there.

Know this –

You aren’t alone. People all around the world are experiencing this.  It isn’t a divine punishment on you.  You’ve not done anything wrong.

But it sure feels like it, doesn’t it? I’ve got some tips and tricks for you to try out.  Keep what works, discard what doesn’t.

For starters –

Go analog right now, as much as possible. 

Digital media (this includes all sorts of things) has a frequency that isn’t harmonious with the human body.  This is true for music, pictures, and writing that is created by anything other than a human.

This means – print out this post and read it offline if that is possible for you. It is shared online so it may reach whoever needs it, across the world. But it doesn’t have to be read that way.

Go outside and get some fresh air. Say hello to the birds and the tiny insects you encounter.  Admire a flower growing in the yard.  Greet a tree by placing your hand on its trunk. 

Remember you too are part of nature.

Here are some specific suggestions in no particular order.

Right now is a good time to read children’s books or a spiritual text of your choosing.  You simply can’t “digest” anything large right now.

Or just sit quietly, without reading anything. That’s OK too.  

Eat like a bird –

Eat small meals, but throughout the day.  Not three large meals.  Cut your portions in half. 

Eat very slowly, making sure to chew your food thoroughly. 

Stop when you feel full.  Often for me the sign is that I’ll burp. 

Didn’t finish whatever it was? Put it in the fridge (if applicable) and finish it later. You don’t have to “clean your plate” like you might have been told as a child.

Switch to very simple food –

Fish and chips is the exact opposite of what is safe right now. 

Eat less processed foods.  Consume vegetables raw, or steamed, or baked.

Eat things you can SEE what they are – they aren’t filled with chemicals.  The best food doesn’t need a label because you can tell what it is.

If you DO eat processed foods, stick with organic and/or gluten free as much as possible.  Do what you can with what you have. You don’t have to rush out and get all new food right now – I’m sure you have something good in your pantry. 

Soup is usually a good option in times like these. Miso soup is really nice right now, and it is easy to make at home.  But don’t worry about that if you don’t already know how to make it.

Avoid spicy food.  Seasoning is OK – just not spicy.

Beverages –

Water, herbal tea, coconut water, fruit juice (not acidic ones, such as orange juice), almond or oat milk are good choices. 

If you feel you must have caffeine, have green tea or white tea only.  Coffee will wreck you.  Even decaf will unbalance you right now.  Coffee is very acidic. 

———————

Much of this food information comes from the GERD diet.  GERD is caused by acid reflux – so the goal is to reduce acidity in the body. 

Prevention is easier than “cure” in every circumstance. 

Here are other things that help –

Music –

Something calming is usually best, but listen to your soul for what it needs.  As for me I started with Mozart, went to Michael Hedges, and am now listing to U2.  In the past Talking Heads, Vivaldi, and Bach have helped me. I’m sure you’ll find exactly what you need. 

If your body likes, move to the music.  Gently dance or sway.  Don’t whirl around.  

Singing along to the lyrics or the notes is helpful.  Singing is breathwork – which is also critical at this time.  There are plenty of resources on YouTube or at your local library that can help on that topic.

Gentle yoga stretches and poses helps.  Don’t know any? There are YouTube videos.  You don’t have to do a full routine. Just move your body gently.

Think of yourself as a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. 

Or a reptile shedding its skin. 

Or a boat that is gently correcting its course at sea.

You are going through a monumental change.  And that is a normal part of being a human.  If you’re lucky you’ll get to do it a lot during your life and learn a lot of cool things from the experience.

But the first time can be really scary.

Or if it has been a long time since the last shift. 

You’re OK.  You’ve always been OK.  And you will continue to be OK.

Breathe that truth in.

Notes

(This is a shift in writing style, so take a breath here.)

We, collectively, have experienced TOO MUCH for nearly a decade.  It got to a fever pitch during the pandemic  – which society as a whole seems to pretend like that was just a blip and is chugging right along. It wasn’t a blip – it caused mass deaths, trauma, and social upheaval.  We are collectively experiencing grief – and grief needs to be processed or it will eat you up. 

We’ve had too much bitterness, and not allowed ourselves any sweetness. 

We’ve consumed too much bad news. It is all too much.

Turn off the TV and put down your phone.

You don’t have to keep up with all the chaos that is happening right now.

It will sort itself out.


There are professionals who are already handling this.

That being said – it is totally OK to seek help from a mental health professional and to take medication if they think it is necessary.  Remember – the brain is an organ, just like the heart or liver. Sometimes it gets off – balance, and prescribed medication can assist in restoring equilibrium. 

It is OK to not do everything on your list right now.  Do enough to stay afloat (take a shower, wear clean clothes, eat good food, pay your bills).

But anything extra?  Reconsider if it is absolutely necessary that YOU do it right now.  Can you delegate? Can it wait a week?

Build in some breathing room for yourself.  If you need to, you can tell people you aren’t feeling well and need to take a sick day. You aren’t telling a story – you aren’t feeling well. 

Your heart, mind, and soul deserve tender care just like the rest of your body.

Other suggestions –

Make art.

Scribbling counts. Adult coloring books count. It doesn’t have to be “pretty” or “meaningful” or ever be shown to anyone else. 

Journal.

Writing has been shown therapeutically to help re-write trauma stories in the body.  Get some paper (the cheaper the better) and scribble away. It doesn’t have to be coherent, or even legible.  Nobody is going to read this. Just write whatever you like.

Seek out good friends. 

Think of the folks you know who are calm and not prone to freaking out or catastrophizing.  They are probably in the same boat with you.  This is easier together. 

Remember – otters sleep in the ocean on their backs.  They hold hands as they sleep so they don’t drift apart. 

We can do that too, in a way.

You’ll get through this. Bend like a willow.  Let the strong winds pass through you.  Resistance is indeed futile in this circumstance. 

See you on the other side.

Peace.

Written entirely analog by Betsy Nelson, the morning of Tuesday 4-21-2026.  You may share this offline if you like but include this note. Giving attribution to the author is cool.  And being cool is cool.

Self-sabotage

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So much of my life right now feels like I’m weeding out people who act like a victim in situations they caused.

Maybe it is unique to American culture right now. Or maybe it is bigger than that. Maybe the disease of creating your own problems and then whining about it is worldwide.

One of the most common situations is obesity.

While we shouldn’t shame someone for being obese, neither are we doing them any favors by celebrating it. The recent trend of “body positivity” has resulted in social media “influencers” who are morbidly obese, complaining about how they can’t fit into an airplane seat or on amusement rides. Those limits are for safety reasons for themselves and for other passengers.

The actor and director Kevin Smith went that route, even though he wasn’t his plan to be a fat-fluencer. He was kicked off a flight in 2010 because he couldn’t fit into his seat. Reports indicate that he was over 330 pounds at that point.

But that incident made him rethink his choices and he decided to put in the work and lost 65 pounds. But it wasn’t enough to restore him to full health.

In 2018, at age 47, he had a heart attack. It was a “widowmaker” with 100% blockage in one of his arteries. He survived the surgery and decided to change his ways. He adopted a vegan diet and is now at a healthy weight.

But he’s the rare example of someone who decided to do something about their health rather than pretend everything is fine and blame everyone else for their problems.

It is hard to watch people I know get larger and larger, and be unable to walk for more than five minutes without needing to sit down. Or they complain that their clothes don’t fit. Or that their feet hurt, so they think they need special shoes.

No – your feet aren’t designed to hold that much weight. Your body isn’t designed to operate like this.

There are sumo wrestlers who are very large – but it is mostly muscle. They train every day for hours so they are exercising along with eating large amounts of food. But people don’t realize that they live on average 10 years less than the average Japanese citizen. Many also have weight -related problems such as diabetes and knee damage that decrease their quality of life.

Many people make up excuses – they don’t have the time, or the money, or the energy. But one thing is true – if you don’t make time for your body, your body will force you to take the time by causing disease.

I know someone who is deathly allergic to cats. Yet – knowing this – she adopted a cat. And – predictably – she had to go to the ER – twice – because she was having difficulty breathing. She eventually realized she’d have to give up the cat. It wasn’t a surprise. She knew it would happen. Yet she did it anyway.

“Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” – quote attributed to Einstein.

I knew someone who was obese and sedentary who had to have a quadruple bypass – and friends acted like it was a shock that he was so ill. They were calling for prayers for him, while I said that this was not a situation to pray about. Prayer implies that there is nothing YOU can do about the situation, so you ask for divine intervention. But being obese and sedentary isn’t an accident. It is a choice – and it is disingenuous to act like the resulting health problems are a surprise.

Thankfully he chose to eat better and exercise, and has lost a lot of weight. But the friends who were asking for prayers haven’t followed suit (they too are obese), and act surprised when their body fails them.

I don’t understand this way of thinking.

And I don’t want to be around people who act like this.

But this means I spend a lot of time alone.

I simply can’t pretend and say “Oh, that’s so sad!” when people complain after causing their own problems.

Maybe my lack of sympathy comes from the fact that my mother died from lung cancer at 53, after smoking two packs of cigarettes daily for decades. It was sad that she was sick, but not a tragedy. She had dug her own grave every single time she chose to smoke a cigarette. 40 times a day she made that choice. And because of her choosing death, I didn’t have a mother to see me graduate, or get married, or publish my first book, or learn how to do all the many things that I’ve learned since she died.

And I’m a little angry about that. And I don’t want to watch it happen again and again to people I care about.

Staying sober with Rumi

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In the book “Teachings of Rumi” by Andrew Harvey, there is this following story.

“A self-styled dragon hunter went into the mountains to trap a dragon. He searched all over the mountains and at last discovered the frozen body of an enormous dragon in a cave high up on one of the tallest peaks. The hunter brought the body to Baghdad. He claimed that he had slaughtered it single-handedly and exhibited it on the bank of the Euphrates. Thousands of people turned out to see the Dragon. The heat of the Baghdad sun started to warm up the dragon’s frozen body and it began to stir, slowly awakening from its winter hibernation. People screened and stampeded, and many were killed. The hunter stood frozen in terror and the dragon devoured him in a single gulp.

Your lower self is like that dragon, a savage tyrant. Never believe it’s dead: it’s only frozen. Always keep your dragon in the snow of self-discipline. Never carry it into the heat of the Baghdad sun. Let that dragon of yours stay always dormant. If it’s freed it’ll devour you in one gulp.”

Whatever you did to get sober is whatever you’re going have to keep doing to stay sober. The work isn’t over. Discipline is the only thing that keeps your sobriety going. There is no letting up. The same is true for staying fit. You can’t diet and lose weight and then start eating whatever you want again. It has to be a lifetime change.

Food abuse

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I see obesity as a symptom of food abuse. It is the same as alcoholism and drug abuse. It is a sign of an abuse or mis-use of food.

I used to be obese. I’ve had to work hard on relearning what (and how much) is healthy to eat and how to incorporate more movement and exercise into my life. But I’ve also had to work hard on addressing the root cause of why I wasn’t taking care of my body and my soul.

The problem is, we have to eat. We can’t just stop eating food. We can’t drop it like we can alcohol or cigarettes or any other addictive substance.

So we all need to develop a healthy relationship with food – and to address the issues that are causing us to use food to (not) solve our problems. Food can heal us, but it can also harm us if we use it improperly. It can be too much of a good thing, but it can also be the wrong thing.

Food wasn’t the only substance I had a wrong relationship with. Back when I smoked pot, I would smoke it to feel better. I’d have a bad day at work, or my family was hassling me, or there was some other stress to deal with. I’d smoke pot to numb the pain. It would ease the pain long enough that I’d forget about it, until I’d sober up again and the problems would come back. The thing is, the problems never went away in the first place. I just anesthetized myself to them. Instead of dealing with them, I ran away from them in my head. When I got sober, I’d still have those problems, and I’d still reach for pot to “fix” them.

It was a terrible cycle of stupid.

Plenty of people do the same thing with food. Because food isn’t seen as a drug, and because it is not only socially acceptable but normal to eat, food abuse is an easy addiction to pick up. And it isn’t like our society in general has a healthy relationship with food. Everything is super sized and fried. It is too much of a bad thing.

Is this fat shaming? No. Not any more than pointing out that someone who drinks to solve their problems is an alcoholic. This isn’t “blaming the victim” either. It is pointing out that when we use food to solve our problems, we are creating our own problems.

Victims are people who have things done to them. They are passive agents in the story. A person who gets hit by a car, or lightning, or something falling out of the sky is a victim.

If you hurt yourself, you aren’t a victim. You have done it to yourself. Thinking about why you do it is the wrong direction of thought. Blaming your parents or society or your friends for your action is self-defeating. You choose your life and your actions. You have control of what you do. You can also make a choice to change.

We need to start naming our demons so we can slay them. If we pretend like everything is fine then we will continue to kill ourselves bit by bit and bite by bite.

Food won’t fix our problems. Facing them will. No, it isn’t easy.

We have gotten into the habit of shoving our feelings and anxieties down, ramming them into our mouths with food. We have to learn how to let them out rather than shove them down. We have to learn that it is OK to speak up and be heard.

What is the goal? On diet and deity.

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Say you have a friend who wants you to do things their way. They want you to eat only raw foods, or no carbohydrates, or a macrobiotic diet.

What is the goal? The goal is health, and they think they have the path that is right for you because it worked for them.

But say you already are healthy. Your weight is good. Your cholesterol is fine. You are sleeping well. You don’t need to do things their way because the way you have been doing it has worked for you.

It isn’t the path. It is the goal.

The same is true of faith.

So many people will try to convince you that you have to go to their church, be a part of their denomination, or read this book by this religious author.

What they are saying is that they think you aren’t well, but you know you are.

You have to do what is right for you, and only you will know that.

Don’t let someone try to put something into you that isn’t right for you.

Understand that they mean well, but when they try to force-feed their diet or their deity to you, it doesn’t reflect on your lack or need. It reflects on theirs.

Southern fried pride

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More meat, less vegetables – that’s the Southern way. More obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, that is also the Southern way. It is as if we make it a cultural thing to be fat. It is as if we are proud of how out of shape we are.

We are proud of our fried food and our fatback and our meat-centric meals. We have made our stunningly unhealthy food an essential part of our culture. To drop the food is to deny our Southernness. It is time to redefine what it means to be Southern, because right now it means that we are killing ourselves.

There is a certain amount of shaming that occurs for those who take care of themselves. I’ve been told “you suck” for my efforts to get in shape – like this is a game of musical chairs and I got the last one. Just because I’ve decided to get healthy doesn’t mean that others can’t. There is room for us all.

This isn’t the only time I’ve gotten attitude for getting healthy. I wonder how many people decide to quit because of this social shaming. The weird part is when people say “Oh, you’re still skinny.” Of course I am. I’m still exercising and eating well. I want to say “Oh, you’re still fat.” But that isn’t nice.

It isn’t easy to get healthy. There are a lot of adjustments. There is a lot I’ve given up. I don’t have anywhere near the time I used to have to read. I don’t like exercising, but I like how I feel afterwards. I’m not a fan of having to think before everything I eat as to whether it is healthy or not, but I like how my clothes fit and how clear headed I am.

This isn’t a whim. This is a lifestyle change. I decided I wanted to live a long healthy life. I decided to be intentional about my health. I quit a lot of bad things and started doing a lot of good things. Plus, I don’t have any children, so nobody is going to be around to take care of me when I get older. So I have to do it myself.

In the South, we don’t have any idea what “normal” looks like. We see someone who weighs 200 pounds and we think he is just fat. No – that is obese. Then we see someone who is 300 pounds, but because she is larger than us, we think we are fine.

Nope. We are all out of shape.

We’ve come to think of “exercise” as a dirty word. We see it as a punishment. We see it like physical therapy – it is something you do for a little while, under doctor’s orders, and then you can quit.

How have we gotten so far off the path?

We act like eating whatever we want is our cultural right. We’ve clawed our way to the top of the food chain and we are going to prove it by taking ourselves to our graves.

We act like being lazy is a good thing. We act like we’ve proven we are number one by the fact that we can sit around all day. We don’t have to work all day long, finding or harvesting our food. We don’t have to walk three miles with a bucket on our heads to bring water back. We don’t have to walk four miles one way with no shoes to go to school.

Maybe it would be a good idea if we did these things.

Then maybe we wouldn’t take them for granted.

I’ve noticed that parents from foreign countries consistently get educational books for their children. They work really hard with them to get them to work hard on their education. Meanwhile, American parents let their kids get whatever they want. They get comic books and cartoons.

Consequently, the ESL kids consistently do better than the American kids. Children who were born into an English-speaking family consistently read and think at a lower level than children who are born into other families. It is because of the parents. The foreign parents don’t let the kids pick what they are going to read. These parents expect their kids to work hard and they don’t take “I don’t want to” for an answer.

I wonder how much of our Southern Fried Pride comes from habit? I knew a guy who was at least 500 pounds. His skin was grey, he was so unhealthy. He said that everybody in his family was as large as he was. I have a strong suspicion it has more to do with what is in their recipe books than what is in their genes.

Our pride is killing us.