Date Posted: October 24th, 2008
Sooner or later you’re going to experience your own personal “dark night of the soul”… that time when you realize some defining part of you must be removed. It isn’t working anymore or maybe it never actually worked in the first place and now it definitely has to go. It’s a scary, uncomfortable time because what has to be removed has been a part of you. Practically by definition it’s something you’re attached to. Needless to say, getting through this period successfully is not an easy or simple task. There’s an overwhelming temptation to continue on your original path because it’s more comfortable, more known, and because you don’t know where your new path will lead. For all you know your new future could be worse than what you’re experiencing right now. There’s no way to tell.
So how do you transcend the transition? How do you thrive? How do you keep from retreating into your old ways? Here are a few things I do to keep myself grounded and to hang on until the fog passes.
Exercise
This may sound a bit silly, but believe me, I’m not overstating it’s importance. An easy way to clear a bit of the fog away is to exercise. Go for a walk or a bike ride or dancing or whatever. Once you’ve done that (and even while you’re doing it) you should feel pretty good for at least two reasons: 1) endorphins will kick in which will cause you to feel happier and more clear headed 2) it’s something you did (are doing) that you know is good for you. Which brings me to the second piece of advice:
Do Something Good For You
The idea here is to do something small that you know is good for you and is definitely within your capability. Maybe you could schedule that doctor’s appointment you were supposed to make a year ago or cook a healthy meal or read that self-help book you’ve been meaning to read. Each task you complete act as a hand-hold you can grab onto when you start feeling overwhelmed or incapable of succeeding. They’re proof that you are indeed capable of doing good things for yourself.
Don’t give in to the temptation to do something major, though, because if the task is too complicated or too time-consuming you probably won’t finish it. It’s hard enough to muster the motivation when you’re feeling generally good about yourself, let alone when you’re in a mental fog! Also you want to start feeling the benefit quickly, so a time-consuming task is right out for this purpose even if it is easy.
One thing to note, “something good for you” is not the same as “something that makes you feel good”. Examples of the latter would be going shopping, drinking, watching TV, eating your favorite foods, etc. They’re all things that feel good but are not necessarily good for you. A rule of thumb here is if it feels good but you feel at least slightly guilty after doing it it’s probably not good for you and you certainly shouldn’t choose that as your “good for you” task. In small doses this kind of thing can be useful, but if it’s your primary strategy you’ll probably backslide because it’s essentially mind-numbing, not mind healing.
An analogy: comforting yourself is like taking numbing throat drops because your throat is sore after a full day of talking. Once you take them your throat no longer hurts so you can continue to talk without any pain, but your throat hasn’t actually healed. If you do keep talking you’ll still be hurting yourself only you won’t feel it. There’s a reason you have pain receptors after all. Your body doesn’t want you destroying yourself. Similarly if your way of dealing with your Dark Night is to reward yourself for being in pain, you’re only numbing yourself to the pain. You have a way to make yourself feel better, but you don’t have a way to heal. Feeling the pain of the Dark Night is important because it’s incentive to become a better person. If you numb yourself too much you lose the incentive. Of course taking throat drops doesn’t imply that you will hurt yourself by continuing to talk and likewise comforting yourself doesn’t mean you’re unable to heal. You’re just taking away a bit of your natural incentive to move forward.
Doing something good for you, while similar to comforting yourself since the goal is to improve the way you feel, doesn’t have the negative side effects that comforting yourself does. Keeping with the “sore throat” analogy, doing something good for you is like drinking lots of cool water. Your throat feels mildly better, but the important thing is that you’re helping your body heal itself. Having faith in your ability to conquer your fears is essential to actually conquering them, and doing something good for you can generate that faith.
Journaling
Journaling is a useful technique because it can help you organize and understand your thoughts. Also it’s easier to break negative thought cycles because you can tell yourself “I don’t need to think about this anymore. I’ve already written this down!”.
When I’m dealing with “Dark Night of the Soul” issues, I try to keep my journal writing focused on only a handful of topics:
- Where am I Going?: Once I’m out of the fog where do I want to be? What should have changed?
- What’s holding me back?:What am I attached to? What am I afraid of giving up? What am I afraid of experiencing?
- What do I do Next?: What steps do I need to take to get out of this?
These topics together form my path to getting out of the fog. Since they’re written down I can look at them a day, a week, or a month later to see if they still make sense. And even if I don’t review my journal entries, merely the process of writing out my thoughts has been really effective in helping me gain clarity.
Honestly these three techniques get me 90% of the way there. My physical body is working with me, I have faith in my ability to pull myself out of the darkness, and I have clarity about where I’m going, why I’m not there yet, and what I still need to do. The last 10% is just putting myself in motion, and that’s mostly dependent on clarity. If where I’m going is compelling enough, (and what I was/am is unappealing enough) I’ll not only do the work to get there but want to do it too. With these tools it’s hard to backslide.
Tags:
Emotional Health.
Posted at
3:56 pm | 1 Comment »
Date Posted: October 14th, 2008
Ever have the problem where you say “I’m going to do X for the next week” and then you aren’t able to do it? For instance, you want to get up at the same time for an entire week, or you want to exercise first thing in the morning for an entire week. These should be fairly simple things to do, and yet for some reason you’re not able to do it. For the first day or two it’s not too bad, but by about day three you don’t feel the same way about it like you did on day one. Why is that? Why can’t you follow through? What can you do about it?
Either Your Head or Your Heart Isn’t Into It
I’ve found that when I have trouble sticking to a commitment it’s almost always been because either my rational side found a flaw in the commitment or my emotional side didn’t like it. For instance, in September I attempted to restrict my diet to foods that didn’t contain artificial additives. There’s no way this could physically be a bad thing for me, so my head was all for it. I mean, why should I have a problem with feeling healthier and taking greater responsibility in what foods I eat? But as the days went on things would happen that would make me want to forget the whole thing. My boyfriend, Aaron, would buy something that I’d eat any other month of the year, and I’d feel left out since I couldn’t eat it too. I’d be invited to someone’s house and they’d offer me something with preservatives and I’d feel very awkward and snobbish if I didn’t accept. I didn’t really consider things when I made that commitment to myself. How do I deal with being a food snob and effectively wasting food for the sake of my commitment? I come from an ethnic family, so both of these issues are a big deal. You don’t turn down food and you don’t waste it either. Needless to say, my head might have thought it was a good idea, but my heart was faced with situations it wasn’t prepared to handle.
If your heart thinks the change is a good idea, but your rational self doesn’t agree, you’re effectively in the same predicament. You’ll self-sabotage because you know it wouldn’t work anyway.
And of course if neither your head nor your heart are into it, there’s no way you’ll both succeed and continue to be conscious. Getting up early and at the same time every morning tends to fall in this category. On the surface my mind thinks it’s a good idea, getting up early means I’ll get a head start on the day. I’ll have time to work out, get in the mood for the day, meditate… all good things. But then I’m reminded of all those times when I’ve woken up groggy, with a headache for not getting enough sleep. My rational self certainly doesn’t want that for itself. A fogged mind is no good. And then there’s my heart, which likes the warmth of my bed and being able to snuggle with my sweetheart. Face the cold morning or continue to enjoy the warmth… hmm. Needless to say I’ve never been able to continuously get up at the same time every day.
However when my head and heart are both into it, making changes are relatively easy. Not watching television commercials, for example, was really easy for me to do. My heart and mind both felt sick watching them, and I could get TV show episodes without commercials. Not watching commercials was essentially a non-issue.
So, how do you get your heart and mind to agree on something?
Learn from your Failures
If you’ve tried to do something and failed, examine what went wrong. Be conscious of why you failed and come up with solutions you honestly think will work. The level of consciousness is directly proportional to the accuracy of your solutions. So being more conscious will decrease the number of times you fail.
Let’s say you really want to exercise daily and you promised yourself that for a month the first thing you’d do after you got up is run for a half hour. Unfortunately three days in you stopped doing it. What happened? Did you stay up late the night before and weren’t able to get up until a half hour before you had to be at work? As soon as you woke up were you reminded of how sore you felt and thought “maybe I should take a day off”? Was it raining outside and you didn’t want to get soaked?
Look at the external factors that led to your failure and see what you can do to fix those. If the problem is getting up early enough to go exercise then maybe you should try exercising right after work. If your being able to run is dependent on the weather maybe you should get a treadmill or have an indoor exercise routine or go to the gym or get some bad weather clothes. If you’re afraid of overworking yourself by working out each and every day then maybe you should work that into your commitment. Maybe you can allow yourself one day off a week in case of soreness, or maybe you can have a lower intensity, mostly stretching type workout for sore days.
Then find solutions for the internal factors. Maybe you really feel like the tiredness you experienced working out wasn’t worth the minor gain you felt afterward. A solution to this might be lowering the intensity of your workout to something sustainable. Maybe you really dislike running and every time you hit the pavement you envision future knee replacements. To accommodate this you could replace running with biking or swimming or yoga. Maybe you feel like spending a half-hour spending energy frivolously is stupid. You could bike to work or run to someplace you were planning to go to anyway or something else that would make you feel good about getting exercise.
Once you’ve determined some adjustments that you think would have made your original commitment work, remake your commitment. If you fail again repeat the process. There’s no shame in failing. There’s only shame in quitting. As Dougie MacLean once said, “You can fall but you must not lie down.”
Limit the Number of Promises
Learning from your mistakes is at the heart of keeping your promises, but there are a couple of general tips that deserve mention, one of which is the common problem of trying to change too many things at once. It’s something I know I’m prone to doing. For example not only do I want to get up early, but I want to meditate for an hour every day, work on learning a new language daily, work out first thing in the morning, and be vegan… for a month. Given that if I work on one of these things I’ll be lucky if I can follow through, why would I think I’d succeed doing them all simultaneously. It’s like trying to lift 100 pounds when I can really only do 10. Inevitably I fail. It’s much better to start with one thing and do it successfully then to attempt to do many things and fail at all of them. And there’s another benefit to picking only one thing to change: you can determine if that change alone improved your life. If you work on exercising more, getting up regularly, and changing your diet, and you end up feeling better you won’t be able to tell which was the one that helped you the most. Similarly if you feel bad it could be that only one of the changes was the cause, but you’ll have a hard time determining which it was.
Take Some Time to Get Excited About Your Commitment
I’ve found that when I take a week or more to learn about what I’m going to change I get more excited about it and am much more likely to succeed. Some experts say that as soon as you have an inclination to change your habit you should start doing it right away. For me, I tend to be kind of wishy washy right after I’ve thought of something that might be good for me. I haven’t taken the time to analyze the consequences of such a change. I haven’t thought much about implementing it. If I don’t know anything about vegan cooking how am I really going to be able to start being a vegan tomorrow? I’m not. If I don’t do some research the chances of me failing are astronomical. And even with things that don’t require research, like getting up early in the morning, if I envision the benefits of success and allow myself to get excited I’m a lot more likely to succeed than if I just up and do it.
Hopefully you now have some insight into how to better keep the commitments you make to yourself. Analyze what went wrong. Come up with some solutions. Try again. If you keep honestly making improvments, you’ll eventually succeed. It’s only a matter of time. In the mean time enjoy the process. Growing is fun.
Tags:
Self-Discipline.
Posted at
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