You Are in Charge of Your Emotions
Not the weather or the stock market
I’ve always been a happy go lucky sort of guy, and other than a small handful of periods in my life, I don’t really have to think and battle with my mental health.
I don’t know if I’m just in one of those periods right now, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my own emotions recently and I’ve been trying to be really conscious to not let myself fall into some downward mood spirals.
And instead of just trying to will myself into feeling happy and chipper again, I’m trying to really think about what are the things in my life which are contributing to the cloud over me, dissect them and think about which ones matter and which ones I can personally control. In fact they quite neatly fall into 4 main categories, so let’s review them.
Don’t matter, not in your control. This is all of the silly shit like the weather or a thing you said in a conversation 7 years ago. They are what they are, and sometimes your brain will think they matter loads and worry about it, so it’s important to figure out which thing fall into this category and consciously say to yourself “sure, it might rain tomorrow but that doesn’t actually affect me at all, my mood is independent of weather”.
Matter, not in your control. So this is quite a large group of things including the stock market, covid, war, health of loved ones etc. There’s loads of important stuff in life which you personally cannot change at all. Sometimes shitty things happen in life and it’s important to recognize that it was not your fault and it truly is just part of life. Don’t let the bad parts of life define you. Life is not what happens to you, it’s how you react to it.
Don’t Matter, in your control. This group really doesn’t matter, but don’t let yourself worry about them just because they are in your control. You get to wear whatever clothes you want and eat whatever you want. These things don’t matter so just make sure you don’t get stuck up on them. Be who you want to be and live the life you want to. They don’t matter really.
Matter, in your control. Okay this is the stuff you should actually dedicate your mental bandwidth to. But importantly it’s hard to know that until you’ve put everything into these groups. Before you do this exercise you’re putting priority on the other groups. De-prioritize those things, if you stressing about a certain thing will actually make your life better because that thing is stress worthy and you can actually change it, then do it! If this is the case then it’s not even stress it’s more like planning. Change or fix the thing to the best of your ability, such that you can relegate it to not being a issue anymore, or at least not one that matters.
I think it’s too easy in life to think that things are happening to you, whereas in reality things just happen and sometimes you get a good run of things and sometimes you get a bad run of things. But it’s important to remember that they’re not happening to you, they’re just happening and you happen to be involved in these things.
Look life can be super shitty but it can also be incredibly beautiful and amazing. It’s a big spectrum, and sometimes when you’re too far on one end it’s easy to forget that the other side exists.
Note: I originally wrote this piece with a mixture of “I” and “you” because this is sort of a part diary and part blog for external consumption. I changed them al to “you”s such that it hopefully makes some form of sense, but please know that I’m not trying to write self help bullshit, this is literally just catharsis for me.
17th July 2022
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