1. Balance.
Every up requires a down in order to balance itself. What I mean by this in practical terms is that everything you do needs to be balanced or it won't be sustainable. Working around the clock in a high-stress environment with little to no rest and poor lifestyle habits will only serve to ruin your health, propel you towards burnout, and make you more irritable and likely to lash out towards those you care about and tear down relationships, not to mention the omnipresent effect of simply not enjoying your life. Your body is your primary home. No matter how well put together your actual house is, if your body is in turmoil you won't have the hormonal profile necessary to appreciate your surroundings. Your body and mind should receive at least as much attention as your external environment.
Therefore, it is necessary that if you want to produce more output from the body (or utilise more energy towards goals in your life), then you must change your life in order to provide more input (or more energy) into your body. So, for example, a person who normally eats a lot of junk food and doesn't exercise very often should eat more vegetables and go for a short walk in the mornings.
On the topic of vegetables, I would recommend reading books by vegans or vegetarians, as such people are forced to devote more than enough time and effort into researching this sort of thing in order to adapt to these eating habits without resorting to junk food. Off the top of my head, some foods that you may wish to add would be potatoes (white potatoes, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, or yams), carrots, peppers, and onions, tomatoes, celery, cucumber, lettuce etc. These are the sorts of vegetables I would have for lunch or in a soup, and they help to fill a hungry stomach.
2. Knowing when to stop
This is a stronger form of balance. Basically I burnt myself out while trying to do two degrees at a time when there was enough stress in my life. Looking back I am somewhat kicking myself for not slowing down, despite having all of the knowledge of what to do in order to recuperate. Instead of allowing myself time to rest and recover from the stress of what I was going through, I instead flung myself into further stress and caused a very serious degeneration of my overall health.
3. Appreciating what you have
I have probably never appreciated a single thing that I always had. As I type this now I am just back from having lunch with a member of a Home Treatment Team which is slowly rehabilitating me so that I can walk around and resume normal everyday functioning. Had I slowed down and simply appreciated everything that I had, instead of trying to accomplish more and more in order to fill an emotional void, then I wouldn't be in this situation.
However, had I not been foolish enough to pursue my hopes of success to a point of destructive imbalance, then I never would have learned the lessons that come from this apparent failure.
In pushing myself to the point where I was physically required to slow down, I have learned to appreciate what I had to begin with. This is not simply some attempt at finding the good in every situation, but an actual realisation combined with gratitude, which allows me to see how fortunate I am to have ruined my health.
No comments:
Post a Comment