Self | Psychology | Health
Most Important Skill for Life and Health
Don’t become a victim of the conventional approaches
Every instinct that encourages you to do something challenging is a good enough motivation for meeting the odd demands of life.
Your health is an abstract subjective measure of your life at any given moment. Higher levels of health mean that you are living your life as you should. Nobody can give you the exact recipe for a good life. Finding what suits you best — is a process of self-discovery and a new adventure every morning.
There exists no right and wrong decision when it comes to saving your life and improving your health. When you, knowingly or unknowingly, twist reality inside your mind, you start feeling the worthlessness of life, then it is necessary to do something to rise above this inner storm, to get on top of it, to crush it rather than getting crushed by it.
If you cannot motivate yourself out of these inner storms, you will be forced to live in worse circumstances and less happy states of being. If you are not motivated enough to live a healthy enjoyable life, it will lead you to live a life that consists of streams of consciousness of other people who are trying to reach their dreams in their own weird ways; you’d be a follower of many on social media. Your enjoyment of life will be a second-hand experience at best — a mellowed version of what your life could have been.
Sometimes you have to suspend cultural etiquettes. If the apartment building, where you live, is on fire and you are taking a shower, you are unclothed, and you remain inside the bathroom, you will only get burnt alive. At such a time, you have to run to save your life and to pay heed to the cultural norms when you are at a safe distance from the burning building.
Our life is not weak and fragile. It is the opposite of it, it is antifragile. Our life not only reestablishes its equilibrium when forced into unconventional challenges but actually improves itself.
Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a scholar and mathematical statistician, in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, defines antifragility in these words, “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
The antifragile gets better with stress, shocks, adventure, risk, and challenges. ~Professon Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If you have wasted your time not pursuing your dreams, you may feel weak, thinking that you could have learned some useful skills, enjoyed some minor successes, or done something that could have empowered you from within. Your power and health are ultimately born inside your own body and mind, and every event or material thing is manifested into reality later because of your initiative.
When you start living joyfully, chasing your dreams, without any burden on your conscience, then your body starts producing pleasure hormones, your immune system improves, and you start to become healthier in mind and body. Happiness is the feeling you have when your emotional mind is clear. Have faith that you are going to improve with every new completed challenge — we are antifragile.
You have to replace the visions of no-love with visions of love. For changing your visions of a bad future life into a good future life, you have to do all that you can possibly do. You have to be creative here, you have to ignore the traditional norms and mores.
If you think your life is fragile, you will not be able to initiate a chain of events that ends in the restoration of your health. This belief — that you are going to bounce back — is the only thing that can cure you of your daily ills. If you cannot feel happy in the present circumstances, it may be due to the people with whom you are living right now.
If you have tried everything, and the people around you don’t care about your happiness, you’ll have to develop the skill of suspending cultural niceties and confront them. If neither your office colleagues nor your partner cares about your emotional wellbeing, it is time to realize that you have to start taking care of yourself.
You have to perform a series of actions for the sake of wellbeing, and to let yourself enjoy life in a way you truly wish. If you care too much about the fragile balance of life, about other people, their sensibilities, their world views, or their emotions, you will ultimately make yourself sick and diseased.
If you feel that you have to go home to a person who does not care about your wellbeing or if the coming weekends frighten you into thinking that you have to stay home for two days, it may mean something is not right. Your home is a place where you are supposed to enjoy life, be comfortable, feel emotional warmth, be calm, be alright, sleep and feel rested. The same reasoning applies to your job as well; your office is a place where you can work comfortably and express your creativity, artistic or technical.
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” ~ Allen Ginsberg
Takeaway
You have enormous control over how you feel about your life. Your thoughts and actions can make you healthy and happy. Don’t act as if you are weak and fragile. You are antifragile.
You must, at least, try to live a life. You have to show an unusual drive and a degree of madness. Please do not just accept the traditional wisdom of fate. Try to create your luck with your initiatives and actions.
Your unconventional initiatives in a direction can start a chain of events that may, in a seemingly miraculous way, lead to health, wealth, and prosperity. However, another conventional move, or inaction, may lead you to a life with no people in it, nobody to talk to, and utter confusion about why you should be doing anything at all in your life.
Don’t become a victim of the conventional approaches, and don’t play so safe that you miss all the fun in life. Reclaim your creative control over your own life and shake things a bit.