Healthy Boundaries

If we are trying to find peace, clarity or self control the only place they exist is at the centre.. when you are balanced in your thoughts, feelings, emotions... thats when those things are accessible and without those things nothing else is possible in terms of self improvement. So you need to put balance at the centre of everything you do.
We can often think of this imbalance as "conflict", which can be useful as this is somethign we can identify on an emotional level, but can also be useful to think about it in terms of imbalance as this hints at how to resolve it... an equal and opposite force, whereas conflict is ugly, ill defined and most of us would rather avoid!
<h2>Internal vs External Balance</h2>
&nbsp;
Teenagers go to extremes, its how we learn where the <a href="/concept/healthy-boundaries" target="_blank" rel="noopener">boundaries</a> are.. we can only understand where the centre is once we have found all the boundries. Imagine trying to find the centre of a shape without first seeing the outline.. its impossible.&nbsp;
Stability can be off putting becaise it seems boring but in order to do anything worthwhile, to stick at it, to nurture the kinds of relationships and opportunities that make like interesting, we need a strong stable base on which we can operate. Strong of body, of mind and resiliance. Strength in the mastery of your thoughts and emotions. This is why it is the single most important concept I can hammer into you.
And I will.
Relentlessly!

Balance

<h2>Up the down escalator</h2>
It is a scientific fact that the natural flow of things is downward, from order to chaos - that's entropy.
If it often feels like the world is working against you, well, that's because it is. Everything we do requires more effort than it seems it should do.
We are constantly fighting unwanted changes in our lives and around us, fighting to hold attention, to figure out what we want, to keep up with news, friends, trends, getting dinner ready, to get more sleep. We fight for more time in the day or to at least slow things down enough to enjoy some of that time. Hell we fight gravity just to get out of bed in the morning!
This is why even though we are trying to do things, to improve, to fight forward... we appear to be standing still. When we DO actually take a breather and effectively "do nothing", we even seem to go backwards a bit!
Life is lived forwards and understood backwards, but that forwards direction is always against the flow. It may seem unnatural, going against the flow, but is the very thing that makes life possible, the necessary friction as it were. We are swimming upstream against the flow of water, we are running full pelt up the down-escalator, just to appear to be casually walking up it.
It is exhausting.
This has only gotten harder in the past decade as the lens of social media, invites us to validate our efforts, achievements and lifestyle against hundreds or potentially thousands of examples of what appear to be happy, successful people doing things far more glamourous or interesting than we currently are.
It is the invisible chain we all wear around our necks, so do what you can to see that chain. See it on your friends and family, your coworkers, the people you strike up conversations with on the commute and those you avoid! Treat everyone like they are putting a brave face on things and most importantly... give YOURSELF a break!
<h2>Perspective</h2>
The reason we tend toward negative thoughts so much is that downward trajectories such as negativity, chaos and destruction are easy. When you think about it, they are pretty much automatic and default.
Inaction or lack of intervention will, for the most part, lead to regression and negative outcomes and we can only do so much!
Taking a break when we most need to dig in and push through is appealing and necessary for normal function and when we lack confidence or enter a freeze state it gets worse and we want to just let go completely.
The effort to counterbalance this experience seems wildly disproportionate. It's infinitely harder to summon the same amount of positivity for sustained periods when we are already feeling ao negative... It's a terrible catch 22 scenario.
The other option than counterbalancing in this way, is "course correcting".
?? This is less extreme, but yields less obvious and immediate results so you have to trust the process and go at it for longer. It's more about trending water than improving though so a coping mechanism

Illusion of progress

Not everything needs specific ROI. Not everything is about goals! On a macro level, maybe, but we get so hung up on RESULTS. This always causes the most amount of people to give up... "Well that didnt work!"
It wasnt supposed to ... not like that!

Incremental conditioning

builds on incremental conditioning and you are not your mind.

Affirmations

Here and now

Intro
Something
..
If you cant seem to move forward in your mind.. focus on your body. Body improves mind and vice versa. Take excercise for example. When we are anxious we have a tendancy to examine our mind in order to make sense of or try to control the experience, but this is somethign which lives, often for years in the central nervous system.
Ever been for a massage and were suprised when you were told how tense you were. We often dont realise just how much tension and stress we hold in our bodies.

Regulating the nervous system

Inner child

Trauma response

Good vibes only.
Stop that. Please stop that.
Relentless, mindless blocking of negativity will not only do no good, it will do harm.
You have to learn to be comfortable with negative aspects of your mind, for two reasons
<ol>
<li>Helps look at your issues objectively as you wont feel so uneasy that you cant consider things properly</li>
<li>There are somethings you will just have to live with. There I said it. Positives and negatives co-existing in our minds and daily lives is natural, normal.. good, even!&nbsp;</li>
</ol>
When you really work to achieve a disciplined mind, you can not only feel more comforable working on the negatives, but start discern between two very different types of negative thought... those automatic negative thoughts, which do no good for anyone and are plainly not true or of any value, and those negative realities, often based on guilt or compensated guilt, (which is really just a higher level of guilt). The latter is significant and important in that when you face those with objectivity they can be a powerful motivator and focus point for driving change toward better goals.

Toxic Positivity

Ypou are not a pscyhologist or psychiatrist. Unless of course you do happen to be, in which case I'd like to apologies for inadvertantly making that assumption.
But let's assume you are not.
Dont try to fix everything. This might seem to fly in the face of what this blog is about. But we are not saying this is the complete solution. It isnt. It can never be. In fact, any thing that tells you it is, ISNT. We can help you get to a place where you can do all the work you CAN do. Using these tools you will be in a place where you will be able to identify a great many things with new perspectives and control. Many of those things you can and will be able to, with time and effort, resolve, but there may be some which really require expert guidance.&nbsp;
You'll not only know that, but be in a position where you can tell which is which!
Remember the core concept about accepting the things you cannot change? The concepts here allow you to prioritise the stuff you can do and the stuff you should do first, to accept you need help where help is most appropriate and in some cases, accept that there are some things you may just need to learn how best to adapt to or minimise.
Where alot of self help literiture gets it wrong, is with the focus exclusively on psycological concepts. These are of course crucial and we cover these in our own way, but as you're not an expert on psycology, and neither are we, you know what your time is better spent on? Learning what taking care on a physical, biological level, of your brain! Its so overlooked for something which has an abundance of practical easy action you can take vs something full of seemingly abstract concepts and subjective experience.

Healthy Boundaries

New Book Launching Early 2024!