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.

Caring healing Aggression against ourselves.

There is this trend in our society to declare, that we do not care about anything anymore. And to be honest, I have participated in this. And it does make sense. We assume the worst in everyone. We assume, we will get hurt. But if we do not care, we cannot be hurt, right? Obviously not. Because what happens is, that we feed into our hatred for ourselves. We naturally care. Because we are passionate. And because we do care, we end up hating ourselves, because we don’t even manage to not care. But this is not the worst part of it. there are so many things, capable to bring us joy, if we choose to not care about them, we will end up in a cold, joyless world, left with nothing but pain.

There is nothing wrong with caring for things. Caring about our health, our relationships, our hobbies and our work. Because after all we have the right to care about our lives. We don’t have to numb ourselves towards everything around us, just in order to not get hurt. Because our dependence on our hobbies and relationships may hurt us, but not caring about those things at all will hurt us more in the long run.

Why is that? Why do I claim that we inherently want to care? What do I know? Well, it is not just about caring. It is very much about a purpose. And about a direction. It is about individualism and self-identification. We all intuitively know, that what we do and how we think, defines who we are. And that is exactly how caring defines who we are. Which is, why we should never blindly care about something. Which is, why there needs to be research in order for us to be sure about something. But we all need to care. Because we all need a goal. Because we all need something that is worth fighting for.

Here is what may happen, if we do not care. We isolate ourselves from everyone around us, which will hurt us, because no one can live depending only on oneself. But we will ignore that hurt, because we decided to not care about those people that we pushed away. The pain will grow, but will will keep choosing not to care. But there is also nothing else, that we can focus on. We end up trying to focus on identifying ourselves as the person, who is cold and does not care.

Someone said, we should not drink a whole bottle of our favorite high volume percent alcohol? Oh well, we do not care. And with not caring we damage ourselves. But we don’t care about whether or not we damage ourselves or not. And we end up in addictions or self-harm. But we don’t really care, but now we have the perfect way to identify ourselves with not caring.

I know this is harsh. I know it is scary to care. It is scary to just be ourselves, because it is so much easier to desperately try to not care. But not caring and the constant need to prove how much we do not care is so damaging to us. Yes, we may get hurt, if we start fighting for our hobbies. Yes we may run into people who judge us for taking care of ourselves. But I think we should rather take care of ourselves, than end up hurting ourselves, just because we are afraid, what people think of us.

Why do we despise ourselves for caring? Why do we feel, if we start caring about things, we loose our independence? Because we don’t unless we let someone else choose what we are supposed to care for. Choosing what we care for means choosing who we are. And it is power. It is like a woman choosing to be cute and kind. She may have dreaded that her whole life, because she has always feared that being cute may be viewed as being immature. Or weak. When frankly that is a decision entirely up to her. And the world envies women who make the choice to be cute and beautiful, rather than badass. Because there is an undeniable appeal to someone embracing who they want to be, despite of their fears.

There is a distinct appeal to someone choosing to care. Because it is well known how much strength it takes to make that step. We don’t end up vulnerable when we care. I have wondered for too long why I was fascinated so much by all those protagonists in books and movies. I knew my life was perfect but I could not get rid of the feeling that it was not as good as those protagonists’ lives. But why? Because no matter the heart-ship and pain and confusion those characters were undergoing, they were always motivated. By hate, by pain or by love. Those are strong emotions. Emotions, that we are not able to use to our advantage unless we care. Yes, we can hate ourselves for caring, but that will only destroy us.

Caring for something can also help us, to stop feeling uncomfortable with it. I have experienced that myself. I used to hate my feet and find them very ugly. At some point I started caring for them. Nothing fancy. Just taking a little time every other week to put some polish onto my toenails. And guess what: I don’t hate my feet anymore.

So when we hate our bodies, we can start battling that hate, by caring for it. There are so many ways of caring for your body. My favorites are applying body lotions and peelings. But there is also water intake and nutrition and exercise. Understand that taking care of yourself is the polar opposite of engaging in self-harm (with exercise potentially being an exception to this). And that is, why it helps to get more in tune with ourselves. It helps to not hate our bodies so much. And for me the next step always is to take care of things mentally. Be it my blog, my studies or the stories, I want to be writing. This can also be the people around us. Our family. Our pets. Caring for and about them will decrease our level of aggression, will give us a purpose and will define who we are.

I like the thought of being able to define who I am. It is work. But it is so much better than being at the mercy of my own hatred.

Balance and Making it count

“Eating is an absolute waste of time. Keep studying!” and “If you take a break now, you will never get back to work!” are just two of the sentences the little voice in my head screamed at me last Thursday. When we try to work. When we try to pour our heart and soul into something, when we try to be good at something, it can easily happen, that we want to make ourselves spend more time with whatever that is at the moment. Because we have a goal that we want to achieve no matter what. This drive is incredible. It can make us become great people. There is just one problem. It is absolutely out of balance.

Also on Thursday I caught myself being irritated constantly. Being mad and impatient. I was swearing and screaming because I go frustrated, because it felt like nothing was working the way I wanted it to. The printer did not print. And I had failed to finish what I had planned the days before. I just hated everything. Then I realized one thing: It had been weeks since I last worked out. My body was totally out of balance. I had been challenging my mind to be disciplined and study, but at the same time I had failed to challenge my body. And this was when I got grumpy.

We may not all need exercise. But balance we all need. Because, eating and sleeping and taking breaks are not just a necessary evil, that we do in order to keep functioning. This is what I tell the little voice in my head. But what we really need is fulfillment. That is what will keep us going. If we do only one thing for days and only eat and sleep because we have to, we run the danger of depending on that one thing to fulfill us. Which can easily become an issue when that one thing starts getting on our nerves for some reason.

That is why we need hobbies and friends and work and family. And all these categories have the right to exist. And all of them have the potential to fulfill us. Sure, we do not want to choose friends that we do not actually like, but we should not rely on our friends to make us happy. Or our family, our jobs or hobbies. They all are wonderful and to lead a happy life, all of these need to be more or less intact. But we cannot depend on one or another. Because that will most likely make us neglect the others and thereby make us unhappy in the long run.

Especially recreational things like taking breaks, eating and sleeping should not be things we think of as necessities. We should be able to draw energy from them. We can actively help doing that, by creating little rituals around going to sleep for example. Or having a designated spot, where we read when we are on a break. Whatever it is, we need to convince ourselves, that we deserve those breaks. And we can be grateful for them and for deserving them, rather than hating on them. We need to believe that it is alright to not study 10 hours a day. Yes, maybe we feel like we might fail the next exams if we stop studying, but if we cannot take a break and recharge, there will be no efficient studying and then we will definitely fail.

We can take this even a step further. Which is typical for people with a positive mindset. We have to go to a doctor or dentist for a regular checkup. Most people would get annoyed by it. Consider it a waste of time. But very few see it as an opportunity. We can talk to our doctor about any concerns we might have and if we don’t we had a checkup and we know for a fact that we are fine. Not to mention the fact that we get out of the places we are on a regular basis. Maybe we can walk there and enjoy the sunshine. Or maybe we just enjoy the time to ourselves. The very same thing goes for running errands and doing groceries.

So to sum it up: there are things we need to do and we need to balance the different parts of our lives, to be able to draw energy from them. But while we are at it, we might as well think about how we can make the the small and absolutely necessary things in our lives matter. This is actively employing a positive mindset and will fulfill us and make us happy.

Love and Our Self-Image

Love is complicated. No kidding. Therefore all I am trying to do is answer the following: Can a mental illness make us fall in love for the wrong reasons?

This answer seems to be a simple “yes”. Because with a mental issue like self-harm oftentimes comes self-hate and we end up relying on someone else to give us the approval and validation we cannot provide for ourselves. Here is the problem: while self-harm enhances that issue it is not the reason. In fact it is the other way around: self-harm and seeking validation from others both are a manifestation of our low self image.

Does this mean that we are not allowed to fall in love? Does it mean we have to get healthy and confident before we allow ourselves to fall in love? What would the natural consequence of that be? Say we never really recover, does that imply we never may give in to love because we could be doing it for the wrong reasons? If we have experienced falling in love and completely depending on that person, it may be understandable that the fear of falling for the wrong reasons might keep us from falling at all. But just because we made one mistake in the past does not mean we have to make another one in the present.

Depending on one’s loved one is natural to some degree. But I find it important to remember that we still are individuals. And as such it is crucial that we keep improving. That we keep working on our self-confidence. I think it is also vital that we talk to our significant other about these issues. A relationship is supposed to make us better as individuals. But the moment we stop improving we are getting worse. So if our relationship makes us dependent on the other person. If the relationship is the only reason we can love ourselves, it is not making us better. On the contrary. And that’s the point where it has to end.

How do we know if our relationship has turned into this? Because it may very well be that it started out as a healthy relationship. I think the best indicator is how much we are depending. And this however is individual. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to make a decision once and just go with whatever the loved one decides. But if the other one makes every single decision that is a clear indicator for dependence. Another one is when one is miserable without the other. And I am not talking about the normal missing someone. I am talking about that moment where you are constantly waiting for the other. The moment where your world is limited to the relationship we need to work on our independence. And this does not mean we need to break up. By no means. But it means that we should take action in some form. Most likely it is also a good idea to talk about it with out loved one. Because looking at it from the other angle putting this pressure onto someone is not fair just as much as it is unhealthy. No one is even remotely capable of being someone’s only reason to be happy. I am not saying that our relationships don’t make us very happy. But the point is that they add to our lives and are not the sole purpose of them.

One more sign would be that the relationship has become purely physical. And then we might just be holding on to it for the physical comfort. Which means we are not dependent on a person but on hugs or sex. Again: as long as we have a life outside our sex-life (my apologies for the explicity) that’s fine. And we have to decide whether or not that is a relationship worth having. Now, I am saying this because I never wanted a purely physical relationship, but I did not notice that I was in one until I got out of it. If we are in such a relationship we often do not see what is going on. And we cannot see because we are depending on it.

There is the possibility of being in a relationship for the wrong reasons. Or having a relationship conflict with us building self-confidence as an individual. But usually that is no reason to end our relationships or forbid ourselves to engage in one. As long as we don’t feel like our relationship is the only good thing in our lives. As long as we have other hobbies and passions, we are fine. In a good relationship we will always be safe and supported when we need it but at the same time we will be encouraged to have our own lives and we will be better as individuals just as much as we are better as a couple.

The vision of who we shall be

I got lucky enough to know that my fear had a deadline. To know that at some point I would have an answer. And I got lucky enough to get the answer I had been hoping for and not the answer I had been so afraid of.

But now what? When we are lucky enough to get the chance to leave our fear behind. What do we do next? When our entire life had been evolving around that fear. (It does not have to be fear. It can really be anything you have been evolving around and now stopped.) How can we move on?

I think there are two crucial parts: One is looking back and figuring out what went wrong. And what went well. This is important, but I think it is quite self-explanatory. It allows us to deal with the emotions and not bury them inside us. But we do not want to live in the past. We shall not be devoured by regret. (In fact this could be the topic for a whole separate blog post.)

The other part is looking into the future. And sometimes, when we have been so caught up in something we need to actively create a vision of ourselves. But why would that be helpful? A vision allows us to measure our actions by. If something makes us more like the person we are in that vision, it is a productive action. But why do we need that?

Because we need a direction. Until this point we have been evolving around whatever it is we are leaving behind. Now it is time to evolve around something positive. Around the person we want to be. In my vision I never say: “I am not a self-harmer.” I say things like: “I am a strong, independent woman.” Such a positive vision, a vision of what we want to be rather than what we do not want to be, is very powerful, because it motivates us to go on. And it gives us somewhere to go. Somewhere we want to go. And every time we are able to take a step towards our vision, we will be able to love ourselves a bit more. Because we did something that made us better.

In the self-harm and self-hate context this is so important. Because we tend to be trapped in all that negativity. And I know I could not even have written this post last week. I think us hating ourselves… as sad as it is: It is part of who we are. And yes, we do have to fight it. But we cannot fight negativity with more negativity. We cannot fight the fact that we hate ourselves, by hating that we hate. That’s… recursive. So instead we need to find something about us, that we can love. And that is why we need a vision: because we want to be like the vision. And every time we get a little closer to who we want to be, we are allowed to be proud of ourselves. Love ourselves a bit more. Trust ourselves a bit more. Experience that we are actually not as much of a failure as we always like to make ourselves believe. And that I call taking control of our lives. Actively fueling our self-confidence instead of letting negativity destroy us.

But how can we create a vision? What inspires such a vision? There are many sources for that: People we admire. Ideologies. Quotes. And more mundane: Books, movies, series, music, pictures. I usually work with 4 categories:

Me and university
Me and my hobbies
Me and myself
Me and others

In each of these categories I determine what is important to me. I write it down and that is how my vision is born. Then I take one or two points in each category and figure out a way to actively improve that point. I make a plan. And most importantly: I try to ask myself on a regular basis: “Is this how the person in my vision would act?” or “Is this bringing me closer to the person I want to be?”. This is not entirely about accounting for the progress we make in becoming the vision, it is mostly about remembering that positive vision. Getting into the mindset of that vision. Because we can so easily forget, what we want to fight for. So reminding ourselves of it is always a good idea.