Limit your unhappiness.
We all go through cycles of ups and downs. Emotional high points are followed by low points. Sometimes we hit plateaus that are emotionally bland. Other times we can get bogged down in difficult feelings.
When the good times are present, hopefully we savor and celebrate them. The more we focus on the good, the more we recognize its presence in our lives.
Conversely, when we’re in an emotional slump, it can be challenging to see anything but the bad. We likely feel miserable and each new difficulty we encounter just reinforces the general auru of pain that seems to surround us. We’re stuck.
When I was in a similar funk early in my relationship with Nate Hall, he asked me a truly important question. “How long do you want to be sad?”
The question really caught my attention. I responded: “I don’t know, but I’ll think about it.”
I certainly had some hard issues to deal with at that point in my life, but my life experience wasn’t going to improve if I kept putting my focus on the bad. From that point on, if I started to feel sad or pity myself, I’d stop and think. “Is this really what I want to do? Will it make me any happier?” Not surprisingly, things got better for me fairly quickly.
Certainly, we don’t want to stuff difficult emotions. We need to feel and process them. But at the time Nate asked his inspired question, I was just repeating the same emotional loop. If was time for me to break the cycle.
Today’s message reminds me that I always have a choice of how much I wish to suffer. I love life more when I make sure I take time to care for myself with positivity and engage in fun activities.
Please reflect and share. What difficult experience my you benefit from releasing now?