8 Ways You're Driving Yourself CRAZY! Part II

 

A continuation and conclusion of our the previous post 8 ways you're driving yourself CRAZY! Part I.

5.  The maintenance of lies.

What’s the best part of telling the truth?  You don’t have to keep track of everything you’ve said.  Quite simply, the truth doesn’t cease to exist just because you ignore it.  It takes constant care and maintenance to hide reality behind a lie.  The truth may be hard to deal with, it may irritate you, but it will always set you free. In the end someone is going to tell the truth anyway.  The only question is:  Who do you want to tell it, you or them?

6.  Procrastinating until there’s an emergency.

To resist at the beginning is always the easiest choice to make, and it’s also the only choice that guarantees you will never reach the end result you desire. The thing we all do best to drive ourselves crazy is to do nothing when something needs to get done.  The way to counteract this is simple: engage deeply in work that needs to be completed. Your time is now.  There’s no price too great for feeling accomplished.  There’s no price too great for feeling alive.  And if you don’t do it now, you probably never will.  You know the thing you’ve been putting off the longest?  That thing you’ve been procrastinating on for the last several weeks?  That’s the thing you need to start doing today.  That’s the thing you need to start before going to bed tonight. The time to start is not when the crap hits the fan.  The time to start is now.  Period.

7.  Focusing on what you don’t like.

What you focus on grows stronger in your life.  When you focus on a person’s wonderful qualities, you have a wonderful relationship with them.  When you focus on a person’s not so wonderful qualities, you have a not so wonderful relationship with them.  When you focus on benefits of a situation, you get to take advantage of them.  When you focus on the drawbacks, you gain nothing but a frown.

The bottom line is that you see only what you want to see, and what you see determines where you wander in life.  Your attitude is a little thing that makes a massive difference.  Don’t be one of the crazy ones who makes it a point not to smile.

8.  Your expectations.

Life will never live up to your expectations, unless your expectations are simply to embrace life as it unfolds and make the very best of it.  You have to lower your expectations and increase your appreciation to improve your happiness.  Know that everything is in impeccable order whether you understand it or not.  How you react determines how good it turns out for you.

Something that is really difficult, but totally worth it, is giving up on how you thought it was ‘supposed to be.’  The most beautiful part of this practice is simply returning to the peaceful feeling of being and working with what’s available to you in the moment.  This peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you had expected.

So embrace life’s surprises.  Smile and realize that it’s far better to be pleasantly surprised than hopelessly disappointed.