Realizing I am a Dynamic System Changed my Life.
+4 tips to change yours.
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For most of my life I was desperate to change; knowing deep within that if I didn’t overcome the obstacles of my life (bi-polar, addiction, trauma, dealing with my sexual identity, growing up in poverty) I’d drown.
I love research and learning so I gathered plenty of perspectives, tools, and methods to try and create lasting change, but nothing stuck.
I’d work on my nutrition or mental health one hack at a time. I’d try to journal or I’d get obsessed with yoga for a few weeks. I’d focus in on something specific: meditation, breathwork, a particular writing process, dopamine levels, etc. I’d take them to the extreme and when my life didn’t change I’d move on to the next silver bullet.
In a way, it’s what we’re conditioned to do. We’re taught to consume miracle drugs, celebrity sponsored workouts, scientific breakthroughs in our diet. Our expectations are high and our patience short. The narrative of our society and the limited focus of the brain promises us that if we can just “fix this one thing” life will be good.
We look at ourselves as singular agents tasked with making all the right choices, in this case finding the thing or technique that will fix us.
But when I tried that, finding one thing after another, it didn’t work for me. An aspect of my life would move forward while everything else broke down. When I’d shift to work on that breakdown, the habit I thought I’d finally locked in would fall away too.
It wasn’t until I put all the pieces together in effective daily habits that life began to shift.
Through this work I overcame:
- Anxiety
- Chronic Depression
- PTSD
- Manic Episodes
- Codependency
- Alcoholism
- Cigarettes
- Marijuana Dependency
- Being too scared to come out to my family
- Being too scared to do the work I know is right for me
As you can see, I’ve had plenty of struggles. Some of them took years to overcome. Some of them have simply melted away…
