love ♥️, strength 💪, & awareness 👀

Hello Cadre Sphere, this is Anila coming to you live with. I changed the name of my Wednesday night sessions from Leading with Love to Love, Strength and Awareness. Which is kind of my personal tagline and also my company tagline and Love, Strength and Awareness. Start stems from basically the seven plus years of me. Hello Becky, welcome. My name's Anila. It is good to see you. Hey aj. One, two. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Happy Wednesday evening. If it's evening for you, let me know where you're at, let me know where you're joining from, let me know what you're up to as you hopefully you're starting to wind down your day, your evening and I'll tell you a little story about me.

I'm Anila. I am co founder of a company called Habit Aware and we help people become aware of their habits and build healthy habits. And I have a mental health condition called trichotillomania. Alright, currently in bed, chilling with your cat. There you go. I got my dog hanging out with me. Maybe I'll go sit and chill with him. The lighting's gonna get worse though, but that's okay. And I have a condition called trichotillomania and that is the compulsion to pull out hair. So I pull from my eyebrows and my eyelashes and it is a mental health condition rooted in basically dysregulation and the brain using that behavior to self regulate.

And other conditions include skin picking and nail biting. And I hid it for a really long time, 20 plus years, because I was super ashamed that I was my hands were doing this to myself. And then a couple of years ago my husband caught me without eyebrows and I shared my secret and we invented a smart bracelet that basically tells a person when they are hair pulling, skin picking or nail biting. It uses motion sensors to build awareness, to help that person build awareness. And so that's where the awareness comes in.

This new name for tonight's sessions, Love, Strength and Awareness. And for the last seven years we've been helping people with these conditions take control of these mental health conditions. And that's where the love and the strength comes from, is that is sort of the methodology that we've created to take control of these things. And the beauty of it is we see it transcending to other parts of life. So love, strength and awareness, just saying that rolls off the tongue a lot better than awareness, strength, love.

But awareness, strength, love is the actual order. You can't change what you don't know is happening. Awareness, when you are aware, that's basically shifting something from the automatic subconscious brain to your conscious control. J. i appreciate you. I'm really moving quickly through the story because there's so much I want to say tonight, but, yeah, I'd love to know in your. You know, for those of you listening, where in your life do you feel like you're moving in autopilot? Right. Where you're just sort of reacting without really taking time to think through.

Hey, is that the right choice to make right now? Like, is hair pulling the right choice for me right now, or the work that needs to be done is to be able to pause and summon that strength to pause. Right. Because it's so easy. It's so easy to pull up to a red light. It turns green. The car in front of you doesn't move for, like, what feels like two minutes. And for you to go, come on, let's go. That's fear talking. That's the subconscious talking. Instead of, all right, they're gonna go when they.

When they're ready. Maybe they're on their phone, and it's better they're not moving, or maybe they're lost in thought or they're stressed about something. And we move slower. We move with awareness. We move with the strength to summon love. And so that is the methodology as a whole. The awareness to summon, the strength to choose love. And I know we live in a culture where physical strength, where might. Where dominance is seen as a strength, but the true strength is choosing love. The true strength is doing right by you and right by others.

AJ Says twist my hair more often when I'm stressed. Kind of similar, but a little different. Very similar. Yeah. So growing up, I started as with thumb sucking, and then I. I mean, you can even see me playing with my hair right now. I twirled my hair a lot as a kid. And then, you know, I think for me, and I've seen in our community, thumb sucking and some of these other kind of. Again, they're these behaviors where we're using our body to self soothe. Maybe it's. I remember my dad used to just rub his head like this whenever he was thinking at his office desk, right?

So we're always using our. From birth, we're using touch as a way to soothe. You think about as soon as the baby's out of the womb, get them on that mama's chest, right. To connect and to touch and the rubbing of the back. And then these behaviors just kind of like manifest and morph and not for everyone. And that's some of the work, the research that We're I hope will finally get done around these conditions because a lot of people suffer from these conditions when it gets to that extreme. That's the other thing, is that mental health is that spectrum.

So changing the name tonight and looking off to the side as I think, changing the name of these sessions to love, strength and awareness with which is a personal tagline, a brand tagline, and most importantly, the way I want to live my life, the way I want to try to move slow enough that I have awareness that I am present so that when something happens, I'm moving slow enough that I can have control to, to not react, but to respond with intention, to respond with love, to not react out of fear, which is coming from that monkey brain of ours, that, that reptile brain.

Becky. Behaviors. You know, everyone's got something. That's the other thing, is that everyone's got something. Like someone may bite their nails, someone may pick their skin, someone may, you know, smoke, someone may do whatever. Like everybody's got a behavior or multiple behaviors that they go to for self soothing that may not be great for them. I'll be honest. This morning I made my kids pasta for lunch, for their school lunch. And I left the pot on the stove, took them to school, the pot's still sitting there when I get back.

And I ate like half of it because I was just stressed about work, you know. So like, I just kept getting up. I'd have like two or three bites and then come back to my desk. And then, I don't know, it was just like, it's like this craving and addiction of like that pesto sauce just so good. I gotta get another bite. And like finally, finally I was like, I just need to put this in a container and put it away because I'm gonna finish it. Becky, do I use fidgets? Facial and restless legs? Yeah. So fidgets are a great, like tool to use to keep the hands busy, specifically for body focus, repetitive behaviors.

Now, I should also mention that I am not a mental health treatment professional. So I come wholly from lived experience and wholly from helping tens of thousands of people around the world with these conditions with the smart bracelet that we invented. So we help you with the awareness piece and then the goal is for you to use that awareness or for our crew to use that awareness to summon the strength to choose love. Which means taking care of themselves in the way that they need to in the moment.

Because ultimately these are self soothing behaviors. And if you're, if your subconscious is seeking self soothing, that means something's gotten you off your baseline. And so the biggest thing is to figure out how to get back to your baseline. And so the best way to take control of these behaviors, like even today with the pasta, even that was a behavior, like an unwanted behavior of unwanted self soothing mechanism. I could have slowed down and should have slowed down. And I was thinking through why am I eating so much?

But not really. I was just like enjoying the pasta, but the same modality of okay, whoa. So let's slow down, let's see. Why, why am I doing this? What am I thinking? What do I need? Why am I feeling antsy today? And now that I can look back, it was because in the afternoon I knew I was gonna have a hard discussion with my teammate about some company business stuff, right? And so I think that now looking back, I can actually understand what was happening there. Also, I didn't eat a lot the night before and I had just gone to the gym, so I was like hungry, so I should have done healthy food instead.

But the pasta was easy and right there. So fidgets, back to that real quick. Fidgets are good for keeping the hands busy, but meeting the need is gonna be what we see and what I've seen in my own life. Better to help you sustain long term change. So the bracelets themselves, the bracelets actually have one over here. I don't really use mine anymore because I've been able to overcome the behavior. And we also have an Apple watch app, but that we just released. But the bracelets have sensors inside them that you train the bracelet for your specific behavior.

Like for me, it was this kind of scanning motion of playing with my eyebrows. For someone else, it could be picking their nose. It could be, you know, maybe just rubbing their nose or their skin. Beard, hair pulling, you know, hair pulling on the head. Basically anything above the shoulders is what the gesture detection works for. And then when it senses a match to that calculation that you've recorded on there, it vibrates. And that's it, that's that makes you aware. And then the app tracks that vibration so you can kind of see your stats.

And then with awareness, it's on that person who's wearing the device. Then to say, oh, okay, why is this happening? My hands are not where I want them to be. What do I need right now? What can I do instead? That's gonna help me feel better. It's gonna help me feel self soothed. And over time, that repetition, it's like, you know, learning to dribble a basketball. The more that you do it, the more that the muscle memory is there that you can then just, it just comes back, right? So you want that muscle memory, you want that practice, that training to retrain the brain so that over time this your go to from this becomes whatever your other, your new habits are, your new healthy habits.

And at this point I would actually, as I talk about this often, at this point I would actually reach for my water which I can't see right now, I don't know where it is. It's usually with me all over wherever I am because it is, oh, there it is. I found it because it is my number one strategy. Because what I realized was when I was pulling the most, there were two times. One was during the day when I was working, kind of chained at my desk, fast paced advertising life that I used to be in. And I wouldn't get up to eat, I wouldn't get up to go to the bathroom, I wouldn't get up to drink water, I would only get up to go to meetings and I would just be work, work, work, work, work.

And so I realized, okay, I need to take care of myself, I need more breaks during the day, I need water, I need tea, I need to go to the bathroom, I need to go take a walk outside. And the more I did that, all those things a little bit at a time, the less I was pulling. And then my other major pulling time was late at night. And for that one it, I mean I would stay up till like two, three in the morning working and now I can't stay up past 11 o'clock at night because I trained myself to, as soon as I, that first pull happens, I look at the time and if it's you know, and now like between 9 and 11, like I'm done, I'm ready for bed.

So those, those strategies have been the things that have really helped me the most. And, and if you look at those strategies, it really is the awareness to summon the strength to choose love. Because at work I was being weak and just doing whatever I needed to to, you know, please everybody around me in my office, my team, get everything done. But it took awareness to recognize what I needed during the day and strength to say, you know what, that email can wait, the client can wait. I need to go to bathroom, I need to go have lunch, I need to go for a walk.

And in choosing those activities, I was choosing love, I was choosing myself. Going to bed, I'm choosing myself. Because it is proven that if you get a good night's rest, you are less stressed. You have you know, less cortisol in your. In your body. And so it really is about choosing love of yourself. And then that transcends to how you treat other people. Love for everybody is really what I think we need more of in this world. Frankly, what he's doing, he's very interested in. So thanks for being here tonight.

Last week I couldn't make it because I was having technical issues and I wanted to respond to a post that Dr. Rachel had left. And I will. I think I'll do that next time because it's getting late. It's 9:20 here in Minneapolis. Not sure where y'all are, but it was nice to hang out with you tonight and I hope to see you again next week. I'm wishing you love, strength and awareness. Good night.