Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
PART 6 - Be Individual
PART 7 - Be Constructive
PART 8 - Balance (+)(-)
CONCLUSION
Happiness is within each an every one of us; you have the power to heal yourself from emotional maladies all it takes is a little bit of insight and the commitment to beat depression.
The key to finding lasting happiness is to stop doing things that are dragging you down and to start doing things that will build you up. The problem that most people have is that they don't realize all of the little things that are dragging them down. With depression, you MUST come to the realization that NO ONE can help you except yourself. Friends, family, and other well-wishers all have pure motives and desire to help you, but without full knowledge of your life, your goals, your ambitions, your personality, etc. they cannot make good decisions for you and cannot offer purely beneficial advice. The only person who knows you well enough to help you is you, and out of all of the people who hold a stake in your life and what you do with it, YOU are most dependent on your own success--more than any other person in the world.
Just to recap and reexplain, a few things that might be dragging you down are: people close to you such as friends and family, your desires and wants, your perceptions of life, and your values.
Humanity is both individual and collective--our survival requires us to work with other people and give up part of our independence to fit in with groups. The internal problem occurs when our groups (family, friends, society, etc) push on our boundaries and we lose too much of our independence to fend for ourselves.
Your wants and desires can drag you down as well. If you want things that you shouldn't have, getting them won't make you any happier. If you want things you can't have, the attempt to obtain them can make you unhappy as well. Lastly, if you try to obtain your wants in the wrong ways, no matter how hard you try to get them if you're doing it the wrong way it'll never happen.
I have observed that with the latter, it isn't that we do the wrong things to reach our wants, it's that we have too many conditional wants and the conditions compete with one another. For example, wanting to find a job that pays well and gives plenty of free time is a lot harder than finding a good paying job or a job that offers plenty of free time. The conditions compete with one another and can trick you into thinking that there is no hope of finding a job with free time or a job that pays well--sometimes the solution is to pick one or the other but not both.
Perceptions of life are huge deterrents to happiness. If you think life is supposed to work a certain way that it isn't, or that happiness is something that it isn't, then you're bound to have a lot of internal turmoil. For example, if you think that getting a job or promotion is about what you know, you'll incredibly frustrated to learn about times that you got passed up for a promotion because someone else knew somebody. You will think that they didn't deserve it or that you aren't getting what you deserve and it can contribute to your long-term depression.
Once you are able to look beyond the things that you are doing to drag yourself down, you can start to replace them with good things. Negative emotions aren't bad, they are your subconscious recalling a pattern of experiences in order to help you make good decisions in the future. If you try to stifle your emotions rather than let yourself experience them you risk making them return for the wrong reasons. Instead of feeling sad when something sad happens, you'll start to feel sad when things are sad AND whenever you feel the need to suppress your emotions, because that is how you are training yourself--whenever you need to be scared, you'll feel sad, whenever you need to be angry you'll feel sadness. Instead of suppressing your emotions, try acknowledging them, contemplate what sort of message your subconscious is trying to tell you, and then make intuitive decisions based on those feelings. Much of our emotions are simple messages from our subconscious saying: "don't do it this way again, look for a different solution to this problem."
Aside from emotions, a lot of people suffer from boredom and confusion. We've made life too easy for ourselves in some regards by inventing means of being more efficient, and in other regards we've made life more complex. It's easy to become confused, even flustered, by having to make so many decisions in a day. A good habit to form is to default your decisions to what is most constructive (as opposed to destructive). If you feel bored, think of something to improve your life or others' lives. If you feel confused, do something to improve your life or others' lives. Being focused on decision making is synonymous with being stagnant--so is being bored! A few common, constructive activities are: exercising, learning, writing, home improvement, gardening, and cleaning.
Balance balance balance. Balance being an individual vs being a part of social groups. Balance time spend on negative emotions just as much as you do positive ones. Balance being constructive and pushing yourself vs relaxing and taking time to recover. Life is a balancing act. You don't have to be happy all the time, and a brief period of depression never hurt anyone but instead helps you to enjoy the good times more.
You have it within you to heal yourself.
My grandmother could do it. I did it. You can do it too.
Happiness is within your grasp, you just have to reach out and snatch it.
No comments:
Post a Comment