Rationality AND Emotion

It is very obvious that we have two sides: Our hearts and our heads. And we all know that sometimes they contradict each other. Sometimes we know that something is right even though it feels wrong or the other way around. Both rationality and emotion are incredibly beautiful powers. And both can help us live a better life, be a better person and be happier, or make us miserable and feel like we have nothing left to live for. But how do we handle them, when they contradict each other? How can we handle them at all and how can we use them to our advantage.

The first step to a healthy balance between rationality and emotion is understanding, that both are important and both exist in their own right. Banishing either from our lives will lead to imbalance and pain. We need to acknowledge our emotion. We need to understand how we feel. We live in a world, where we are either over-focused on rationality or over-focused on “feeling good”. The problem with the first is obvious: If we never focus on emotion, we are emotionally immature, meaning, we have no idea what we feel and how to handle it. Focusing too much on “feeling good” is problematic, because it does not allow for pain and anger and their negative siblings and we cannot deal with something that we do not acknowledge.

Everything we experience we need to handle on an emotional and a rational level. Imagine, we had a fight with our best friend. The rational level to deal with that is to understand where our friend was coming from and to admit the points where we were wrong ourselves. But that is not it: It is natural and good that a fight with our friend will trigger some emotion. Sadness, anger, pain. We need to realize that we do feel them and handle them. Maybe we need to talk or journal about them, maybe we want to deal with our anger by working out, or cry. However most obviously it would not be wise, to just deal with the fight emotionally and never talk to our friend about it. And never rationally dissolve it.

Sometimes we feel emotions that seem out of place. And that is alright as well. We can try to make sense of our emotion, but sometimes, there is no real reason for why we feel a certain way, but that is no reason to push the emotion aside and not allow us to feel it. Emotions are beautiful. Being able to express them and show them is not a sign of weakness or a sign that we have no self-control. It is a sign, that we are human. It is a sign that we know ourselves. And frankly once we learn how we can deal with our emotion, it becomes a super power. Because it is how we truly end and argument.

But we do not only feel negative emotion. The interesting thing is: when we learn to handle our sadness and anger we also become happier. Because we learn to recognize not only our negative emotion. We learn to recognize when we are happy. And when we enjoy ourselves, and consequently we learn to understand what got us into a positive state and we learn to repeat that. And when we have dealt with the negativity there is room for happiness inside us.

But it is not all about emotion. There are emotions, that are very persistent and difficult to deal with. We do our best, but we simply cannot handle them. A good example is guilt about past actions. We cannot change what happened and we feel bad about it. And the more we focus on it, the worse we feel. This is one of the points in time, where we need to understand that we cannot handle it emotionally anymore, but we have to be rational and let it go. Move on and maybe come back to it at some point and try to deal with it then. A similar situation is, when we fall in love even though we may be married. Feeling attracted to someone is not something we can control. It is an emotion. It is nothing we have to feel guilty about, but pushing that kind of emotion aside will allow us, to keep living a happy life with our husband.

Just because something is the right thing to do does not mean, it is easy on our emotion. And it is alright to feel that emotion, as long as we do not make a mistake because we based our decision purely on emotion. There is a healthy balance between doing what we have to and doing what we feel like. But it is good to know what we feel like. It does not mean, we have to act upon it. And sometimes acting on an emotion is a good thing. For instance when you feel like telling a team mate, that you enjoyed working with him. That will lift up both you and the team mate, so why would you not say something.

It is important, to control how we act on our emotion, because we may cause harm. But it is just as important to not suppress all emotion. If I feel like crying at the movies, I should. The worst thing that could happen is that I end up with ruined make up. Yes, we will need to do our jobs, even if we don’t feel like it, but maybe we can get ourselves into a bubble bath afterwards.

It is important to tend to our rational side and do the things our head tells us we need to do. Because if we do not do them, we will feel bad about ourselves and this will affect our emotions as well. But it is just as important to take care of our emotion. And it starts with acknowledging them, and then we get to figure out, what helps us feel better. Different emotions will call for different measures and it is journey to find out how to deal with which emotion and when to push an emotion aside for a bit.

Anxious because Lazy

Sometimes all we do is focus on ourselves. We focus on our body image. And we focus on our goals. And we focus on our mindset. We focus on setting up the perfect life. And when everything seems in perfect order we check back in with ourselves and wonder:

“My Life is perfect, why am I not feeling good?”

Of course this can have a multitude of reasons. But one possibility is, that we are lazy. We know what we would have to do, but we are not doing it. And we may even use our mental instability as an excuse for it. We put off the work we should be doing in favor of creating our mindset, or exercising more, or whatever that may be. With me this would go so far, that I would engage in self-harm, just to have a bigger problem to focus on. Of course not everyone who self-harms does it for that reason, I would even go as far as to say most people do not. But I did. I am also not stating, that anyone with a mental issue, is simply lazy. That would be outspokenly ignorant. But what I am saying is: If our lives are perfect and we still feel anxious, it may be because we are lazy and I think it is absolutely worth checking up on that.

How does our laziness affect our emotional state? We may long for someone telling us, that we are doing well enough. We may long for external approval, because deep inside us we know, that we could be doing better. We end up being anxious, because we do not approve of what we do. We do not approve of ourselves. This can lead to a wrong self-diagnosis. We think, we are attention-seeking, have mental issues and don’t love ourselves the way we should. While this may true as well, the real reason is laziness.

I do not believe, that lying to ourselves, and telling ourselves that everything is fine when it isn’t but can be made alright is a smart move. Sure, there are things we cannot change, like our past. But it does not mean, that we should accept that we are lazy and just decide to roll with it, when it really is something that bothers us. We have control over this. And why would we find ways to cope with laziness, if we can just eliminate that very laziness and make our lives better this way?

How do we know, if we are lazy. We all are aware that emotional state fluctuates and maybe we are not equally lazy all the time. There is a simple way to assess this. We need to have a look at our commitments. All of them. School, work, family life, hobbies, you name it. Once we know what our commitments are, we need to determine, how committed we really are to them. When was the last time, we worked on that project we claim to be close to our heart? Do we only do the minimum of what is expected of us? And if so, why? Could we do more? How much TV and alcohol do we consume? As sad as it is, that last one is a good indicator, because when watching TV we feel, like we are doing something productive, but we can end up doing it for hours, without really doing anything.

How can we fight our own laziness? This is difficult. And I have just started struggling with this, myself. However there are three main steps, we have to take: We have to first acknowledge that we are lazy and in what regards we are.
Then we have to choose not to be lazy. We have to remember, why we made that commitment. Without a good reason to do something we should not be doing it. Everyone whines about how they do not have enough time, but they could not tell you, why they made half of their commitments. So let’s get our why.
And finally we need to strategize. We need to find out, what actions we can take, to not be lazy anymore. We can either increase the effort we put into something, or the time we put into something. We can run faster, or we can run for longer. We can finish a task well or we can work on it for longer. To spend more time on our commitments, I recommend Calendar Blocking. Using a calendar and assign tasks to time slots. Because this way we have full control over our time.
We should not try to force ourselves to doing more than a little more. This is a journey. We need to improve step by step rather than setting up a schedule that we cannot keep to for longer than a day.
Once we have our time slots, and we are working on that task, there is one thought, that I find helpful:

“I am spending time on this. I might as well do it well.

This is great, because it allows you to gradually not only increase the time spent on our commitments but also improve the work we do during that time.

One final tip: Try to quantify. Not everything can be quantified. But some things can. How much time we spent, how fast we wrote something. How long it took us to accomplish the same task as last week. Because even though this sounds very competitive it is true: Success is measurable. And if we only think we are good, with no recent measure to back that up, we are probably not that great and we have most certainly stopped improving, because improvement is change and change is visible, at least to ourselves. We deserve success stories, we are working on improving ourselves after all.

So finding ways to measure the improvement is crucial for our motivation, but also to battle that anxiety, that comes with laziness. Because when we see, how we improved, we know we are not lazy. We are not just telling ourselves, we aren’t to make us feel a little better. We are not lying to ourselves, we are telling the truth and with that, the anxiety will disappear. (Unless there was another source for it, in which case, we are now not to lazy anymore to deal with that as well.) In any case making sure we are not lazy. Making sure, we are improving is equal to being the best version of ourselves. And I kid you not: the best version of ourselves tomorrow is a little better than the best version of myself today. Working on fighting laziness will improve everything. Us as a person, our lives our relationships with ourselves, the world around us and the people around us, but especially the relationship with the people we love.

The Mindset

A Mindset. What is it? Can I eat it? No. A mindset is not eatable, but it can include eatable things. Allow me to explain. Google defines Mindset to be a person’s set of attitude. Even though very accurate this does not help anyone unless one already knows what a mindset is.

A mindset does not include emotional state, attitude may. Even though emotions and mindset do affect each other. But is one important difference: The mindset can and should be a conscious choice, whereas emotions are out of our control. As a result, the mindset is more steady than emotions.

How we handle our emotions may very well be a matter of our mindset. And how we choose to form our mindset may be influenced by our emotions. But they are not the same. Mindset can include eatable things, as it determines, what exactly we think about food.

The dictionary defines Mindset as a person’s way of thinking and her opinions. I like this definition. Because we can choose the way we think. We get to have control over that. Our mindset includes every attitude and also our general approach to life, the universe and everything. It includes our attitude towards working, relationships, spirituality, money, health, politics and climate change. As well as our opinion on art and literally everything around us. It also includes our goals and our wishes. Our desires and dreams. And our attitude towards those.

The most known and hyped mindsets are probably the minimalist mindset and the mindful mindset. But I do not believe that we have to choose one of the two, to form our own mindset. Keep in mind, that the mindset is probably one of the most personal things. I believe that a mindset can be changed. I believe everyone should tailor their mindset to their own needs to find happiness. But that is a whole new blogpost, that is what I am planning to write next.

A mindset does not only define our way of thinking and our attitude, a mindset can and in my opinion should define our whole life. The reason for that is simple. We have control over our mindset, if we define it such that it will take control of our life, we control our life by transitivity.

A passive mindset, will not affect a person’s life very much, in contrast to the active one. To understand that imagine Anna being criticized by her friend. She understands and even agrees with the criticism and moves on with her life. If Anna entertains an active mindset, she will improve, it may take her days, weeks or months depending on what the criticism was about, but in due time, she will not repeat that mistake. Anna takes responsibility for her life. And she deals with things. If she had a passive mindset, Anna would nod and smile and forget about it. She agrees, but her mindset is not to take action.

Improvement comes easier if one has an active mindset. Because with an active mindset, we have realized that this world does not do anything for us. As long as we have a passive mindset, our lives will not change the slightest bit. At least not in the direction we want. Because we may have dreams… but those are not coming true by chance. And concerning the little things in life, we don’t even really know what we want. We don’t really care. A passive mindset is just the result of ones upbringing. Just the sum of one’s surroundings.

An active mindset does not only contain the dream, it contains the steps to reach it. It contains a detailed roadmap. Someone with an active mindset will check back in with that roadmap and see if his or her actions bring him or her closer to that dream. Which at that point is not a dream anymore, but a goal.

The problem with switching from a passive mindset to an active one is, that it is so much work. We don’t only have to figure out what we want and how to get there. We have to motivate ourselves. And that turns out to be way more difficult, that it sounds. Taking the action of switching mindset, is already something that would be inherent to the active mindset, that is the very thing we are trying to acquire. And so we end up in a vicious cycle.

Most people with passive mindsets do not even realize, that their mindset is passive. Because it is how they have always lived. And when they don’t feel their best about their lives, they don’t realize, that it is not just a little thing bothering them. It is not just their job, friend or partner that is problematic. It is their entire mindset. Their way of thinking. Their attitude. That makes them unhappy. And they do not realize that unless they find a way to fix that, they will never find true peace and true self-confidence.

In addition I believe that many young people don’t quite understand the concept of a mindset. They all want to grow up and be their own boss, but they cannot take control of how they think, because they are still entertaining the same mindset they entertained as teenagers and children. I think, that we cannot be truly gown-up unless we understand how to take control of our own mind. This is true freedom. True independence.