The Rider’s Mind Podcast Episode 133: Q & A Curing A Barrel Racing Hangover

I love getting questions submitted for the podcast and we have a good one today. This question was from someone suffering from “barrel racing burnout”. No matter what event you compete in, I’m sure you can relate to the feeling of being drained from doing things you love and having all kinds of feelings come up about it. Today my answer covers a lot of ground, but comes back to remembering to give yourself space and grace.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it recently, but I love getting questions submitted for the broadcast. So if you ever have anything on your mind, feel free to drop me an email and I will answer your question in a broadcast. And as this person has submitted their question, they recognize that they’re really hoping that they could also help someone else by stepping up and asking this question. And that is really true, and I think that this will help others. As I answer this question here today, I mean that’s the idea about the whole thing.

Okay, so the person asked: I’ve been feeling off all day. I called it a barrel racing hangover when the guy at the feed store said I looked tired. Is that a thing? And what is it exactly? And how do you avoid it? Because it doesn’t feel nice. I raised two horses and two different races over the weekend. Neither of these races were very far-away I’m paraphrasing this part, so it wasn’t the traveling that made me tired. I’m sure there are many factors that at play here, but I felt compelled to write to you in case this helps other people too. While I’ve been working on my mindset and seeing, and others are starting to see me as cool and calm, I see I still have work to do. I’ve paraphrased it to shorten it up a little bit too. I didn’t do horribly at the races. I placed in the third and fourth division.On both days I achieved some of my personal goals, but I wanted to do better. I wanted to place better and ride better than I did, and the more people who say hey, nice runs or you did great on the weekend, the more I feel embarrassed. I’m shameful of not being as excited about my accomplishments and downright depressed. I feel body sore, sluggish, distracted, sad, heavy and of course shameful that I feel this way. I also feel burnt-out too many people and all their energy, and I just feel like I can’t people today. So do you have any insight or wisdom to offer all my barrel racing hangover?

Yes, thanks, for asking. This is a big question, but I would, if I was to summarize my answer into a sentence, it would be to give yourself some space and give yourself some grace. Go easy on yourself, because you’re not going to be on and ready to rock-and-roll all of the time. I want to offer some consideration, some things to consider, to keep in mind as this comes up. So first of all, as I said, it’s unfair to feel like we should be on and feel like we have it together at all times that that is not a realistic expectation. I also want you to consider and pay attention, if this goes on for months on end, to consider that there might be medical issues or hormonal imbalances that are causing a problem. In this sense, this was something that this is something that I have dealt with, and it ended up being a medical issue where I was just tired, like, couldn’t get myself off a bit tired, could hardly lift my saddle on my horse type of tired. So that might be something I don’t want to say, it’s just all in your head or or it’s just all spiritual, it could actually be a medical thing.

Okay, speaking of spiritual, I’m going to go there because when this was written, this is a couple of weeks now that this is going to air, since I received this. But we were in a new moon and we were also in an eclipse, it was all happening at the same time. Now i’m not an astrologer, but I do follow some astrologers and I pay attention to these energies because when I see these, these reports or messages that are shared by people like I follow Alex Myles and Kari Samuels, the two accounts that I follow (linked below) , I am always, I should say, always I am very often aligned with the message that they share and if I am just feeling or wacky are out there. I’ll read their message and it will. It’ll really resonate with me. During this time I actually did a survey on my instagram post because I was feeling like woo, not crazy, like fly off the handle, crazy, but just buzzy and light, and my energies were just like it just felt weird, like something was happening and my kids were off the wall. Stuff was happening. So I did a post on my instagram, I did pull on my Instagram stories and it was like 91% of the people. I think it was only one of the people were not feeling for not feeling weird at that time when it’s shared. So this is a thing we often feel like we’re the only ones that are feeling begged and tired and dragged down. Meanwhile, 90% of the people are feeling that way. They’re just putting on their best face and trying to act the part like everything’s fine. Meanwhile they’re just barely putting one foot in front of the other. So we always think it’s just us.

But you know from that survey that I did and often, well, I’ll say like: hey, is this moon affecting you? And another thing will happen is that they’re certain signs like miller, like all of the different signs are gong to be more impacted in certain phases of the moon than others. So maybe that one percent was that person or that 10% was that person. That wasn’t one of the signs that was going to be impacted by the new moon in this time or the eclipse at this time. I’m no expert in astrology, but I’m curious about it, learning more about it because the more I am tuning into it, the more I can feel the patterns and and the differences. The other thing is the moon’s like whether it’s a full moon or whether it’s a new moon. The different moons are going to affect you differently. I mean the the moons affect the tide, they affect the ocean people. So of course they’re going to affect you. You’re mostly made up of water and there’s you know, some folklore, some herbalis type people. They will harvest certain herbs from the wild during certain moons because they’re going to be more concentrated or not during different periods of the moon, because the moons are affecting the amount of moisture within the plants. They are affecting you. You can ask any teacher or any nurse and they will tell you that full moon’s matter because the, the old people, start going crazy in the nursing homes and the kids in the school start going crazy at school.

So making this even more complicated or more intense. There’s these different layers and I’ve learned a lot about this from my friend Cristy Duce, and she talks a lot about our female cycles, but also how that interacts with the moon’s how your feeling is not just about whether you have your period or not. There’s different seasons for each quarter of your cycle and women are cyclical beings. That’s just how we are. And if you, if you start tracking how you’re feeling in these different quarters, even day by day, if you are just journaling it and I think if you go like on Kate Northup’s website, you can download a free template of her journal where that is a big part of her work is studying the where you’re at in your cycle in relation to the moon, and it it really is a thing. So if you start tracking this, you will see over a few months that at different times of your cycle and different periods of our period of your cycle, you’re going to feel differently. We put so much focus on. You know, like shark week when you’re angry, you have and all of that or you’re actually instating. But there are. There are other parts of this cycle that are also important and there are different times where you’re going to be more of a goer and you’re going to get more done, and then we start to believe that that’s who we are and we should be like that every day. But that’s not the idea. Through the cycle, it’s you know, make hay while the head hay shines and then rest when it’s raining. But if we’re not in tune with it and aware of the different impacts as your bodies, building into these different phases or releasing that, we just think we should be the same every day. And that’s not possible for people who have a cycle. That’s masculine programming. That’s like men thinking that we should do work, work, work, work, work every day and have no grace and not rest. That is not how we work, and us thinking that we should be able to go, go go and we shouldn’t be tired is where the shame comes in of having to take that time to rest. But the beauty.

When you start paying attention to your cycles, you’ll recognize when you need to rest and if you do honour your body and you do give your body grace when it needs to rest, that your productivity is actually going to, you’re not going to be catching up from when you should have rest and then crash in your in your go time. You’ll actually be able to make the best use of your go time, be hugely productive and focused and, you know, enter all the races during that period because that section season of your cycle, because that is when that’s that is, when things are going to fall into place for you and you won’t have to fight and scrap your way through to just to just get there. It’s this slowing down that makes you able to speed up and then be extremely effective.

But each of these times needs to be honoured and used to its best interests. We really have to be able to listen to our bodies to do this. Listen when you’re doing things, because you think you should. When your body is saying no. So you know these races were closed, I thought I should go there. I took two horses because I thought I should. If you were already tired, going to that second race, maybe you should. I don want to use a should on you, but perhaps that might have been the day to just enjoy yourself and relax and just take one horse and not shame yourself, because you were too tired to take a second horse. But honor yourself and recognize and listen to your body. Your body’s just going to scream louder until you start to listen and pushing through isn’t going to shut her up. It might shut her down, your body might start to shut down and then you end up with actual medical problems, and I mean that’s happened to me. So I get that. But listening, honoring, not doing things and pushing through because you think that you should is super important. Now I want to address the second part of the question, which was “I wanted to do better. I wanted to place better, I wanted to ride better than I did and then every time somebody said you did great, the more embarrassed I was, and I was ashamed that I felt embarrassed”. It was just like this vicious cycle right. That’s part of the question.

So, feeling shameful and not feeling as excited about your runs and the success that other people were recognizing, you weren’t seen as a success because you actually wanted to do better. And I feel like this is maybe a fairly simple shift in perspective here that you might shift your focus on celebrating how nice it is to have people support you and to say these kind things. And it’s nice that they were able to see these improvements or they were able to see the good things. Or you know how well your weekend went for you and it feels so good to have that support and you now.

Maybe those weren’t the runs you were looking for today. But you can still be in a higher energy when you are grateful for the entail that you were able to get from that ride or that run and you’re going to be able to use that for the next one. The worst thing I would say that’s happening here is that you’re shaming yourself for feeling shameful, and so just the reminder that two negatives don’t make a positive. Just recognize. Oh, I’m feeling shameful. Isn’t that interesting? Don’t think, oh, I’m feeling shameful. I shouldn’t feel shameful. How horrible of me to feel that way.

Those were great people for saying those things and then you just get in your head and think spiral. It goes from bad to worse. You don’t have to feel excited about not doing as well as you’ve hoped. You don’t have to feel as excited about it as these people felt for you. That’s okay. They’re seeing things from a different lense, from a different perspective than you are. Just think of how nice it is that they’re seeing it from such a lovely perspective that they’re able to see that you do not have to see things that same way.

You don’t have to feel bad for not seeing it the same way, but you can still feel satisfied with the effort that you put out, the effort that your horse put out and that you tried your best. Maybe it didn’t go as well as planned, but it went. You got through it, you got some information and some feedback from it. So that’s a win. You can be happy where you’re at and desire to do better and to dream bigger. You can be happy where you’re at, you can be satisfied where you’re at and desire to do better and dream bigger.

So overall, I think the, the, the biggest message I want to share here is to honor your body and to really recognize what it’s telling you and recognize that there are outside, energetic influences that are having an impact here. Maybe this was the time to stay home when you went out, and yes, it was too peopley, maybe your nervous system is too activated and you’re sensing all of these things. I sense that you’re a highly sensitive person, so as you’re dealing with all of these things, it just goes from bad to worse and you’re feeling all of the other people and you’re feeling all your stuff when it’s just a lot, when really you need to take some. Take that time to breathe, relax, ground yourself, get back in your body, cleanse these things that you’ve picked up from other people. Ground it into the earth, recognize that there are other energies impacting. You have a cycle. There’s this environment, there’s so much that can impact this. It’s just it’s not just you and how you’re handling things in your mind set. There is a lot that goes into it.

Heads up. According to these, astrologists May is an intense month energetically and it will continue throughout the month. We’re going to have a lot of his and a lot of low and some big shifts that might feel crappy at the time, but they’re going to end up being big and great things in the end. So hang in there, give yourself some grace, get to bed in good time so that your body can rest and restore hope. As I said at the beginning, I always welcome questions, so send them my way. If you have them until next time, breathe deep, stay present and ride the stride if you’d like.

Accounts mentioned
Cristy Duce on Instagram
Alex Myles on Facebook
Kari Samuels on Facebook

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