Where does the habit of seeing the world in black come from? How to put things in order in your head and change your attitude to life?
Transport, work, kids, family life, cleaning, shopping, cooking, paying bills, entertainment… we don’t have time to breathe. And as if this is not enough, in addition, we tend to follow the well-known philosophy: “Why is it simple, if it can be complicated?”
Trouble starts with waking up. We can’t decide what to eat for breakfast, we lose a quarter of an hour rummaging through unsorted wardrobes in search of suitable clothes, and we run out of the apartment, realizing that there is not enough time for the road.
By the time we enter our office, the only thing we have enough of is stress.
We would like to eat healthy food, but we don’t like spending time in the kitchen: it’s better to spend it with the kids!
And so we spend hours wandering around the supermarket, checking if frozen dishes contain harmful dyes, and the children with whom we dreamed of communicating whimper between the shelves and try to load the cart with the most unsustainable products.
What is the result? Nervous breakdown, anger, fatigue.
When it comes to relationships, we are driven by a sense of duty mixed with guilt: we try to be both caring parents, good daughters (or sons) to aging fathers and mothers, irreplaceable employees, attentive spouses, devoted friends.
And if we fail, trying to combine these difficult roles, then we are ready to give up: “This is too much for me, I can’t take it anymore!”
Everyone has their own tricks
To switch and restore clarity of mind, everyone has tricks, more or less successful.
“When I need to figure something out, I do a spring cleaning,” says 47-year-old Stepanida. But what works for one person may not work for another.
“I just can’t throw anything away. Things are piling up, as well as problems, ”admits 38-year-old Sofia.
Demand creates supply, even a new profession has appeared — life coaching in all its varieties and variants: time management, thought management, etc.
The religious and cultural tradition to which we belong is more about sacrifice than pleasure and relaxation.
Numerous coaches are ready to teach you how not to lose heart and achieve the desired result.
To that end, personal effectiveness consultant David Allen invented in 2001 an internal spring-cleaning technique to sort and simplify things: the Getting Things Done (GTD) method.
The instruction is simple: write down on external media — a notebook, notepad, stickers — a long list of things that we need and want to do (pay bills, call mom, go to Kolomna …) to look at them from the outside.
And Russian productivity specialist Maxim Dorofeev has his own theory about this. He coined the term “thought fuel” (a resource that we use for problem solving and self-control) and calls for saving it, making thinking more economical.
Here are the habits that, in his opinion, complicate life and eat up “thought fuel”: leaving unfinished business, thinking about work at home and home problems at work, constantly being in touch, hanging out on the Web.
Maxim Dorofeev proposes to abandon them and pay serious attention to the fact that we need to regularly recuperate.
The severity of guilt
But in addition to what we discover in ourselves through awareness, there are internal «complicators» that often remain unconscious.
One of them is the feeling of guilt, which forbids you to relax and tells you to do the impossible in order to achieve the ideal roles and images that you want to match.
The Jewish-Christian religious and cultural tradition to which we belong is more about sacrifice than pleasure and relaxation.
If we look inside ourselves, we will see a child who wanted his parents to be proud of him.
And let’s not forget about the misplaced narcissism that takes us away from our true selves: in order to be significant in our own eyes, we draw up a schedule that would be more suitable for a minister. Out of fear that something is not enough for us, we burden ourselves with unnecessary objects and activities.
Why impose this hard work on yourself?
If we look inside ourselves, we will see a child who wanted his parents to be proud of him. It seemed to him that he would be loved only if he shone. It still hovers like a ghost in the unconscious of perfectionists who are obsessed with perfection and poison their own (and others’) lives with it.
Our tendency to complicate things is most often a family legacy.
35-year-old Oksana admits: “Just a light bulb burns out in the apartment I rent, and I can already imagine how the owner will come in, accuse me of negligence and put me out on the street. And he won’t listen that I’m dizzy, so I can’t climb into a chair to change a light bulb. And I know where I got it from! Mother also makes drama out of everything. If her father didn’t come home on time, she thought it was bad luck. Mom always chose the most disastrous hypothesis.”
Lack of serotonin?
Among those who find it hard to believe that minor troubles will soon pass, there are people whom the psychoneurologist Boris Tsiryulnik calls «affective sissies.» They are deficient in serotonin, a central nervous system neurotransmitter that fights depression.
Since they lack this natural antidepressant, they perceive life as a thorny path: every love leads to disappointment, any undertaking is doomed to failure.
For these hypersensitive people, life is difficult from the very beginning. Every change in the situation — even a change of chair in the office — causes them a disproportionate amount of stress.
Sometimes we suddenly remember what is really important — for example, when we are faced with difficult events, such as illness, the loss of a loved one. But is it worth waiting for a life blow?
When our inner world and existence as a whole become so confusing that it poisons life, the best remedy to regain peace of mind is to turn to a psychotherapist (or psychoanalyst). To start psychotherapy means to put things in order in thoughts and aspirations.