The Token System
Welcome to Takeout Therapy. I'm Rebecca Hunter, an anxiety specialist private practice therapist, and total mental health geek. Stick with me for the next few minutes, and I'll teach you what you need to know and have emotionally healthier and more peaceful way of life. I promise a little free mental health education can't hurt. We should have had it much earlier, but It's never too late to learn.
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Let's dig in. Well, hi there. I thought I'd just do a really quick episode today. To talk with you about a therapy tool that I've been using a lot in therapy lately, but also in my own life. I call this silly tool that a lot of therapists use the same concept and maybe you already use the same concept in your life, but I call it my token rule.
And here's the deal, is that sometimes in life, we get kinda strong out. We, like, do too much. We we're always moving and moving from one thing to the next to the next, and it can really cause our whole system to go into alarm. And we call this burnout to recall it overwhelmed or we say, I'm super stressed out. But basically, what's happening is that we're using more resources to live our lives than we actually have.
It's kinda like spending money we don't have. So I think this token system is really a good system to use because it's easy and it's fast and it can help you just assess where you're at in your life. And here's how you do it. So the game is this. Every day you wake up, and you get a certain amount of tokens.
I don't know how many you get. You get to decide. There are a lot of rules to this game and you get to decide all of them. Yeah, this is how it works. So you get so many tokens a day.
Right? And every time you give up your yourself in some way or another, you spend a token. So whether that's in caring for the people in your life or doing things around your house or going to work. Sometimes these things don't take a ton of tokens. Right?
Sometimes it's kind of chill. Other times. We have interactions that take a lot of tokens. They take a lot of physical energy sometimes. Or mental and emotional energy.
Right? So I kind of think is of the tokens is like, This is your money to spend. These tokens are yours to spend on what you spend them on. And if you are spending tokens on things that you don't wanna be spending tokens on, then it's your job to clean that up. And I think the system really helps because tokens are not infinite, We get a few every morning, but throughout the day we spend and spend and spend.
They're not infinite. We don't have as many tokens as we want, which clear closely resembles real life. Which is that we don't have as many resources as we think we ought to. Like, we don't have as much energy as we wanna have. We can't engage in all the things that we want.
We think we can engage in. It's too much. We become overwhelmed. We become stressed out and burned out. And so when you start thinking about this in terms of this finite amount of tokens, you start to really understand There is no bank that you could go and get a loan.
If you spend more than you have, you're running in a deficit. Which is why you feel crappy, which is why I myself tend to get sick. When I'm in my burnout cycle, I run myself into the ground, and then I just get something. I pick something up. Whatever, some horrible, whatever that puts me down.
Because then your body is like, okay. Well, now we have to rest because we don't have any tokens. Actually, we're in a deficit of tokens. So we will just lay here now until the tokens are replenished. See where I'm getting that?
So the other part of the game is that you can replenish your tokens. And the way you do that is not by helping others and saying yes to all the things that you shouldn't be saying yes to it's actually the opposite. Every time you choose to nurture yourself, with the understanding that you have enough respect for yourself not to run yourself into the ground. With the understanding that you have finite resources. You have finite energy.
You have finite mental capacity. You have finite patience. If you're anything like me. Right? Like, we don't have all we want of anything.
That's part of the game. So every time you nurture yourself and every time you give to yourself in some way that you deem is caring, nurturing, or filled your cup, a lot of people say, then you can add a token and you know you have a little bit of resources. But here's the thing. It's like people aren't gonna just be knocked on your door, a friend, and giving you tokens because they need their own DM tokens. Were token hoggles in this game.
You are responsible for maintaining a decent level of tokens so that when the shit hits the fan, because it will, it always does, perhaps you have a few in the bank or perhaps you know how to generate more tokens so that you have more capacity to handle lives up and downs. This is my gift to you today. This very short little introduction to the game of the token exchange of life. I don't even know how I came up with tokens. I think that there's some therapists that use spoons, but I was always like, what the hell do I need spoons for?
Like, I don't wanna carry spoons around. So me, I'm over here. I got a few tokens in my pocket. And I know how to make more. How about you?
How's your level of tokens feeling today? Is there anything that you can do for yourself? To give you what you need. Is there any way you could possibly say no to something and save the token for something that is an abs lute yes. Okay.
Good luck with it. I'll see you next time. I'm so glad you joined me today, and I hope it was helpful. Always make to get the appropriate level of help for your unique situation. Check out the resources at takeouttherapy dot com, and hopefully you can find something there As always, thanks so much for showing up and doing your work, which in a way changes the level of emotional development in your community, in your town, Even in the world, yeah, it's kind of a big deal.
This podcast is intended as education and prevention, not medical or mental health treatment. See you next time.
