3 Life Tests Many People Fail, According to My 89-Year-Old Neighbor

Everyday life is about mastering the little things

I love a scoop of wisdom from decades ago. I love hearing about life in older generations. So when another opportunity came up, I wasn’t saying no.

Recently, I caught up with an 89-year-old lady who visited her grandson, my next-door neighbor. Seeing she would leave in a couple of days, I cornered her for a late afternoon serving of life advice (one perk of working from home).

As a retired teacher, she’d seen it all. And with time on our hands, she went further and shared with me three of life’s biggest tests she’s noticed too many people fail.

The test of managing our wandering thoughts

Her first point was that people allow their wandering thoughts to harm them. And mountains of research support her claims.

It’s bad enough that many people get little downtime in the hustle culture, that’s itself a dangerous situation. However, during the day, we all get a few lucky breaks — a few minutes in a queue at the checkout, a half-hour waiting for our turn at the dentist’s, or a 45-minute commute home from work.

That’s usually some spare time to catch a break and some breath. But while at it, people sadly allow their thoughts to fly around uncontrolled.

Nothing particularly wrong with that, except that too often, those thoughts spiral down a negative, past-oriented slope. By default, some of those thoughts come back often and soon become ruminative thoughts.

However, experts caution you never want your ruminative thoughts to be negative. Negative thinking can lead to depression, anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem.

That’s why we need to get a hold of the random thoughts that spring to mind during the ideal times.

How to get better at it

Dr. Rachel Goldman, a psychologist and clinical assistant professor at the NYU School of Medicine, shares some insightful keys. She advises people to track their thoughts during idle times, identify, and eliminate the negative ones.

While these unhelpful thinking patterns differ, they often involve distortions of reality and irrational ways of looking at situations, she notes. Examples are “black and white thinking, overgeneralization, catastrophizing, and blaming.”

Of course, if that doesn’t help, you can take the next step of seeing an expert.

The test of following through on commitments to change

She noted how, over the years, she’s seen many people — mostly her students — make commitments to improve aspects of their (academic) lives but fail to follow through. But she said it transcends the walls of academia.

People always make powerful commitments but can’t find the power to follow through.

For example, 77% of people abandon their New Year’s resolutions within a week, 64% drop theirs within a month, and only 9% will follow through to the end of the year.

The numbers may vary by study, but the point reminds us that most people just can’t stay the course. Too many people.

Before we know it, we allow those commitments to die a slow, painful death. We revert to factory settings. And the cycle continues, year after year after year. But we must get better at that.

Again, it goes beyond New Year’s Resolutions. People start books but don’t finish, enroll in causes but drop out, start fitness programs but quit midway. It happens in almost every aspect of life.

How to get better at it

You can always use the fresh start effect: holidays, birthdays, the start of a week/month, etc. if there’s too much pressure on the New Year’s resolution. But experts stress the need to cultivate discipline above every other hack.

The test of communicating one’s feelings

She also recalled how some people’s inability to communicate their little feelings later left them with big problems. I realized the many occasions when I was firmly in that camp.

Have you ever read someone’s body language and realized something was off? And then you ask them what’s wrong, only to get the standard “nothing” shrug.

Others may even mask those feelings. Yet deep down, something, everything’s wrong. Yes, keeping those emotions close to the chest can feel safer, but it’s often not the healthiest option.

Bottling up your feelings strains your mental health, affects your physical relationships, and even causes you to adopt unhealthy coping mechanisms.

How to get better at it

It’s always better to find a positive outlet for those frustrations, those concerns, those grievances. One way to do that is to talk to someone — a partner, a confidant, a therapist.

My host gave me more than a scoop of wisdom from the past. These are present-day challenges many people still face — perhaps more so today.

Thanks to a deluge of round-the-clock negative news, our thoughts are more likely to follow in that direction. Also, the many distractions could force someone to veer off the road to change. And lastly, with people quick to label you as too sensitive if you express your feelings, some are slow to voice their discomfort.

But these are little tests we need to get better at. The alternative isn’t pleasing.

Before you go…….

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