Have you ever noticed how all of us are constantly running? Running to get the best grades. Running to score the perfect job. Running to find our one true soul mate before someone else does. We’re all in a race to get to the finish line, without knowing where it is, without knowing when we’ll cross it, and without knowing if it even exists. And in this race, the only time we ever stop to take a break, to get some rest, and to just let all the stress go, is when we feel that it’s taking a toll on our physical health.
But what about our emotional health? Why don’t we ever talk about that openly? Why don’t we take care of it exactly like we take care of our physical health? It’s definitely just as important. It can definitely take a toll on our well-being as well. And it definitely deserves some real recognition.
The root cause of most of our emotional problems stem from the way we treat our self, and not from how others treat us. In the race of life, we tend to ignore our actual feelings, we tend to blame ourselves for all of life’s drawbacks, and we start to feel a sense of abandonment from our own thoughts and our own personalities.
Not only does this behavior affect our personal life, it also affects our relationships with those around us. We enter into relationships with an unreasonable fear of rejection, fear of betrayal, and a fear of abandonment.
So we dedicate this article towards truly discovering yourself, towards determining whether you have been taking care of yourself emotionally or not, and to make sure that you stop making the following 4 mistakes.
You constantly judge yourself
What judgments have you formed about yourself lately?
“I can never be good enough.”
“I have an inadequate personality.”
“I’m a bad human being.”
“I am a loser.”
“I’m so ugly.”
“I’m dumb.”
“I’m not capable of achieving anything in life.”
“I better not make that mistake again.”
And the list can go on forever. If you recognize any of the above statements or a statement close to these as one of your constant thoughts, then you are being completely unfair to yourself. When you live your life in the constant company of all these judgments, you bring yourself down, you prevent yourself from reaching your true potential, and you become a prisoner of your own thoughts.
These judgments can easily leave you feeling unloved, anxious, lonely, and depressed. So stop generalizing. Stop looking at every failure or problem in your life as a reason to judge yourself and make your life miserable. And consciously make an effort to avoid negativity from filling up your life.
You don’t stay simultaneously focused in your head and your body
The thoughts in your head are rarely consistent with your actions. You feel like doing one thing but you end up doing another. Maybe it’s because of this job you took up, the one you don’t actually like but you took it up anyway just to impress the people around you. Or maybe it’s because those people you hate but still end up hanging out with just to build your connections.
Or maybe it’s just because of the fact that your whole life was spent thinking about what’s ‘right’, thinking about what the people around you want, thinking about what would be best for the future, and not stopping for a minute just to think about what YOU want.
When you start to ignore your own true feelings, when you avoid thinking about the things you really want, and when you let your actual desires die, you can end up feeling incomplete. You end up being unhappy with every situation life hands you. And you can even end up with a lot of anxiety and depression.
You give in to different addictions
It started with that one day when you were so stressed, when you didn’t know how to manage all the work that never seemed to end, and when you just needed to let it all out in any way possible. You couldn’t leave your work. You couldn’t say no to the things you didn’t want to do. You couldn’t even take a small break. So each one of you just gave in to the one thing (or things) that had the potential to become your weakness.
You lit up a cigarette, even though you knew how hard it was for you to stop last time. You started drinking in your free time, knowing how unproductive it would make you. You started gambling just to take the stress off. You started spending uncontrollably because you felt all those expensive things just might make you feel a little better.
All of us have tried ways to numb the pain sometimes, to just avoid dealing with our problems by resorting to these addictions and all of us know very well how these things end up being only a temporary solution, and not even a very good one.
A solution that leaves us feeling even more stressed out than before, a solution that leaves us with even more problems than we started out with, and a solution that we most definitely regret in the future!
You blame others for everything that you feel
This is the most important point to determine whether you are an emotionally strong human being. Just take out a moment and think about all the hardships and failures that you ever faced in your life, think about how they made you feel, and think about the explanations you had in your mind for all of your feelings.
Did you blame the people and the situations around you or did you take up full responsibility for what happened? If your answer is always the former one, then there’s very little chance that you’ll ever find some emotional peace in life.
Take life into your own hands. Hold yourself responsible for every single thing that comes your way, good or bad. And learn to change your bad experiences into something you can learn from.
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