When one finally gathers the courage to pull together all parts of your life after you hit a slump and go into hibernation, barely surviving and keeping it together, there comes a day when you decide to pull it together.
This usually shows itself in the form of a day where you wake up and decide you are done mopping, sulking, complaining about your life, or simply existing. You decide to go on a cleaning rampage, decide to draft a long to-do list and do more in a week than you have done in two months. This usually marks the extreme high, after enduring an extreme low. Both these experiences become the norm, and you start operating in extremes. You are completely deleting your social media pages, feeling overwhelmed, or having terrible eating habits and an inability to do more than is required of you. Or, you are doing everything right, smashing goals and operating at your maximum.
Although the highs are amazing, and that is when you can get so much done, finding a balance in life is truly important. Operating at two extremes results in instability, which calls for balancing. To find the middle ground from which to operate to find balance in your life.
1. Work on extreme behaviour
Human beings have impulse as a response to matters around them, and while some people are born with an ingrained nature to control the feeling, most have to adopt mental willpower to control impulsive urges. When one reacts impulsively to extreme behaviour it is usually because one ignored prior opportunities to resolve a matter implacably. Impulsive behaviour is an extreme opposite and can show itself in extreme behaviour without thinking through the action and it’s long term consequences.
One would, for example, delete all your social media platforms because you are overwhelmed by information. When your body had been giving you warnings that you need to decrease your social media usage, you then take the much-needed break after deleting all the social media pages, only to find yourself in the same situation four months down the line, and then you delete them again. Showing that how you remedied the problem was extreme, and not one that can be maintained. Finding the healthy route in the situation would be a learning discipline in social media usage by putting a time cap on how much time you spend on it. It is the more difficult route to take, but the more rewarding and sustainable in the long run.
2. Find the balance
Finding a balance sounds harder to do then it is. When you think about your life, and where you depict characteristics of extreme behaviour, think of where the middle is to the polar opposite. If you find that you have a hard time expressing your feelings and are unable to speak about your emotions, and would generally have an outburst to open up. How about teaching yourself to share little by little till you find the middle ground. If you find that you are incredibly clingy and possessive with the people you love, how about teaching yourself to ease off when your emotions are heightened till you can find the middle ground.
Finding a balance in life is in recognizing the extremes, and easing your way to the middle ground one small step at a time.
3. Master yourself
Often times what you feel and the reality of what is happening can be mismatched. Our feelings primarily impact how we receive formation and our perceptions can be clouded. We lean towards the truth that feeds what we feel, such that you can receive an honest answer as rejection because it feeds the feelings of rejection you already feel. You could buy the sugar-induced chocolate after committing to a sugarless diet because it feeds your feelings of dejection.
Understanding your triggers and why you operate the way you do, is the first step to mastering yourself. You must be able to understand yourself, in order to understand why you function the way you do.
It is no longer enough to operate from a place of ‘that’s just who I am’ – the question is ‘why are you the way you are?’
Here’s to journeying towards healthier habits: one small step at a time. From one powerhouse to another
Love,
Mavis
Find me on www.mavisbraga.com