It starts with changing your relationship with pain.
Bad things just happen and we’re left with the task of getting through the pain and doing our best to heal from it so we can not only go about our lives with minimal suffering but also hopefully grow and evolve from it.
And then there’s another kind of suffering. The self-inflicted kind.
It comes from:
- constantly entertaining negative, self-limiting thoughts that chip away at our self-worth, confidence and happiness every single day.
- choosing to look at the world through glasses tainted by the hurt, injustice and cruelty that others have inflicted on us, and inflicting the same on others.
- allowing others to dictate our path, which creates a lot of unhappiness in the process, instead of taking on the difficult but necessary task of standing up for ourselves.
- giving in to self-destructive behaviours that wreak havoc on our well-being, work and relationships.
- letting fear control us, keeping us in stagnation, holding us back from adventure, learning and growth.
- **allowing ourselves to ruminate endlessly on the past and worry about the future.
Once they take hold, we end up losing ourselves in a never-ending cycle of painful mental patterns that keep us stuck in our own heads, making us feel helpless and trapped, as if the world’s closing in on us.
I know these feelings very well because I’m guilty of allowing all three to enable my own self-inflicted suffering for the longest time.
But these days, the realization that one negative thought has caused me to spiral into a bad mental state hits me relatively quickly, and this awareness in itself helps me recalibrate so I don’t agonize (and suffer) needlessly.