Tag: change

How Do You Start Caring About Yourself?

by hkatz, posted in Struggling Striving Healing

A lot of advice about self-improvement rests on the assumption that people care sufficiently about themselves and their life. But some people may not care. They feel hopeless. They think they’ve made too many mistakes. They’ve sunk into apathy (“What does it matter what happens to me?”).

There’s no easy answer for getting more motivated to care about yourself, because people don’t all respond to the same approach at different points in their life. But here are some things to consider:

Do a favor to your future self

At the moment, you may feel hopeless. You may be depressed or stuck in a terrible job. But you don’t know with certainty what your life will look like down the road. Even if you think it will all be bad from here on out, you can’t know that for sure.

So don’t decide on your future based on your current situation or mental state. Emotions change, mental states change, and so do circumstances. You may not currently care about yourself, but at some point you may see the worth in your life. Act with that possibility in mind, even if you aren’t believing in it at present.

Pick one thing to change

Sometimes, people lose interest in caring for themselves because they perceive so many problems in their lives that they don’t even know how to start changing. They stop caring because to care would mean to feel overwhelmed and crushed.

In this frame of mind, any change can seem impossible. But what if you start with only one thing?

Let’s say you have a drinking problem, eat poorly, and exercise infrequently. Trying to change all of these behaviors at once can be too much. So pick the one that seems most urgent or that you’re most able to tackle at the moment.

If it’s your drinking problem, you work on that. You find reliable ways to cut back on or completely abstain from alcohol. Depending on the nature and severity of the problem, you may need to go to a detox program and attend group meetings.

As you work on this one problem, you may begin to notice positive ripple effects in your life. Because you’re drinking less, maybe you have more energy or motivation to exercise or to work on some projects you’ve neglected. Maybe you start to pay more attention to what you eat and increase the nutritious variety of your diet. The quality of your sleep may improve, and your bonds with other people may become stronger. If you’ve neglected other health issues, you may wind up making appointments with a doctor or therapist.

Changing one habit can make it easier for you to improve your life in other ways.

Let action lead to emotion

You may have no motivation to exercise, and you may not think it matters one way or another. But what if you were to set aside a short amount of time, maybe just 10 minutes, to go for a walk or do some calisthenics? What if you were to repeat the 10-minute exercise the next day, and the one after that?

It’s only 10 minutes, so even if you don’t feel that it’s worthwhile, it won’t take up much of your time. And, as weeks go by, you may find yourself getting into the habit of exercising. You’ll need less effort to push yourself into it. Maybe you’ll want to start extending your exercise time to 15 minutes, maybe 20. You may even come to like exercising, appreciating the feeling it gives you.

Repeatedly performing an action often increases its importance to us. The action comes to mean something and become a part of our day. So even if you’re apathetic about exercise (or about something else, like studying a new skill), maybe give it just 10 minutes out of your whole day, for starters.

Look outside of yourself

I’ve read accounts by people who were close to giving up on life entirely, but they stayed alive for their cat. They sometimes talk about it self-deprecatingly, but there’s no shame in making your pet a reason to live, and then finding other reasons over time. A cat is a living creature, and it needs you. You’re nurturing it and giving it your attention and love. If it helps keep you alive, that’s great.

You may not care much about yourself, but it may be easier for you to care about someone or something else. You don’t want to let your kids down. You want to be there for your spouse. Or maybe you volunteer at a nonprofit, and other people depend on you. Focusing outside of yourself may remind you of reasons to care about your own life, even if you’re feeling hopeless or empty.

Let go of a rigid view of what your life should look like

Life may seem to matter less to you if it doesn’t look the way you want it to. You may not have the job you want, the person you love, or the home you always imagined living in. Maybe you look around and see little of value.

For one reason or another, many people don’t lead the life they’ve always pictured. What we can control is limited. It’s possible to be so focused on an idealized version of your life that you miss out on what you have now. Try not to overlook what’s good in your life, what has potential (even if the potential is currently unrealized). Even small things can bring pleasure, inspiration, and contentment.

Don’t see setbacks as proof of permanent failure

After major failures or one too many failures, you may respond to the pain with apathy, a personal shutdown that enfolds you with protective numbness. 

Failures can be devastating, but try not to see them as unbreachable walls that you can’t get around. Maybe you’ll need to take another path in life and try new things. Failure doesn’t have to extinguish all hopeful possibilities. (And if you can’t see any possibilities now, give yourself time.)

Listen to the impulse to live well

Even when people live in hopelessness or apathy, they may sometimes be visited by thoughts about living well. They think about a job to apply to, an educational program to enroll in, or a friend or relative to reach out to. They remember an activity they used to enjoy. The apathy may roll over and crush these thoughts, but they exist. 

Grab at a thought, examine it, and – if it’s a life-affirming one, if it’s something that may make your life feel less cramped, less gray – maybe follow where it leads.

What Does It Mean to Be a Warrior of the Increments?

by hkatz, posted in Struggling Striving Healing

In recent years, I’ve been encouraging myself to get into the mindset and habits of a Warrior of the Increments. (Putting it in caps makes it sound like an official title that’s going to stick, and I hope it does.) But what do I mean?

– A Warrior of the Increments places secondary importance on grand gestures and primary importance on the small tasks and day-to-day efforts that may not seem like much when looked at separately but that do amount to something much more over time.

– These smaller efforts help change bad habits and sustain better ones. They help you work towards goals and create conditions in which well-being, understanding, and success are more likely to be the outcomes.

– Generally, the most difficult battles you have in life are with spiritual inertia, self-destructive habits, the sluggishness of the mind, and the frailty of the body. Working on changes, bit by bit, is crucial.

– A Warrior of the Increments doesn’t think only in terms of all-or-nothing battles. Sometimes you are fighting alongside something, not merely against it. Other times, you’re settling down for diplomatic talks and negotiating a workable peace.

– A warrior of this kind is very much a “one foot in front of the other” type.

“You only know what you know ’til you know…”

by hkatz, posted in Struggling Striving Healing

YouTube recommendations sometimes are wonderful. I go on YouTube mostly for music, and this song by Mozella (an artist I was unfamiliar with), hit me with its lyrics, which have some good insights about change and development.

“You only know what you know ‘til you know.”

People, myself included, sometimes wish so badly that they could know everything they need to know at the outset of some great venture or new stage in life – to have the knowledge, complete and whole, at their command, to keep them from missteps, embarrassing mistakes, and painfully wrongheaded decisions.

But there’s no such complete knowledge. At any given point, you know what you know, that’s it. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a mentor or another trusted person to guide you, you still have to live out the process of learning for yourself, and one way or another, you won’t always get things right. The key is to keep learning, to grow in wisdom.

“So many things mattered to you that really meant nothing but you needed them to find the truth.”

Yes, some of the things that once interested you may seem unimportant now, but they’re still a part of you. They helped you become who you are now. You’ve still learned something from them.

“You can’t sleep it off or drink it away, trick it with frivolities, fortune, or fame.”

There’s a temptation to ignore pain, which is a symptom of an underlying difficulty, something in you that needs to be addressed. The strategies for avoidance and denial are varied and often involve an addiction or compulsion of some kind; maybe you drink frequently or spend hours on mindless Internet browsing. But the problems don’t go away. The call for change and growth persists, even when it goes unanswered. How long can you avoid change or pretend that everything can stay the way it is?

RIP Marion Woodman

by hkatz, posted in Readings, Struggling Striving Healing

I first learned about her through this interview, where her thoughts on addiction and perfectionism struck me:

“They are never where they are; they are always running, or dreaming about the wonderful past, or the wonderful future. So they are never in the body. The body lives in the present. The body exists right now. But an addict is not in the body, so the body suffers. Uninhabited. And there’s where that terrible sense of starvation comes from.”

Recently I started reading one of her books, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation, and it’s a summons to fight stagnation:

“People splayed in a perpetual chrysalis… are in trouble. Stuck in a state of stasis, they clutch their childhood toys, divorce themselves from the reality of their present circumstances, and sit hoping for some magic that will release them from their pain into a world that is ‘just and good,’ a make-believe world of childhood innocence. Fearful of getting out of relationships that are stultifying their growth, fearful of confronting parents, partners or children who are maintaining infantile attitudes, they sink into chronic illness and/or psychic death. Life becomes a network of illusions and lies. Rather than take responsibility for what is happening, rather than accept the challenge of growth, they cling to the rigid framework that they have constructed or that has been assigned to them from birth. They attempt to stay ‘fixed.’ Such an attitude is against life, for change is a law of life.”

I wanted to share this passage in part because that last line is a necessary reminder to not resist the inevitable changes and to not avoid the changes that could help me grow.