Major life stressors, such as the pandemic can reek habit on your mental health and cause anxiety to skyrocket. That doesn’t mean you need to be a victim of circumstances or a puppet on the stage of life. Humans have an amazing and essential capacity to adapt and grow through difficult circumstances.
We have lost the capacity for patience. We have lost the need to analyze information because someone in front of our screen will do it for us. Our internal processing atrophies when we deny its use. Sometime it has never been learned. Due to the constant influx of information, we often revert to external sources in which we are told everything we should think, see and believe. If we are not careful we essentially become a robot, fed what the external world tells us and then acting accordingly.
If you are a Christian, you have likely heard this message time and time again. “Lose yourself in the service to others.” If you are
How long, I wonder, how much time in this life, have I forfeited? Just a few minutes here and there, but has it been hours? Days? Even years now, that I gave to nothingness?
Our communication is not just convoluted at times, sometimes we communicate the complete opposite of what we want.
Automatic responses permeate our life and they are important. They reserve our brain power for when we encounter something we have to consciously address and can’t respond to automatically. However, when we respond automatically in a way we don’t like or isn’t appropriate, it can be frustrating. It can even lead us to believe that our response is beyond our control, but it’s not.
Science has taught us that simply the absence of a mother can be devastating to the growth and development of any baby. The lack of the tender touch of a mother’s arms can be fatal. There are challenges for sure, but our mission is not hard. We simply must be there. We simply must love. Mothers need only to extend open arms and accepting hearts to the precious children first placed in their arms as cold and crying infants before being wrapped in the warmth of love and care, or perhaps brought to those arms through the miracle of adoption.
Feeling no pain sounds like it would be amazing. Pain, however, is a communicator and when we find every means possible to avoid feeling that pain, we are figuratively gouging our eyes out. When we ignore, mask or hide pain we are choosing to ignore what our body and mind is attempting to communicate with us. By avoiding addressing pain, we cannot identify and fix the root cause of the pain.
Our culture has such unrealistic expectations for our men that rather than cry a tear over the heavy burdens they carry and tremendous pain they feel they turn to drugs, alcohol, high risk behaviors and suicide. Rather than encouraging men to embrace and talk about the pain, hardship and struggle of life, instead of seeing them weep, we send the message that we would rather they destroy themselves trying to be strong.
Emotions are powerful. While they sometimes seem beyond our control, as we begin to gain a greater awareness of our emotions, the events that lead to them, the thought process that is involved with them and the way they are elicited, we can begin to make changes to our environment and the way we think which will help us alter the automatic response that is associated with our emotional experience. While many emotional responses are a learned response from past experiences, we can change our learned response to be more inline with what we would like our emotions to be.
