Hello and welcome to pursuing health. I'm Dr. Julie Foucher, family physician and former CrossFit Games athlete.

Here I bring you information and inspiration to help bridge the gap between fitness and

medicine and support your journey toward your healthiest self. Thank you so much for joining me.

Now let's get started with this week's episode. Today I wanted to share about a tool that has been

completely game changing for me.

And so I'll share this in the context of an area of my life where I found myself running up against a lot of resistance a couple of years ago.

And this is the area of feeling disorganized. So I don't know if anyone can relate, but I was feeling overwhelmed all the time.

It felt like I had so much to do, but I had no idea what I needed to do and everything was

scattered. I had to do lists on sticky notes, on small pieces of paper scattered around the

house, on my notes app on my phone. I had to do

lists in my email, in my calendar, and I struggled to find a way to keep it all together.

My email inbox seemed like it had thousands of messages. And after so many failed attempts at

getting organized and trying to find a system that worked, I started to have

this thought that I'm never going to be organized. And there's this concept called the

cognitive emotive loop that I've been introduced to. And it really explained my situation with

that thought. So I would start having this thought. I'm never going to be organized. And

immediately, when I have that thought, what emotions come up for me? I start feeling anxious. I start

feeling fearful. I start getting overwhelmed. I start to feel angry and frustrated like, why can't I get

this right? And as I have those emotions, it triggers more thoughts, right? I'm so

disorganized. I'm a failure. I'm incapable. How could anybody ever rely on me? And then when I have

thoughts like that, more emotions of anxiety and fear and overwhelm. And I would find myself looping like

this for hours and hours, just getting more and more intense with my thoughts and my emotions. It would just

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