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mindfulness

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  • All the major reasons why you should eat slowly

    Barry Allen (or The Flash) might be the fastest human alive, but I can definitely eat faster than he ever will. There are many potential explanations why I eat that fast.

    It might be because my parents ate fast. It might be because the oldest 0-type blood runs through my veins, remembering the ancient times when fridges hadn’t been invented yet and you had to immediately eat your whole catch. Or it might just be gluttony. It’s probably a combination of all those things.

    There’s one thing that could put me in the Guinness book of world records (I can eat 4 bananas under 1 minute), yet eating slowly is some of the best health advice ever when it comes to diet and nutrition. How unfair can life be?

    I must put tremendous effort into eating slowly; and to be completely honest with you, I manage to do it approximately half of the time. To stay optimistic, that means I’m halfway there.

    Based on my own observations and some research, let’s look at the main reasons why you should eat slowly; or at least torture yourself to do so.

    Eat slowly

    Why to eat slowly?

    You will eat less food

    It takes around 15 to 20 minutes for your brain to become aware that your stomach is taking in food. If you eat the whole plate in like 5 minutes, you still feel hungry. Your brain assumes that your stomach is still empty. Try it.

    I did it several times, and it’s true. When I eat slowly, namely for more than 20 minutes, the feeling of being fed kicks in. And eating any food in less than 20 minutes keeps me hungry. I’m like: I just ate, what the heck is going on with my appetite?

    A trick you can do is to start with a hot soup or a salad. It’s impossible to eat salad fast. You need to chew all the leaves. A cow has four stomachs, and still needs to chew grass for a long period of time. You only have one stomach. That means even more chewing.

    It’s similar with a hot soup. You need to eat it very slowly, waiting for every spoonful to cool down; or else you burn your tongue. In summary, eating slowly is the best advice when it comes to portion control. And portion control leads to losing weight.

    You don’t overclock your stomach

    I have very sensitive stomach acid. If I eat very fast, my stomach acid gets irritated immediately. Too much food at once keeps you bloated, clogged, tired and with too much stomach fluid. If you eat slowly, on the other hand, you give your stomach a manageable workload. That has several side benefits.

    First of all, with slow eating you properly chew the food. Since digestion already starts in your mouth with saliva, that saves additional work for your stomach. Secondly, with slow eating all the food gets properly digested, which leads to fewer digestive problems. And you avoid burping, which is very nice, especially if you’re in public.

    You can enjoy the food and practice mindfulness

    Mindful eating
    Pay attention to food!

    There are at least two aspects to food. One is to survive and the other is to enjoy it. Food has always had an important role in all kinds of pleasurable and social activities.

    But here’s the thing. If you eat quickly, it’s kind of impossible to really enjoy food; or your company. Only eating slowly gives you the chance to dedicate part of your attention to the food – taste, texture, mixture of tastes, decoration, and so on.

    There’s also a thing called mindful eating. You strive to be completely present in the moment, with your attention completely focused on every bite that you take in your mouth. You try to observe and sense as many things about the food as possible.

    That way you practice being present in the moment, you train your attention span and, of course, you eat slowly, which brings many other health benefits we mentioned above.

    Taking slow bites calms you down and makes you be present in the moment.

    Surround yourself with slow eaters

    In my country, we have this stupid game for kids, in which the one who finishes the meal first is called “the golden bird”. The competition forces kids to eat quickly from a young age.

    I’ve been raised in a fast-eating family, so we all competed to see who the golden bird would be. I always won, of course, so no wonder that I was extremely obese when young.

    Today, the situation is quite different. My girlfriend is an extremely slow eater. When I’ve already finished the whole meal, she’s still chewing her first bite. And then I feel kind of awkward.

    Watching her eat slowly absolutely has a positive influence on me eating slowly. And if I’m in a fast-eating mood, I take longer breaks between the dishes, waiting for her to “catch up”.

    As always, your environment has a great influence on your habits and who you become. Surrounding yourself with slow eaters will force you to eat more slowly.

    It’s the ultimate training for self-discipline

    We all need food to survive. Food is something very primal that plays a central role in our lives. That’s why it’s so hard to be disciplined when it comes to eating habits, especially to your sugar intake. No wonder the world is getting more and more obese.

    Consequently, fasting and slow eating are the ultimate exercises of self-discipline. If you can train yourself to go without food for a longer period of time (with a healthy limit) and if you can train yourself to eat slowly, you can achieve anything in life.

    The whole world lies in front of a person who is disciplined, persistent and focused. Luckily, you can start training your self-discipline with your next meal.

    Trick yourself into eating slowly

    In the fast food society, slow food is absolutely the way to go. Your digestion will improve, you’ll eat smaller portions, you’ll do your digestive track and overall health a great favor and in the end, you might even lose a few pounds of fat. And let’s not forget that you’ll also enjoy life more.

    What more can you ask for?

    But if you are like me, eating slowly is not something that comes naturally to you. So, it makes sense to trick yourself into lazy chewing. Here are a few ideas how:

    • Count to 20 chews every time you take a bite (it won’t work with soup)
    • Practice mindful eating (you know, observing every possible detail of every single bite)
    • Set a timer to 21 minutes and adjust the eating pace accordingly
    • Drink a glass of water before you start eating
    • Don’t eat in front of the TV
    • Take 10 very deep breaths before you start with your meal
    • Use several smaller plates
    • Always sit down behind a table to eat
    • Eat more foods that are high in fiber or protein (salads etc.)
    • Put the fork down in between bites
    • Use small spoons or chopsticks
    • Avoid sugar to prevent insulin spikes

    Your stomach pays more attention to the food’s volume than calories.

    Emotional eating

    Pay attention to the “fast food” triggers

    Pay attention to the situations in which you repeatedly eat really quickly. I noticed there are some situations that trigger in me the need for eating speed. Examples of my triggers are:

    • If my blood sugar drops after not eating for a longer period of time
    • When I get emotionally upset, which leads to emotional eating
    • If I have a really busy day and I try to be very productive
    • When I don’t pay enough attention to my basic needs, because of “higher goals”
    • If I’m really excited about something

    Some triggers can be easily removed. In my case, a good example would be the sugar spikes. If I follow a consistent eating schedule, I can easily avoid any extreme hunger. Sometimes when I’m busy, working in the flow, I simply forget to eat. So, I aim for 80 % perfection. That’s a good enough goal for me.

    And some triggers, like emotional hunger, can’t be easily removed. I have no idea who or what will piss me off tomorrow. In such cases, I either find a healthy surrogate for food or sometimes I just eat fast, forgive myself, and make sure that I eat my next 20 meals or so very slowly.

    It’s much better to forgive yourself than burdening myself with additional guilt. Just don’t forgive yourself every single meal.

    Knowing yourself is the best way to teach yourself slow and mindful eating. If you aim for 80 % perfection, you’ll be just fine. Your next meal is a great opportunity to start practicing slow eating. All hail slow food!

  • Emotional flashbacks – when your emotional response is out of proportion

    There are two psychology books that completely changed the quality of my life. The first one is Feeling Good by David Burns, where I learned about cognitive distortions and how you can manage them with emotional accounting and other similar exercises.

    Emotional accounting as a thought-correction process helped me tame my inner critic, focus on more positive aspects of life, be satisfied with good enough at work and in relationships, and avoid all-or-nothing thinking and acting.

    The second book that completely changed my life and helped me understand myself better is Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker. In the book, I learned about the outer critic (constant judgment of other people) that usually accompanies the inner critic and even more importantly, about the emotional flashback. I finally understood the missing puzzle that you can’t deal with solely through emotional accounting.

    In the past year or so, I practiced emotional accounting a lot. I learned to recognize cognitive distortions, categorize them and correct them with a rational response and self-defense. I learned to talk back to the inner critic and shrink his voice. He’s still there, he often still gets too loud, but now I know how to manage it and I’m getting better and better at it.

    But here comes the missing puzzle piece. From time to time, I get into a really intense emotional state, without identifying any severe negative thoughts. There is only a trigger, and I feel like somebody is trying to murder me or that the world is going to end.

    The intense experience happens more on the physical level than in the mind. When it happens, it definitely releases and enhances the power of the inner and outer critics, but the experience has a much wider force and effect. I can feel the happening in my bones.

    They are emotional flashbacks. In this blog post, I will focus on what they are and extremely honestly and openly talk about my own experience of how they’re messing with my everyday calmness and the quality of life (and how I am learning to manage them). If you identify that something similar is happening to you, reading this blog post might be a real epiphany.

    Emotional flashbacks

    What are emotional flashbacks?

    You experience an emotional flashback when a trigger in the environment reminds you of your childhood pain, suffering and traumatic situations. A subject, object, item, place, expression or any other kind of trigger reminds you of all the past events that caused you constant pain. There is a small similarity between the current and past event, and that triggers an emotional flashback.

    For example, somebody says an unjust critique directed at you and subconsciously in a second you experience all the pain of the thousands of times when one of your parents criticized you.

    An emotional flashback happens as a delayed response to childhood abuse. When you were a child, you didn’t have any power to defend and protect yourself. You could only suffer. In addition to that, you had to see your parents as perfect, because they were your protectors and providers, so you blamed yourself for all their toxic behaviors. That means a great deal of repressed pain and unfairness.

    The right thing to do would be to scream, to stand up for yourself, to protect yourself, to find love, but you were not in a position to do so. All you could do is witness (physical, verbal, emotional or spiritual) abuse, repress your feelings and go on with it. At the end of the day, a child can survive almost anything.

    No family is perfect, but there is a limit where it becomes toxic

    Don’t get confused at this point. These things don’t only happen in poor, alcoholic and broken families. It’s happening in 1/3 or more families that look normal at the first glance. By having complete power over children, it’s extremely easy for a parent to break a child; or to mock or criticize them; or to leave them on their own.

    I’ve seen dozens of “healthy and normal families” where parents labeled their children as stupid, clumsy etc., or they were constantly criticizing them or hugging family members was a strange thing to do. There is absolutely no perfect family, but there is a limit where an environment becomes a toxic one, and starts causing great psychological damage to a child.

    The problem is that it’s hard to admit to yourself (and others) that your family was toxic. You have to see your parents as perfect and that may also continue when you grow up. Next to that, it hurts like hell and it feels very shameful to admit that you don’t have a nice, healthy loving family. But living in a lie doesn’t pay off.

    Experiencing emotional flashbacks

    Experiencing an emotional flashback

    Now let’s get back to emotional flashbacks. They are direct messages of your painful past, alerting you how unfairly you were treated and how much pain you had to suffer. They are a cry for help from your inner child (your emotional self and damaged soul) to somehow address your traumatic emotional past.

    One situation in the present (a trigger) reminds you of everything you suffered in the past that’s yet unresolved.

    The emotional flashback isn’t happening only on a psychological level. Your body also gets into an adrenalized state, same as when you are facing danger. But when you’re experiencing an emotional flashback there is no real danger.

    Amygdala, the part of your brain responsible for fears and pleasures, hijacks the rational part of the brain with an intense reaction in the memory part of the brain, reliving and bringing forward all the painful past experiences.

    Even small seemingly unimportant events can trigger the amygdala to a severe emotional response, which completely blocks rational thinking, even when there is no real danger (someone is 5 minutes late, somebody interrupts you, you make an error in your email etc.). When they happen, emotional flashbacks get you into severe regression, stigmatized by:

    • 4F – flight, fight, freeze or fawn response
    • Strong mixture of experiencing fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression, all at the same time, where one negative feeling dominates the experience
    • Overwhelming negative thoughts; the inner and outer critics awaken

    When you are in an emotional flashback, you panic – internally or even externally in your irrational words and actions. Emotional flashbacks often lead to you feeling like something is life-threatening, even if it’s not.

    You lose all of your self-confidence, feelings of helplessness arise, severe self-criticism and judgement of others start happening. We can also add social anxiety, depression, relationship problems, oversensitivity and even suicidal thoughts to the list. It can last from a few seconds to a few days or even weeks.

    The triggers and the 4Fs

    Every emotional flashback has a trigger. Something in the environment triggers all the memories. It’s a stimulus in the environment that reminds you of a childhood trauma and pushes you back into unbearable feelings of those times. Triggers can be external or internal.

    Triggers are most often places, people, events, things, facial expressions, specific styles of communication, specific words, and so on.

    Examples of triggers are visiting your parents or caretakers who acted toxic, family gatherings, a specific type of a shaming tone or words (cynicism, humiliation, criticism), authority figures, asking for help, making a mistake, not feeling perfect, physical pain, public appearance, a specific look, when you don’t meet your high standards, nightmares and bad dreams, and so on.

    If you are experiencing emotional flashbacks, you have to observe yourself (with mindfulness) and find your own triggers. Not everything is an emotional flashback, but many things are:

    Practical examples
    • You can’t stand the face of your coworker. Seeing the person probably triggers an emotional flashback.
    • You worked the hardest, but your boss didn’t give you a raise, so you are outraged and depressed for days. You’re probably experiencing an emotional flashback.
    • Somebody takes away your right of way on the road and you get into the road rage mood. You are probably experiencing an emotional flashback.
    • The boss corrects you at work and you feel so humiliated and unworthy. It’s probably an emotional flashback.

    Emotional flashbacks push you into one of the four responses to danger. That is a very intense experience on the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual level. But when you are experiencing an emotional flashback there is no real danger, you’re only responding in an unhealthy way.

    You are acting out of proportion in a specific situation. You are acting reactively, self-destructively and irrationally. Here are unhealthy 4F responses you resort to when experiencing an emotional flashback:

    Fight Flight Freeze Fawn
    Narcissistic Obsessive-Compulsive Dissociative Codependent
    Explosive Panicky Contracting Obsequious
    Controlling / Enslaving Rushing on worrying Hiding Servitude
    Entitlement Drive-ness Isolation Loss of self
    Type-A Adrenaline junky Couch potato People-pleaser
    Bully Busyholic Space case Doormat
    Autocrat Micromanager Hermit Slave
    Demand perfection Perfectionist Achievement-phobic Social perfectionism
    Sociopath Mood disorder-Bipolar Schizophrenic D.V. Victim
    Conduct disorder ADHD ADD Parentified child

    Source: Complex PTSD, Page 107

    My own experience with emotional flashbacks

    Let’s start with two examples from my own life. When I go for a walk and suddenly somebody passes me on a bike, I experience an emotional flashback. My inner response is similar to somebody just putting a knife on my neck. It takes a few seconds for the rational part of my brain to start working again and then everything calms down. That’s a short but intense type of an emotional flashback.

    Another example is driving in a cab in a foreign country. When I sit in a cab, there is always a “background program” running in my brain monitoring and checking where the cab driver is taking me, if they look suspicious etc. It’s not that intense, it lasts for the whole ride, but I just can’t really relax. That’s a second example of an emotional flashback. There is no real danger, but I’m experiencing an event as such.

    Emotional flashbacks are a big part of my life, I’m used to them and you will rarely notice me experiencing them. It’s all happening internally and I’m quite a courageous person, so there is no way an emotional flashback would stop me from doing something I really want. But I never understood what was this shit (sorry about the language), until I read the book Complex PTSD (here is my summary). Since then, I categorized my emotional flashbacks pretty well.

    I categorized my internal flashbacks into three different types:

    • Short, but really intense ones
    • Obsessive ones that last until the trigger is out of my sight
    • Long ones, where I get completely lost in daydreaming, melancholy and fantasies

    Short but intense ones are when something unexpected appears in the environment; something I couldn’t anticipate and calculate how dangerous it is. My rational part gets hijacked for a second, I get into the 4F (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) response and as soon as I calculate the fact that I’m not really in danger, things calm down and I forget about it. A nice example is the one described with a bike passing by.

    Obsessive ones are when something is bothering me with a person, place or any other subject or object. I somehow feel unsafe and I just can’t stop thinking about it until I change my position and the trigger is out of my sight. I constantly pay attention to what’s happening to the trigger or stimulus. An example would be a ride with a cab or if I’m in a hotel where I don’t feel safe enough.

    Very long emotional flashbacks are the trickiest ones. Usually I feel like I don’t have enough control or that I am trapped in a certain situation (like I was when I was a child) and that leads me into melancholic fantasizing and severe angering states that last for days. That happens at least a few times per year, especially when things don’t go as planned. Yes, that’s why I’m learning and writing about how to be more flexible in life.

    I identified more than 30 different triggers of emotional flashbacks and the list is getting longer and longer with time. Identifying triggers helps me a lot with managing them.

    Short intense emotional flashbacks

    Here is the list of triggers of short intense emotional flashbacks that I am currently aware of:

    • When I’m alone at night and I hear any voices
    • When somebody passes me by unexpectedly from behind (walking, running, with a bike, a car etc.)
    • When I break the rules or a law (small things)
    • When I encounter a police officer or an army person
    • When I need to kill an insect
    • When I need to fight for money (fair payment)
    • If I don’t leave a tip
    • Often when I am eating (emotional eating)
    • If I do something clumsy or if I make a mistake
    • When I hear an ambulance
    • Any loud noises
    • Whenever I put money into my savings account
    • Seeing my father (photo etc.) – we have no contact
    • When something unfair happens (it can be in a movie or in real life)
    • A few specific insulting phrases
    • Any physical pain
    • Unexpected physical contact
    • When I have to wait for somebody
    • When I have to reject somebody or if I get rejected
    • When I need to stand up for myself and assert myself more aggressively
    • When I want to take enough space
    • When I have to ask a question in room full of people

    Medium-lasting obsessive emotional flashbacks

    Here is the list of triggers of medium intense emotional flashbacks that I am currently aware of (they end when the trigger is gone):

    • Two or more people arguing or fighting
    • If I feel like I’m not in a safe territory (district, hotel, etc.)
    • Passing by a group of people who don’t look very nice
    • Dealing with strangers in an unknown environment
    • People partying loudly or laughing out loud
    • When I encounter a person that’s physically stronger than me
    • When I spend time with somebody who makes (much) more money than me
    • Passing by some types of dogs
    • Dangerous animals – spiders, snakes etc.
    • Some types of non-dangerous animals – insects, red ants etc.
    • When I leave my possessions alone and somebody could steal them (bike etc.)
    • When the person I’m talking to is moody
    • Asking for help or somebody giving me something
    • Passing by a block where I was raised as a child
    • My birthday

    Long emotional flashbacks where I get completely lost

    Here is the list of triggers of short intense emotional flashbacks that I am currently aware of:

    • When things don’t go as I wanted or planned
    • Not doing all the work I had on to-do list (not finishing my sprint)
    • Interruptions of steady patterns in relationships (something unexpected happens in a relationship)
    • Cheating (and sometimes sexual history)
    • Ending things (a relationship, finishing a diploma, ending a project etc.)
    • Any big rejections or unfair happenings
    • A particularly melancholic music

    How come you aren’t going crazy?

    I know, this is a long list of triggers. But most of the listed situations trigger the emotional flashbacks very subtly. I needed years of reflection to identify so many of them. And most of them can be managed quickly. So it’s not like I’m going crazy every day, stuck only in emotional flashbacks. But many people are.

    If you spent years by my side, you would never notice that I’m experiencing emotional flashbacks, or you’d notice it extremely rarely. Many people who know me and read this post will be quite surprised. Not that I’m hiding the flashbacks, they’re just such an integral part of how I experience life that I just live with them and move on. I notice them, I manage them, and everything seems normal. But …

    No situation gets better with the passage of time; things only get better when they are addressed and the problem is confronted. Many times, emotional flashbacks do mess up the quality of my life.

    Many times, they do cause severe tension and get me stuck in the 4F response. They definitely contributed to a poor body posture, pinched nerves, stomach problems, periods of melancholy and anger, and sometimes an extreme loss of temper. Even if you try to ignore them, they are still there and they suck.

    They also mess a lot with having a healthy and smart life strategy. Your instinctively react based on the 4F response. If you react, you can’t be proactive. My first coping mechanism is flight, then fawn, then fight and the last one is freeze. I can be a pretty anxious, obsessive perfectionist who gets lost in work and improvements. I also know very well how to put the needs of others before mine like a martyr as well as how to lose temper and enjoy narcissistic tendencies. And sometimes I freeze.

    No situation gets better only with the passage of time.

    Dealing with emotional flashbacks

    Dealing and managing emotional flashbacks

    Emotional flashbacks aren’t healthy and they do cause a lot of damage. They can happen very subtly, it’s hard to admit that you’re experiencing them, but living in a lie only makes things worse. That’s why emotional flashbacks need to be addressed. I will share with you a few approaches that help me.

    Analyzing the triggers and reminders

    The first step that might help a lot is to understand better. You have to become mindful of your internal cognitive and emotional processes and become aware when you’re experiencing an emotional flashback. There are three things you want to figure out:

    1. Trigger – What exactly triggered the emotional flashback.
    2. Thoughts and emotions – What kind of thoughts are going through your head and what kind of emotions you’re experiencing (anger, fear, humiliation etc.).
    3. What is the crying about – Every trigger reminds you of some injustice, traumatic event, abuse or unfairness. Try to figure out what it’s all about. You can start asking yourself questions like who, when, where, why, what etc.

    I always have a piece of paper and a pen with me or a digital notebook, and when I notice that I’m experiencing an emotional flashback I use the D.E.A.R. concept – I drop everything and reflect. I start writing down everything that comes to my mind, ask myself “why” hundreds of times and then I connect the dots.

    As you can see, I’ve identified more than 30 triggers. I can connect all of them to different traumatic childhood experiences, abuse or neglect. Now I understand exactly why something is happening. Once you know about emotional flashbacks, you know when you’re experiencing one. At that moment, you have to sit down and do self-reflection.

    Employ the D.E.A.R. concept – Drop everything and reflect.

    Dealing with the inner critic

    The inner critic is constantly trying to prevent you from dealing with emotional flashbacks. Writing this article alone is one big emotional flashback for me and my inner critic is trying to stop me from publishing it in order to not experience public shame and humiliation. But I learned how to say “stop” to the inner critic.

    Why can I easily override the inner critic? Because I know what it’s like before you get familiar about what emotional flashbacks are and after that. It’s a huge epiphany and relief. You know what you’re dealing with. And if one single person gets an idea of what’s happening to them and how they can deal with it, it’s worth it.

    Well, the inner critic is constantly at work, minimizing the damage done in your upbringing (“it wasn’t so bad”), explaining to you that you’re only a pussy (“it wasn’t that hard, you’re just weak”), and constantly explaining how nothing is good enough, how everybody is flawed and how emotional flashbacks are a stupid concept.

    Emotional accounting is how to deal with the inner critic. First you have to tame your critic a little bit, then you can start dealing with emotional flashbacks. You can do this part while analyzing the triggers and reminders, but if you don’t shut down the inner critic, you have zero chance of managing emotional flashbacks properly.

    Developing a healthy relationship with yourself

    Listen to yourself. Explore your inner world. Be kind to yourself like you are to other people (well, most of them). Never go to war with yourself. Take good care of your body, emotions, mind and soul. Build yourself motivational environment. These are all my mantras that help me deal with emotional flashbacks.

    I direct emotional flashbacks into exploring my past, grieving the lost childhood, undertaking creative endeavors and developing empathy. In other words, I listen to what my emotions have to tell me. I listen to what the scream is all about. And I’m trying to calm the scream down by being nice to myself.

    In the book Complex PTSD, there are 13 steps for managing emotional flashbacks. It’s definitely a process I recommend you to follow. For me, the process is a bit complicated, so I simplified it.

    I first say to myself that I’m experiencing an emotional flashback and identify what the trigger was. That enables me to get my brain back from being hijacked by the amygdala. Then I remind myself that I am not a helpless child anymore and thus I try to express my feelings in a healthy manner. In the last step, I listen to what the scream is all about, let myself grieve and I try to relax (jogging, stretching, deep breathing).

    Many times I succeed at managing the emotional flashback, and many times I fail. Sometimes I know that there is no other option but to wait for it to pass – when a strong one happens. There’s nothing wrong with it, because life is not a bed of roses. All these happenings make my personality a lot richer.

    Having realistic expectations about the emotional flashbacks

    marbles in a jarIn the end, I have realistic expectations. Scientific research shows that you can never completely get rid of emotional flashbacks. Imagine a glass with one red marble in a glass bowl. Then you start throwing green marbles into the bowl. Soon you cannot see the red marble anymore, but it’s still there. The red marble is a painful experience, and the green ones are new positive experiences in your adult life.

    By experiencing more and more positive situations – like safe relationships, deep positive emotional experiences, enjoying life and growing personally, you are slowly gaining a more accurate picture of reality. These are the new green marbles in the bowl. The world isn’t that dark. It takes a lot of work on yourself with all the described exercises to make emotional flashbacks and cognitive distortions exceptions, not a rule.

    But even when you achieve that, the red marble is still there under all those green marbles. Sometimes it still washes ashore. Especially in new situations, which you don’t know how to manage yet. But that mustn’t stop you. Dealing with emotional flashbacks is a never-ending process. You have to accept that.

    You have to welcome the idea that you are stronger than any emotional flashback, because you have many tools to deal with them and in the end, you don’t have to be perfect. You just need a strong vision for yourself that’s bigger than any obstacle on your way; including these flashbacks. And if you find your emotional flashbacks too strong, many times a professional therapy is the best way to go. Good luck.

  • Regular daily reflections will change the quality of your life forever

    In the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework, you don’t just do things because you always did them in a specific way. You don’t just work and execute tasks like a robot.

    Instead, you regularly reflect on why you do certain things, analyze how efficiently you are doing them and, most importantly, you constantly evaluate where your actions are leading you and if you are following your True North.

    If you want to avoid being on reactive autopilot, you have to do regular reflections. The main goal of regular reflections is to ask yourself thought-provoking questions so that you can develop a deeper level of understanding:

    With regular reflections, you want to gain as many important insights as possible that can help you shape a superior life strategy, progress towards your goals faster and, in the end, live a better life. The good life.

    But that’s not all. One of the biggest values of reflection is that you can change how you see yourself, how you feel about certain situations and, in the end, how you act. New thoughts lead to new emotions and consequently to new actions. That way, regular reflections really help you stay lean, agile, flexible, happy and wise.

    There are several points in your life when performing a reflection is extremely valuable:

    1. After every sprint (bi-weekly planning session) and 100-day plan (quarterly plan)
    2. After every experiment you perform in the search mode as part of validated learning
    3. When big or unexpected changes happen in your environment or relationships
    4. When negative emotions pile up or you sense big negative mood swings
    5. At the end of the day, just before you go to sleep to examine your daily life

    Reflections after sprints, 100-day plans and experiments are called introspections in the AgileLeanLife Productivity Framework.

    Reflections before you go to sleep or when an emotional or situational trigger fires a need for analysis we call short self-reflection. We will discuss both types of reflections in this article.

    But first, let’s answer the basic questions of why, how and when to do reflections.

    Regular daily reflections

    A short daily reflection is nothing but a healthy habit

    Regular daily reflections are a positive habit, like any other healthy and beneficial habit, from exercising to reading and being grateful. Every habit has three key elements.

    There must be a trigger, a behavior you perform and, in the end, a reward you enjoy. If the triggers are strong enough and rewards are big, you have a greater chance of sticking to a habit. That’s what you also need if you want to stick to regular reflections – strong triggers and big rewards.

    Reward – why do short daily reflections

    There are so many big rewards of regular reflections. Everybody doubts it, but then after doing it a few times, they become in love with it. Many times, I had to push people a little bit to do it the first time, but then after performing it a whole new world opens to them.

    They are like “wow, I didn’t know my mind works like that and that I can get so many insights by writing a few of my thoughts down. With reflections, you can finally meet the deep and rich internal world you possess. And now the benefits.

    • You better understand yourself and your actions,
    • You pay more attention to your thoughts and emotions
    • You become aware of your rich inner world
    • You become connected to yourself much better
    • You can more easily see all the ways of how you can properly adjust
    • You can plan how to do things in a better way

    With all that, you gain more control over yourself and you become much more proactive.

    With regular reflections, you explore your needs and wants and become very much aware of them. You explore the fears that are blocking you on your way towards your goal. You can finally understand what kind of conflicts are preventing you from being more assertive in life.

    You can more easily identify all the different toxic thoughts and how they’re hurting you. You can identify competing commitments, internal frustrations and other things that are blocking you in life. Therefore, combining reflections with mindset upgrades is the perfect combination.

    All this removes different inner blocks and releases emotional tensions. Not to mention that these are all the inputs for a superior life strategy.

    Regular reflections help you better understand your environment and its paradigms, including people’s diverse behaviors and changes in their behaviors. You can see and understand your position in your environment exceptionally well and you can analyze how different actions can lead you towards different outcomes.

    Regular reflections enable you to go from reactive behavior to proactive behavior. Regular reflections enable you to go from being miserable to being happy.

    Behavior – how to do short daily reflections

    Doing a short daily reflection is an extremely easy exercise. All you have to do is take a notebook and a pen and start writing down your thoughts. You provoke yourself with a few tough questions, you encourage yourself to look at things from different angles and you ask yourself why dozens of times. Then you dig deep. As deeply as possible.

    Here are examples of questions you ask yourself during reflection:

    • How am I feeling? Why am I feeling like that? Why am I so anxious, angry etc.?
    • What does this situation remind me of? When did I feel the same way as I do now?
    • What am I trying to achieve with my behavior?
    • Why are others behaving towards me as they do?
    • What is the best way to improve my situation? Why am I blocking myself?
    • What am I scared of? Why am I persisting at this thing that doesn’t work?
    • Why does this bother me so much? Why do I really dislike that person?
    • What will happen if I do the complete opposite? How would my life look like if I believed the opposite from what I believe now?
    • After every question you ask yourself why, why, why and dig deep.

    The solemn end of every reflection should always be new insights about you, about your position in the world and how your life relates to different relationships, marketing trends and other environmental elements. After you do a reflection, you should finally understand. There should be many “aha” moments.

    When you do retrospections (after execution), you consciously decide how you will change your behavior and actions. You discipline yourself to follow a new behavioral pattern. On the other hand, in very well performed self-reflections it should all come naturally to you without any force. You should feel it in your bones how you can do things differently and how it makes sense to change.

    Trigger – when to do short daily reflections

    There are many potential triggers that can lead you to do a reflection. Some of them can be planned (after a sprint, before sleep) and some of them can be spontaneous. I suggest you combine both types.

    The strongest and most useful triggers are usually emotional ones. Examples include interesting thoughts or ideas you become aware of, big negative changes in your moods, getting hurt by other people, and so on. In such situations, you go straight to the most painful things a lot more easily.

    The second most common triggers are time- and location-based. You do a daily reflection before you go to sleep. You do a reflection as part of a planning meeting with your team, and so on. You should always have a few strong location and time triggers that naturally lead you towards performing a reflection.

    Napkin sketch

    Introspections – reflections after executions

    Now let’s go a little bit deeper into the concept of introspections.

    Introspections are reflections you do after different periods of execution and after performing life experiments. They are an integral part of bi-weekly sprints and quarterly planning sessions, and their main purpose is to improve your strategy, tactics and actions.

    With retrospections, you want to make sure you’re progressing towards your goal in the best possible way. With regular retrospections, you want to have the smartest strategy and be one step ahead of your instincts, life itself and other people.

    Introspections are otherwise also an integral part of agile software development (SCRUM), where a team reflects on how they work and where they can improve. As I mentioned, introspection is done after every sprint. The things you want to achieve with introspections (you can do it by yourself or with your team if you have one) after sprints and 100-day plans are:

    • Reviewing the tasks done in the previous interval
    • Carefully planning your next sprint
    • Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goals faster
    • Thinking of all the ways you can adjust to achieve your goalswith fewer resources
    • Making sure you are going into the right direction (following your True North)
    • Brainstorming how you can do things better and how you can improve and adjust
    • Analyzing all the new ideas you have
    • Better connecting with yourself or with team members if you have a team
    • Updating your life vision or vision of the team
    • Measuring your real progress based on the metrics framework you set for yourself
    • Adjusting the strategy and plan and reflecting on new things that you learned

    Sprint planning and short morning meeting with yourself (and/or your team) are great starting points for execution, and reflection is the perfect activity to end every execution interval.

    The best practice is to combine planning a new execution phase with reflection on the previous one. That way you can really improve yourself on the way from one sprint to another. The simple rule is to never even leave out execution retrospection when planning your next sprint, quarterly plan or an experiment in the search mode. Never. Because that’s what successful people do.

    The bottom lines of introspection are the most important part of the process. If you don’t have the bottom lines, you have a very poorly performed introspection. The mandatory thing is that after every introspection, you have answers to a few very basic, but extremely hard questions:

    • What went well during the last sprint that I/we will continue doing?
    • What could I/we do differently?
    • How can I/we implement the change?

    Based on that, you should make three decisions and stick to them:

    • What should I start doing?
    • What should I stop doing?
    • What should I continue doing?

    After every introspection, you have to change your behavior and your actions. You have to do things differently. You have to improve and grow. If you don’t, introspection was useless. Changes and adjustments are the whole point of it.

    Before we go to short daily reflections, let me once again emphasize the important difference between introspections and self-reflections. The changes and improvements after introspection can be a little bit pushed, you can discipline yourself to do things differently.

    Meanwhile changes after self-reflection must come completely from within, they must feel completely natural. You can train yourself to perform a new behavior, but you become wiser after an epiphany that changes how you see the world in every one of your cells.

    Performing reflection

    Short daily reflections – do them at the end of the day or whenever you feel like doing it

    Now let’s move from introspections to short daily reflections.

    Explained very simply, performing self-reflection means that you take from a couple of minutes to an hour or more to reflect on your goals, beliefs, behavioral patterns, negative and positive emotions, emotional knots and everything else that’s happening in your life.

    The best way is to do it daily by writing a journal. Once you try it, you will see what kind of amazing breakthroughs self-reflection can lead you to. It’s better than any thriller movie once you discover your rich inner world.

    There are two perfect moments for doing a short daily reflection. One is at the end of the day. At the end of the day, you can analyze and compare your plans to what actually happened in reality.

    You can write down what you’ve learned, people’s unexpected reactions and interesting changes in your relationships, how productive you were and how well you completed the three most important tasks that you had given to yourself for that day, and so on.

    The second trigger is when you sense an interesting thought, observation or insight or when negative emotions pile up. When you get extremely moody, when something upsets you, when things don’t go as planned, sit down and start analyzing.

    Use the D.E.A.R. concept in those cases. Drop Everything And Reflect. Or sometimes Drop Everything And Read, you know, to get wiser and more educated.

    A short daily reflection is slightly different from introspection. If you have to force yourself to make a certain decision after self-analysis, you hadn’t done it right. Self-analysis is about understanding yourself and noticing, not judging and forcing yourself into anything.

    There are no “stop doings”, “start doings” and “continue doings”. It’s about changing the course of your life without any force, by better understanding who you are and what you want through analytical thinking.

    Here are a few additional ideas for what you want to achieve with short daily reflections:

    Analyze your day

    Think about how your day went compared to – (1) your daily plan and (2) your ideal day. Analyze if you executed all the planned tasks, especially the three most important tasks for the day. Analyze what went wrong and what went right, what you’ve learned throughout the day, and write down the insights you gained.

    You can also write down all the cool things that happened to you, so you never forget them. In the end, you can also add all the new things you’re grateful for.

    Look for errors in your subjective reality map

    You see the world through your subjective lenses. I call it the subjective reality map or the frame. You operate based on this mental frame, a set of schemas defined by your beliefs, values, way of thinking and many other factors. Subjective lenses are like unique code that runs in your brain. You’re only aware of a small part of it, most of it is subconscious.

    This frame or the subjective reality map is not the truth, even if it most often feels like it. But it’s not the objective reality, it’s only how you interpret the reality with your limiting senses.

    That’s important, because there are many errors in your subjective reality map. From wrong assumptions and cognitive biases to all the things you don’t even know you don’t know. With reflections, you should identify as many errors in your subjective reality map as possible.

    Through analysis, you should notice that you were wrong about something (but first you have to put your ego aside) and then say to yourself: “Oh gosh, I was really wrong about that” or “I can’t believe I was lying to myself so hard” or “I really operated based on toxic behavioral patterns and beliefs, now I see it”.

    With regular reflections, you should come closer to the objective truth and identify all the ways you’re lying to yourself or deceiving yourself.
    Examining-your-mind

    Make subconscious conscious

    By asking yourself tough questions and digging deep, you can find many emotional knots in yourself of which you weren’t aware before. These knots are tied by all the mistakes your parents made in your upbringing. The more toxic the family environment where you were raised was, the more tension there is. Not all family environments are toxic, but many of them are.

    When you identify these emotional knots, they lose some of their power and some tension gets released. On top of that, you can become aware of why you are performing some self-sabotaging behaviors.

    With regular reflections, I identified all kinds of different things, like why I was always late, why I was afraid to start my own business, why knowledge is so important to me, and much more.

    Brainstorm ideas

    The only way to keep your creative muscle strong is to regularly brainstorm ideas. If you do it every day, the creative part of your brain will be fit and strong.

    It’s hard to brainstorm ideas every day, but you can still make it a part of your shutdown routine before you go to sleep, just after making a short reflection. In such a case you will never forget to train and stretch your creative muscles.

    An idea that isn’t written down is an idea quickly forgotten.

    Of course you won’t have only brilliant ideas with regular brainstorming, but writing down as many ideas as possible is the only way to get to brilliant ideas. If you write down 100 ideas every day, most of them will be absolutely crappy; but every now and then, a new brilliant idea will be born among all the crap. An idea that might lead you to a new course of life.

    An idea to start a business, to help your company to grow, how to improve your relationships or how to experience life more fully, and so on. One such powerful idea can change your life forever.

    Giving instructions to your subconscious

    Your brain works 24/7. No rest, no holidays, just work. Even when you sleep and enjoy your dreams, that’s your brain at work. One good way to use your brain better is to keep the dreaming function alive during the day as well. It helps you be more creative, stay curious and an optimist.

    Very similarly, but the other way around, it also makes sense to give instructions to your brain what to work on when you are asleep. There are many different types of instructions you can give to your brain. Revealing a part of your subconscious self to you in your dreams, finding a new solution for various problems, experiencing lucid dreaming, and so on.

    As the last step of your daily reflection, just after your brainstorming session and before you go to sleep, give instructions to your brain what to work on while you’re sleeping. Just say to yourself (or to your brain) what you want your cognitive power to be used for during sleep. It will absolutely raise your productivity levels and lead you to many cool new insights.

    Mind Body Spirit Soul

    Homework

    Drop everything and go buy yourself a notebook

    Richard Branson, one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever, always carries a simple inexpensive notebook and a pen with him. He writes down all cool ideas, meeting minutes, observations, and so on. You can do the same just for personal purposes.

    A simple notebook that you always carry with you is the best way to do regular introspections and self-reflections. Because when an interesting thought appears, you can simply sit down and start writing. Whenever and wherever you are.

    You can do it digitally, of course, but there is a special connection between paper, pen, your hand and your brain. So I suggest you go to a stationery shop and buy yourself a notebook you like, a pen that feels comfortable to write with, and start with regular daily reflections.

    The mantra here is to just do it. As mentioned several times, it’s hard the first few times. I have people in my life I care deeply about and it took me years to convince them to try self-reflections. It took me three years to convince somebody I love to do their first self-reflection. Three years.

    The first few times, you always feel blocked somehow. There’s nothing to write down. It feels weird. But you have to be patient with yourself.

    Sooner or later your heart opens and your thoughts start to flow.

    After performing one really deep self-reflection I guarantee you that it will become one of your favorite parts of the day and one of your favorite personal development tools; especially because you will forge a better connection with yourself and you will be able to easily enter your rich inner world that’s hidden deeply inside you. Have courage and start exploring your inner self.

  • How much relationship drama is just too much?

    Every relationship is a dynamic mixture of two energies – positive and negative ones.

    Positive energies are the energies of connecting, sharing and loving. They bring people closer. Examples of positive energies are touching, making love, having deep talks, exchanging useful information, working on team projects, having fun together, sharing resources, offering mutual support, and so on.

    Negative energies as the second dynamic are thoughts, words and actions that bring distance and tension in relationships. Negative energies are the energies of disconnecting, excluding, hating and alienating. Below are examples of negative energies in relationships.

    I call them drama in one word.

    • Gossiping
    • Lying
    • Hiding the truth
    • Verbal fighting
    • Physical fighting
    • Passive aggressiveness
    • Ignorance
    • Controlling
    • Humiliating
    • Manipulating
    • Cheating
    • Stealing
    • Betraying
    • Hypocrisy
    • And so on

    Negative energies are present in every single relationship. It’s a matter of the yin–yang principle and the duality of life. Positive can’t exist without negative. There is no good without bad. And in everything good there is just a little bit of bad, and in everything bad there is just a little bit of good.

    Here are a few examples. If you eat too much chocolate, you get sick. In the same way, if you spend too much time with someone, like 24/7, a relationship starts to get stifling. And there must be a little bit of friction and conflict in a relationship. It brings passion, creativity and growth to both parties.

    Nevertheless, there is a limit to how much negative energy is too much. There is a point when too many negative energies make the relationship a toxic one. Then the relationship becomes abusive, destructive and life destroying.

    It brings nothing but the negative and drama into the lives of everyone involved. That’s why it makes sense to constantly pay attention to how much drama there is in every personal relationship in your life, especially the key ones, and to manage drama properly.

    Relationship DNA

    The DNA of a relationship is set in the first 90 days

    In the startup world, there is a saying that the team’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. A-level people attract A-level people. Smart people attract other smart people from different domains and industries.

    Every startup has its own DNA, which is considered a combination of culture, processes, competencies, vision and other elements. The DNA is nothing but a mixture of its leaders’ DNAs. You can find the same phenomenon in personal relationships, especially in two ways.

    Birds of a feather flock together. People who like drama attract people who like drama. If somebody doesn’t like drama, they cut people who cause drama out of their lives. Ambitious people attract other ambitious people. People who like to whine and complain spend a lot of time with other people who whine and complain.

    Analyze people in your life and they always reflect a part of your personality. Much like parts of your personality are reflected in other people’s lives. So change yourself and you can change others. Change yourself and new people will come into your life. Find a new group of people and you will become a new person. It’s that simple.

    Men/women are like kitchen tile. If you lay them right the first time, they stay there for the rest of your life. It’s a stupid example, but it shows very well how the DNA in an intimate relationship or any other relationship is formed. The beginnings of every relationship are extremely important and they set the tone of the relationship for the rest of its existence.

    In the first 90 days, the culture of a relationship gets shaped. Boundaries, general attitude, communication style, common interests and the things you do together, locations where you spend time together, relationship vision, and so on. Once the relationship DNA is set, it’s extremely hard to change it. It can be done, but it’s extremely hard.

    If you observe a little bit, you will see that with the same person things usually evolve and operate on the same pattern. You do the same things together. You talk about quite similar topics all the time. You go to more or less the same restaurants or types of restaurants. You have the same types of fights, and so on. That’s the relationship’s DNA. It’s a collection of the relationship’s core patterns.

    If a lot of drama develops in the first 90 days, because both parties encourage or allow it in one way or another, there is a great probability that drama will be a dominating force for the rest of the relationship.

    The first 90 days are crucial for the direction into which a relationship will go. So make sure that you set the right boundaries and the right culture from the beginning. Making changes later in a relationship takes incomparably more effort and hard work.

    Every relationship is a dynamic thing, for sure. It can be changed later. People change their preferences and values. A relationship’s DNA is no guarantee for anything to be as it is forever and it’s not completely predictable. But it definitely sets the general tone of a relationship. Now let’s get back to drama.

    Relationship drama

    How much relationship drama is just too much?

    As we said, there is some level of drama in every relationship. In every relationship’s DNA, there are chromosomes that cause tensions, destructive interpersonal patterns and misunderstandings. But the question is: how much drama is simply too much?

    If we want to find the answer, we need a few metrics that can help us determine how toxic a relationship is. Since relationships are not math, it’s a completely subjective assessment, but we can still get a good sense of quality of every relationship.

    The metrics that measure the level of drama are at least the following (I read that somewhere on the internet and found it a brilliant idea, so I developed it further):

    • Type of drama and level of destructiveness (intensity)
    • Frequency of drama
    • Average duration of drama

    Type of relationship drama

    There are different levels of destructive patterns in relationships. In other words, there are things that can be forgiven and things that shouldn’t be acceptable at all. Some things hurt more than others.

    It definitely depends on you what is acceptable to you and what hurts you the most, but we can try to set a general scale from the most destructive type of drama to the most forgivable one.

    Ground zero is having a normal human discussion with someone. Then we can continue with heated discussions and small fights that are quickly under control. But already in the next step, we have different types of drama that at some point get out of control and can even escalate all the way to physical abuse.

    Here are different types of drama:

    • Physical abuse: Hitting a person, strangling, scratching, kicking, smacking, throwing objects etc.
    • Verbal abuse: Humiliating, scolding, making fun, insulting, passive aggressiveness, criticizing, sarcasm, mockery, threatening etc.
    • Betrayal: Cheating, lying, having double standards, manipulating, stealing etc.
    • Behavioral abuse: Ignoring, evoking jealousy on purpose, rudeness, controlling etc.

    You can find 50+ types of drama in the template you can download at the end of the article.

    I suggest you make your own scale of what is tolerable to you, what you can deal with and where is the limit when a behavior becomes completely unacceptable to you. A deal breaker. If you don’t want toxic patterns to repeat themselves, you have to draw the line the first time it happens.

    When it happens the second time, you just leave.

    Frequency of relationship drama

    The second important metric is the frequency of drama or, to be more exact, the frequency of different types of dramas. Frequency is extremely important and here is why.

    Causing drama is a bad life decision. What leads to a general poor quality of life is making a series of bad decisions, stupid decisions. You can make a big stupid decision, like driving drunk and getting into an accident, or you can make small daily stupid decisions, like smoking a pack of cigarettes.

    Even if small stupid decisions don’t seem as hurtful as the big ones, they accumulate over time and can have an even greater negative impact than big stupid decisions. The best thing is obviously to avoid both, big and small stupid decisions, but frequency matters because it accumulates. It’s the same with the frequency of drama.

    Everyday cynicism, criticism and small fights can be as hurtful as big abusive fights that happen from time to time.

    You want to avoid every toxic combination: frequent big drama and frequent small drama. Drama should be the exception in a relationship, not a rule. It’s completely up to you to decide where is the limit when an exception turns into a rule. Nevertheless, we again need some metrics to get a better perspective.

    You can simply measure how often drama happens in every one of your relationships. It can be:

    • Constant never-ending drama
    • Daily
    • Weekly
    • A couple times per month
    • A couple times per year
    • Never – which is usually also not a good sign

    What you’re looking for are exceptions that cause drama. Somebody had a bad day or got thrown out of their emotional center. Being extremely tired lowers tolerance levels, and so on.

    At the end of the day, tough times are real relationship tests. They aren’t toxic drama, they’re real-life tests. But what you want to avoid at all costs is a repeating pattern of constant drama in a relationship.

    Relationship fight

    Average duration of a relationship drama

    A monster grows with time. Drama grows with time. You want drama in your relationship to be short and to turn sweet as quickly as possible – into a smile, hug, deep conversation or make-up sex. The longer the drama lasts, the more your precious life is being wasted.

    Simply measure how long a drama lasts in different relationships you have in your life:

    • A few minutes
    • An hour
    • A few hours
    • Maybe even a few days
    • Seems like forever

    Together with the other person in a relationship, you have to find a way to make every drama last as short as possible. There are many tools you can use to achieve that, but that’s a topic for the next article.

    What is acceptable to you?

    As we discussed, every relationship has a certain DNA. The DNA as a blueprint of a relationship consists of patterns that repeat themselves over and over again, unless a person is really prepared to change things when the relationship gets toxic; or both of them, to be more exact, since there must be two people to create drama.

    It rarely happens that people are willing to change, but sometimes it does. In my past, I tolerated and created a lot more drama than is acceptable to me today.

    In very healthy relationships, drama occurs a few times per year, it’s always a controlled one that doesn’t do serious emotional damage and it lasts for an hour or so at most. Under rare circumstances, spikes can happen, but they must be a big exception not a rule.

    The type of drama, frequency and duration – you have to decide what is acceptable to you. You have to decide how much drama you will create in relationships and how much you will tolerate. Try to get the drama creation from your side to be as low as possible and then show the other person how to do that.

    There are many mechanisms for achieving that:

    • Compliment people and tell them you love them (5 – 7 compliments to 1 critique is a healthy ratio)
    • Express your expectations and boundaries with values
    • Be straight with other people, apply the radical candor philosophy
    • Develop superior communication skills
    • Don’t let debates escalate in a negative direction
    • Treat others as you want to be treated
    • Try to solve problems immediately
    • Apologize when you make a mistake
    • Learn to accept yourself and others as they are

    Although we know many drama management tools, from time to time you meet a drama queen or drama king, and then it’s usually time to let go and move on.

    Sadly, people create drama in relationships because that’s the only way they know, they had dramatic relationships at home with their parents. But only when people are willing to change, only when people are willing to find a new better way, can you really help them and show them how to improve and how to grow.

    Relationship drama template

    Homework

    Relationship drama assessment template

    Below you can download a template that will help you evaluate how much drama there is in your relationships in life. It will help you get a clearer picture of how healthy a specific relationship is. It won’t give you an exact answer, but you’ll get the general idea. The template includes 50+ abusive behavioral patterns.

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    • Relationship drama assessment – Template (xls)

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    So many people prefer to live in drama because it’s comfortable. It’s like someone staying in a bad marriage or relationship – it’s actually easier to stay because they know what to expect every day, versus leaving and not knowing what to expect. – Ellen DeGeneres

  • Finding the balance between doing and being for all the workaholic

    There are two modes of human operation. One is doing and the other is being. Doing is work, achievements, recognition, creating value and improving yourself. Being is loving, enjoying and appreciating life. Without any improvements needed. You need a healthy balance of both if you want to be truly happy.

    Doing is a prefect bully of being (and vice-versa as we will see). Doing is a very convincing illusion of escape. You can always start doing something and forget being.

    You can have an endless to-do list. You can always take on more responsibilities. You can take your phone in your hand and check work emails anytime and anywhere.

    You can nicely whine and complain about how busy you are to whoever you meet so you get a little bit of comfort and love. And achievements can always give you a short-term boost of self-worth and confidence.

    I’m extremely inclined towards doing. It’s called being a workaholic and it’s an addiction like any other, helping you run away from yourself and life – from being.

    With becoming older and a little bit wiser, I have been slowly learning to also just be. To only be, without any work. I improved in this sense a little bit and still have a lot of work to do. I know “a lot of work to do” sounds a bit ironic in this case. Well, I have to do less work I guess.

    Anyway, I grasped the theoretical concept of what leads to an ability of only being in the present moment, but implementing it is a completely different story; if you are a natural born workaholic. Actually, nobody is born pure workaholic. You become workaholic usually because of the toxic upbringing.

    If you are a workaholic and struggle with just being like I am, let me share with you a few core concepts that could help you find the right balance between doing and being.

    doing and being balance

    You’re valuable for who you are, not what you achieve

    If your parents told you that they love you only when you did things right and didn’t have your back when you made mistakes, you might have started confusing achievements with love.

    In the same way, if you don’t get enough emotional support and proper care when you are young in general, later in life achievements might become a way to compensate for that; because other people are applauding you and it feels good.

    No matter how hard you work, it will never be good enough for your parents, if it was never good enough in your past. Some problems can’t be solved by only working harder.

    Soon your self-worth gets connected to what you do, not to who you are. That leads to great oscillation in feelings of your self-worth and capacity for self-love. When you achieve something, you feel great about yourself and life, when you don’t win or when you make a mistake, the feeling of your self-worth crashes to zero.

    The tighter the connection between self-worth and achievements, the greater oscillations occur. In a complete extreme, doing any small mistake, like a spelling error or breaking a glass, can immediately make you feel worthless. That kind of a personality characteristic consequently makes you an extremely volatile and labile person.

    You’re valuable for who you are, not what you have

    Unhealthy craving for status can be one type of compensation, greed for money is the other. For emotionally wounded people, money and possessions sometimes seem like the way of filling the void. There are several big problems with that.

    Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. – Erich Fromm

    The first problem is that net worth fluctuates and consequently your feeling of self-worth also fluctuates. Then we have the problem that there is always someone who has more money than you, and that again provokes your feeling of self-worth. The last problem I would mention among many is that today, you can very easily look rich without actually being rich.

    Seeing your self-worth exclusively through money lenses can drive you to bad financial decisions. People are buying homes, cars and other possessions they can’t afford, often just to feel that they matter. They want to be loved, noticed and seen as capable, and a fancy car seems like the way to get all these things. Obviously it’s not.

    Without money, your life can definitely be miserable. Money is important. You need enough money to live a happy and quality life. You also need status and achievements. But at the same time, focusing on money and achievements too much and putting them way before your health, relationships, integrity and balance leads to poor life choices and misery. Greed is not good.

    You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. – Tyler Duren, Fight Club

    enjoying life

    You can’t just be if you’re running away

    There are so many things you can be running away from. Your childhood life and your abusive parents. Disliking parts of your personality. Finding yourself in the same toxic relationship patterns as you had with your parents. Feeling like you were a burden to your parents. Not to mention all the fears known to humankind.

    If you have to run away from a single thing, you can’t just be. You can’t be free. You have to move, you have to go forward, you have to be constantly running. Unfortunately, running away from yourself is like running away from your shadow. No matter how fast and how long you run, you can’t outrun yourself.

    If you want to free yourself, you have to sooner or later confront yourself and your fears.

    You can’t just be if you’re caught in severe negative thoughts and emotions

    How can you just be if you’re thinking the same negative thoughts over and over again? How can you just be if you’re feeling lost in severe negative emotions like anger, guilt or sadness? It’s impossible to be, all you can do is to keep busy and try to work away all the negatives.

    The moment you stop working, the moment you stop being busy, negative thoughts and emotions get louder. How can you then stop for a moment and take a deep breath? Because the moment you start to relax, a monster of negative thoughts and emotions start to hunt you.

    If you’re busy, you’re okay. If you stop, you’re not okay. You have to choose the lesser evil in a way.

    And it’s not only that. All the negative thoughts and emotions have to be directed somewhere. They can be directed inwards, toward self-destructive behavior, or outwards. In the latter case, negative emotions can be the drive to achieve, sometimes even by trampling other people.

    With severe negative emotions and thoughts, you can’t just be. They drive you to do stupid things. They drive you to bully yourself or others.

    You can’t just be if you don’t know how to play

    If you had to become an adult too soon and take responsibilities on your shoulders that your parents should have taken care of, or if you were never allowed to really play and do childish things, or even if you were always overprotected and not able to freely explore and water your curious mind, you might have forgotten how to play as an adult.

    If you can’t play as an adult, you can’t enjoy life. If you don’t know how to really enjoy life, you can’t only be. You have to work, you have to be productive, you have to be responsible. But you also have to be capable of stopping and playing. Fortunately, what you’ve unlearnt you can learn again.

    Sense of control

    Doing gives you a great feeling of control and consequently a feeling of safety. You are the one moving things around when you clean your home. You decide how you will perform a specific task. Maybe you can even completely decide what will be on your to-do list. Doing gives a sense of organization, predictability and control.

    On the other hand, being requires leaving things as they are. Being requires you to not bother with how things could be, to not be afraid of not having control, but accepting things as they are and just being relaxed. It’s hard to accept the chaos of life and world as messy as it is.

    That may bring a sense of uncertainty, insecurity and fear. But the moment you start doing again, you gain control at least to a certain extent. You aren’t just passively enjoying life in all its chaos, you are the one moving things around. You have control. But you have no life.

    On the ego level man expresses himself as a creator, on a body level he is the created. As a creator his focus is upon doing. As a creature his role is simply to be. – Alexander Lowen

    Addiction to adrenaline rushes

    If you had a stressful, anxious childhood full of adrenaline rushes or a longer such period in your adult life, there is a great probability that you got addicted to stress, anxiety and adrenaline kicks. Doing things is a very easy way to cause yourself a lot of stress, anxiety and fire-fighting situations.

    One big reason for overdoing in life instead of enjoying can be that you need drama and other negative feelings, because they are something you got used to as your default mode of operation.

    In such cases, you tend to find work and business relationships that are stressful and bring drama to your life by default. You are the one choosing and co-creating your environment. Build yourself motivational environment, instead of a stressful one.

    working hard

    Finding balance between doing and being

    If you want to live a quality happy life, you have to somehow find balance between doing and being. If your feeling of self-worth is wired completely wrong and if you have extremely low capacities for self-love, professional therapy might be the only way to go.

    But if you need just a little bit of adjusting, there are a few concepts and exercises that might help you find the right balance. These exercises are not quick fixes, you have to practice them regularly and usually things get worse before they can get better; especially because you have to stop running away from yourself.

    I encourage you to start with different exercises, building up your self-worth and self-confidence, and measuring results. If regularly performing exercises (regularly is the key word) doesn’t show any results and you can’t see a better balance in your life, I encourage you to decide for therapy.

    Nobody deserves to live a miserable life.

    Stop running away from yourself

    The first step you can make to go from doing towards being is to stop running away from yourself. You have to stop and start paying more attention to your emotions. Doing this, you may realize that your feelings aren’t as stable and okay as you thought they were.

    Paying more attention to your feelings may show that you’re hurting and trying avoid the pain by being busy. That’s not an easy realization. But sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take two steps forward.

    The best way to start paying attention to your emotions is the happiness index. Build yourself a chart on which you mark how you’re feeling one, two or more times per day. Then examine further what’s causing those feelings. Regularly performing reflection with the happiness index will slowly help you learn to pay attention to yourself and fully focus on yourself.

    Define how much is enough and then go for good enough

    If you want to find a better balance between doing and being, you have to better manage yourself, your time, your emotions and your expectations. One way to do that is by defining very strict limits and going for the good enough.

    The idea behind the concept of good enough is that it’s completely acceptable to be reasonably consistent with your goals and not follow them 100 % of time to complete perfection; because the latter is simply impossible and only makes you unhappy and miserable.

    You don’t need the perfect job, you need a good enough job. You don’t need the perfect spouse, you need a good enough spouse. You don’t need to be filthy rich, you need a good enough financial situation. You don’t have to eat perfectly healthy, your diet must only be good enough. You don’t need the perfect life, you need to fight for a good enough life.

    In a similar way, you can set very strict limits that curb your desire for endless doing. By setting limits, you can very clearly define answers like:

    • How many hours of work per week is a reasonable maximum? The answer should be around 50.
    • How much money do you need in your bank account to feel safe? The answer should be around 6 – 12 of your monthly costs and not drowning in debt.
    • What is the minimum number of hours you deserve per week to just do nothing?
    • When and how is the best way for you to have an hour of power completely for yourself?

    If good enough is good enough, then you don’t have to work so hard. You can relax a little bit.

    Doing is not hard work and being is not lazy

    Our society rewards doing and often sees being as a lazy thing. Laziness and being are not the same thing. And doing is not the same thing as working hard, even less working smart. These are all different categories you mustn’t mix.

    • Being means taking time for yourself, feeling good in your own skin, being able to relax and enjoy and appreciate life, and not connecting your value exclusively to accomplishments.
    • Doing is as important as being. You do it by having an important life mission, providing value, developing your talents and creating. You are here to enjoy life and you are here to create. All in healthy limits.
    • Doing is not being busy. It’s not like the richest people work the most. Doing means working hard and working smart. And also includes knowing when the time comes to rest and recharge.
    • Laziness means that you don’t do things at all. It means overbeing. You’re like a leech, expecting other people to do all the work instead of you. If you aren’t creating value, somebody else has to do it instead of you.

    Being plus action

    There is a nice sublimation you can do to doing. If you really manage to find work you enjoy based on your talents and based on your life vision, life mission and values, and if you find people with whom you love to create value together, you can take doing from doing to being plus action.

    In such a case, you still must take enough time off, you still need to learn how to just be, you still need regular technology detoxes, but you can also be while you do. That is the easiest way for me to just be. Being in action. It’s not completely the same as just being, but it’s close enough.

    In the past, I’ve learnt to not just be busy, but to work smart, have a superior life strategy and follow the concept of being plus action. Now I’m slowly learning to also handle just being.

    Being in action

    Talk back to your inner critic

    Your inner critic is the internalized voice of your parents telling you how nothing is good enough, how you have to try harder, how your accomplishments are nothing, how every mistake is the end of the world, and so on. So you work harder, you try harder, but nothing is ever good enough.

    Your mind can take you to some very dark places. Having constant thoughts that you aren’t doing enough is absolutely such a dark place.

    If you want to enjoy being, you have to constantly talk back to your inner critic. You have to see reality in a clearer way. You have to see that you matter, that you are good enough, that you also deserve to enjoy life and that people can love you for who you are as you are. The way to talk back to your inner critic is with emotional accounting.

    Leave things as they are, relax and just be

    Much like you can get used to the work overload without any margin, stress and not to forget anxiety as a constant in your life, so you can get used to just enjoying life and relaxing.

    You can make the relaxed feeling of being in the present moment a regular constant in your life. You just have to practice it enough. First list different things that you enjoy and make sure they aren’t doing, but just being activities. Usually, they are things considered playing.

    Then regularly timebox playtime and rest-time and technology detox time, and don’t allow work to invade it in any way. Turn off your computer, mobile phone and TV, block any other distractions and just play. Play board games with your kids. Barbecue with your friends. Have a date night with your spouse.

    Enjoying the path

    One destructive concept that might help you stick to overdoing could be saying to yourself, I will enjoy life when … I earn enough money, when I manage to get a better job contract, when I pay off the debt, and so on.

    Usually what happens is that there is always something new that prevents you from enjoying life.

    I understand why people do this, I’ve been there many times. It’s hard to enjoy life if you’re caught in a shitty situation. It’s impossible to relax when you have so much burden hanging over your head. But you can find a way to make things more manageable.

    You can define what you need to do to get out of the worst crisis, and how much time it will take. Then you can slowly start to add being to doing. You can define small “being rewards”, after you innovate your way out of tough life situations by doing or when you reach one of your milestones.

    You have to somehow put yourself in a position where you can enjoy the path while you’re walking, not only think about enjoying life when you reach the goal someday. Because by that time, you may actually be dead.

    You are valuable the way you are

    Being is good. Doing is good. The right balance between the two is the best. Love and work. Work and love. Poor mindset, emotional problems and other psychological issues usually lead to overdoing or overbeing. In the next step, both lead to a poor quality of life, addictions and running away from the true essence – yourself.

    Homework

    It’s not something you asked for, but it’s definitely something you have to deal with. If you’re inclined towards overdoing, there are a few tools you can use to find a better balance. We looked at a few of them, now it’s up to you to apply them into your life. Here they are once again:

    1. Remind yourself over and over again that you matter for who you are, not what you do
    2. Material things are meant to be enjoyed, they are a very poor surrogate for love and for feeling better about yourself
    3. Figure out what you’re running away from and then stop running
    4. Start paying attention to yourself and your feelings with the happiness index
    5. Get used to playing and enjoying life by “forcing” yourself to do it in the beginning
    6. Talk back to your inner critic with emotional accounting
    7. Practice letting go of control and surrendering from time to time
    8. Define strict limits and go for good enough
    9. Don’t see doing as hard work and being as lazy; healthy being has nothing to do with laziness
    10. Find things you enjoy doing in life and practice the concept of being in action, instead of just doing

    It makes no sense to overdo everything to the point of getting attention from the whole world, if in the end you doom your own life. You’re here to be happy, enjoy life, connect, grow and create. That includes doing and being.

    Don’t become your own worst enemy by leaning too much to one side or the other. Choose wisdom instead and make the best out of your life – with being and doing.

  • Life is just a dream – not really, but the idea can be useful

    Life is nothing but a dream. I’m just kidding. Life is not just a dream. It feels pretty real to me. Nature, sun, rain, pain, food, sex, keyboard, kissing, blood, it all feels very real to me.

    Not only my body, also my mind, my consciousness, relationships with people that I love, they all feel very real, even though I can’t touch my mind and I can’t see the relationship bonds.

    Don’t get bored, this blog post is not about arguing why life isn’t just a dream or why that could be true. You can find many philosophical debates about that online, from solipsism to discussions over whether Matrix could be real, and responses to Elon Musk saying that life is only a simulation and that we live in a video game.

    In this blog post, I’ll talk about how perceiving life as a dream can be a good mental trick you can use to stay more (1) flexible and (2) creative. We will start with the creativity, but first what kind of a problem are we even trying to solve with this mental exercise.

    The main problem is that because life feels very real, you take yourself and the world around you very seriously, including your limiting beliefs, assumptions, convictions and values that you’re emotionally heavily invested in.

    To free yourself from the emotional pains, to open your mind and to play with different ideas, versions of yourself and potential future realities, it sometimes helps to see life as nothing but a dream.

    Your brain works 24/7 and dreams only for several hours every night. Why not keep the dream function working also when you’re awake?

    Life is just a dream

    If life is just a dream you can more easily create

    Everything that surrounds you and wasn’t created by Mother Nature was created by man. You have the power to do the same, to contribute, to create, to innovate and to solve problems. But before anything was created by any human, it was first born as an idea or a thought in someone’s head.

    Someone imagined a solution in their head and then made it come true. Someone had a dream of a completely new thing, of a completely new reality. Every idea is born twice, first in your or someone else’s head, with help of dreaming and visualization, and then it materializes through hard work.

    Dreaming of things that you can create and then creating them is one of the reasons why you’re on this planet. You’re here to create, grow, enjoy life and connect. You’re here to create a better future and leave a better place behind. You’re here to dream, not only when you sleep, but also when you’re awake.

    Everything was made up by people that were no smarter than you. Steve Jobs

    You have the ability to dream and imagine how the future will look like. Then through actions, you also have the power to make it come true (at least to some extent). Dreaming is of course not enough. Only when you break your big dreams down into small action steps, how they can become reality, you create a vision that has a potential to materialize.

    Visions are dreams combined with action plans. Only individuals with an incredibly strong vision and determination to make the vision reality changed the world. The vision has to be so strong that it’s above all the problems you encounter on your way. All problems must become irrelevant when you think of your big vision.

    Say to yourself: life is just a dream, a dream where I can create almost everything I want. First imagine life as a dream, distance yourself from the hard limits of reality and then imagine things like:

    • How your future could look likein all the different alterative scenarios
    • What kind of products you can create and all the cool ideas you have
    • What kind of domestic and international relationships you can forge
    • What are the potential scenarios for how the future will look like in 20, 50 and 100 years and how you can contribute to it
    • What the different versions of you being at your best are
    • Dream of different life settings you would like to experience

    Imagine all these things, daydream without any limitations. Then slowly make your dreams and ideas meet the limitations of physical reality. Still keep your mind completely open, but try to extract practical innovations from your dream in the shape of products, your actual future, art masterpieces or anything cool that could be created in reality.

    And then make an action plan how you will bring your dreams to life.

    Perceiving life as nothing but a dream gives you a tremendous ability to brainstorm new ideas and be creative. You can play much better with products not yet created, alternative versions of your future, new types of art, and so on.

    If life is just a dream you can easily change yourself and the way you think

    You see the world through your subjective lenses. You have a mental frame, a set of schemas, defined by your beliefs, values, way of thinking and many other factors, by which you interpret what’s happening around you, you make decisions based on it, and so on.

    Subjective lenses or the frame are the unique code that runs in your brain. You’re only aware of a small part of it, most of it is subconscious.

    This frame is an integral part of you. It’s not the truth, it’s not objective reality, it’s how you interpret reality in combination with limiting senses. The frame is how you think, how you see the world, what you value, what is important to you.

    Changing your beliefs and values together with frames means changing yourself. The more heavily invested you are in your current frame, the harder it is to change it. It’s not easy to operate for years or even decades on a certain set of beliefs and values, and then just change them.

    Nevertheless, sooner or later you encounter a situation when you see that your frame is not giving you the results you want. You’re following one thing because you perceive it as thinking, saying and doing the right thing, but the feedback you’re getting from the environment is not as shiny.

    You might quietly realize that you are operating based on false beliefs, that you were misguided, that you inherited a corrupt piece of mental code. Your way of thinking needs to be reprogramed.

    When you find yourself in such a situation, you have a few options:

    • You can immediately change your frame when you realize that you’re wrong, like Steve Jobs had no problem doing. He didn’t mind being wrong and changed his view of the world in a matter of seconds. I guess he had an extremely flexible mind. The same way Elon has no problem imagining and believing a drastic thing like the one that we are nothing but a video game simulation.
    • You can persist in your frame, lying to yourself that you’re doing the right thing, that you won’t betray yourself and you have to insist on not changing yourself, even if your life is getting more and more shitty. Next to that, you have to live with constant internal conflict and emotional pain.
    • You might have a desire to change, but the pain is just too huge to do that. You can’t just let go all the emotional investment in your (false) beliefs and values, it’s who you are, it’s a big part of your past, what you always defended, how you were raised. In such a case, you have a big internal conflict, two competing commitments, you want to stay true to yourself and change yourself.

    If you find yourself in the scenario with big internal conflict and resistance to changing your frame, but you want to do something about it anyway, seeing life as a dream might help you a lot. It’s nothing but a mental trick to have a more flexible mind and to more easily reframe your reality and consequently change your beliefs and values.

    Virtual reality

    It’s impossible to change reality but it’s easy to change the context

    Let’s say that life is just like a dream, limited by material laws. It’s impossible to change reality and the basic laws of physics, but it’s easy to change the context, the emphasis, the focus, the frame of what you see and what you don’t.

    It’s much easier to reframe anything, if you’re thinking of life as a dream, especially when you are emotionally heavily invested in your current frame. It helps you be more flexible in your thinking and mindset. It helps you distance yourself from yourself a little bit. Because you are only dreaming, nothing is real.

    First of all, it wasn’t your choice to be programmed as you are. It’s a matter of genes you inherited, how you were raised and influenced by secondary socialization, and so on. You didn’t choose what will be your reality, life chose it for you.

    The mental code you got – you didn’t choose it, you just got it – that also includes many cognitive distortions, things you’re afraid of, self-doubt and other crap that prevents you from being happy and making intelligent decisions.

    The question is – why to be faithful to the reality you were put in, if you’re suffering?But if life is just a dream where you can do whatever you want, why not simply decide to live by different rules, why not to go after a better dreams.

    Why not just change what you value, what’s important to you, what you focus on in your dreams, and what kind of a life you create for yourself. It’s nothing but a dream, so you can easily do it. It’s no big deal.

    How and what you think is limited only by you. You can decide to live by different rules and value in seconds.

    Practical examples

    If life is just a dream, imagine a world where you don’t judge yourself but only love yourself. Imagine a world where you don’t judge others but care only about deeply connecting with people.

    Imagine a world where you have many creative (business) ideas you put to use. Imagine a world where you can’t get heartbroken. Dream that it’s impossible for you to get heartbroken, because you love yourself so much.

    Dream of a world where rejection doesn’t affect you at all. Dream of a world where all of your talents are fully developed. Imagine a world where you do what you love, are good at it and make enough money. Dream of being super motivated. Imagine a person who is the complete opposite when you think of your weaknesses.

    What is stopping you from going after these things? You are most often the only one stopping yourself. What if in some cases, the only thing preventing you from living a dream life is being faithful to something that doesn’t work? And you even haven’t chosen that for yourself.

    All you need is the courage to disinvest yourself from your beliefs and start being committed to a new frame. If life is just a dream, you can do that immediately.

    The mental exercise of distancing yourself from yourself and your environment by seeing life as a dream enables you to change yourself and how you perceive things much easier and faster. With perceiving life as a dream, your frame becomes more fuild.

    But when you start sliding back into reality, it again feels so hard to change the frame. So when the old frame starts stifling you, zoom out from the reality into your dreams, imagine a new reality of how you perceive things and who you are and then zoom back into reality. Doing that a few times might help you weaken the negative emotional charge. That’s it.

    But then comes the time to wake up

    Seeing life as a dream is just a tool, nothing else. And as with any tool, you can use it the right way or you can use it the wrong way and even hurt yourself. You can hit a nail with a hammer or you can hit your finger if you miss the nail. Thus there are several ways of how seeing life as a dream can be misused.

    The tool should be used when you need to be creative, open you mind, stay more flexible, reframe things, change yourself to the better version or deal with your limiting beliefs that cause you emotional pain. On the other hand, examples of misusing this tool would be the following:

    • Using daydreaming to escape from reality or as a way to lie to yourself.
    • Brainstorming awesome ideas and products and then doing nothing.
    • Dreaming of violent, negative or evil scenarios. Don’t feed your mind with such things.

    Life is just a dream, nothing else, so make sure you’re dreaming nice, beautiful, diverse dreams that are also turning into reality. If you don’t like the concept of dreams, imagine life as a simulation where you can freely focus on the things that you wish without any emotional garbage.

    And if even that isn’t enough, imagine you’ve just woken up from the Matrix where it’s time for you to take full responsibility for your life and the code you’re running in your brain. If the code is not working and giving you the results you want, it’s your job to update it once you are an adult.

    Imagining life as a dream is only one way to update the code more easily, because it enables you to distance yourself from the reality and yourself. You stop taking everything so serious. For Elon Musk it’s just a computer simulation, so no wonder he can focus on creating rockets. It’s no big deal.

    And if you find the idea useless, you can luckily choose among many other tools that are at your disposal to play with your mindset. Happy and successful dreaming.