Life Lessons

I started this day feeling kind of lousy and in a bit of a funk. As usual, I drank entirely too much on Saturday beginning at brunch and not stopping until some point late that night or early Sunday morning. As a result, I was too hungover yesterday to even make it off the couch and missed out on enjoying a beautiful day. This morning, I woke up still feeling the after results of the weekend binge and turned on NY1 on time to see their coverage of yesterday's Aids Walk. Great! While I was too hungover to even pour myself a soda yesterday, thousands of do-gooders were out volunteering for a worthy cause and doing something healthy at the same time.

By the time I got to work I wasn't even in the mood to blog so I decided to do a little reading instead and happened upon something titled. "10 simple ways to save yourself from messing up your life" posted on lifehack.org.
It was as if this article had been written just for me and after reading the first few simple steps, I was already in better spirits and ready to face the day.

Below are a few of the steps that I especially liked. You can read the entire list at the link above:

Stop taking so much notice of how you feel.
How you feel is how you feel. It’ll pass soon. What you’re thinking is what you’re thinking. It’ll go too. Tell yourself that whatever you feel, you feel; whatever you think, you think. Since you can’t stop yourself thinking, or prevent emotions from arising in your mind, it makes no sense to be proud or ashamed of either. You didn’t cause them. Only your actions are directly under your control. They’re the only proper cause of pleasure or shame.

Ease up on the internal life commentary.
If you want to be happy, stop telling yourself you’re miserable. People are always telling themselves how they feel, what they’re thinking, what others feel about them, what this or that event really means. Most of it’s imagination. The rest is equal parts lies and misunderstandings. You have only the most limited understanding of what others feel about you. Usually they’re no better informed on the subject; and they care about it far less than you do. You have no way of knowing what this or that event really means. Whatever you tell yourself will be make-believe.

Take no notice of your inner critic.
Judging yourself is pointless. Judging others is half-witted. Whatever you achieve, someone else will always do better. However bad you are, others are worse. Since you can tell neither what’s best nor what’s worst, how can you place yourself correctly between them? Judging others is foolish since you cannot know all the facts, cannot create a reliable or objective scale, have no means of knowing whether your criteria match anyone else’s, and cannot have more than a limited and extremely partial view of the other person. Who cares about your opinion anyway?

Give up on feeling guilty.
Guilt changes nothing. It may make you feel you’re accepting responsibility, but it can’t produce anything new in your life. If you feel guilty about something you’ve done, either do something to put it right or accept you screwed up and try not to do so again. Then let it go. If you’re feeling guilty about what someone else did, see a psychiatrist. That’s insane.