Self-Improvement

Jan 20, 2024

Life may seem like it’s going smoothly for a while but then it can all fall apart.

Maybe there isn't necessarily anything bad happening to you, but you just feel confused.

Almost like you're living life on autopilot. However that doesn't capture the whole picture.

The things you've been doing aren’t bringing you the same joy or results as they did previously.

Or you stopped doing those things and you don't know why.

You had a system in your life and that system suddenly failed.

Or maybe it’s that you know that your meant for more, but you cant seem to take action.

You’ve become a victim of whatever you think is standing in your way, so you distract yourself with modern addictions.

Can’t Help Myself

Most people will have the perspective that they’re doing something wrong. Or they adopt a sense of helplessness. As if there is nothing they can do to change things for good.

When these negative thoughts creep in, they bring emotions that make you feel bad about yourself. You do the bad habits even though you don't want to. You also may end up procrastinating on the things you should be doing.

A part of you knows what you should do but everything feels pointless anyways.

You may have seen this piece of artwork made by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu called "Can’t help myself"

"Can’t help myself" is a piece of artwork where this robot arm is given the task of keeping the leaking red hydraulic fluid within a certain perimeter.

The fluid never stops spreading, leading to a neverending cycle for the robot.

To top it off, the fluid looks like blood, giving it this sort of eerie feeling.

There are tons of speculations about what it is supposed to represent and I think most people will view it from the perspective of the actual name: "can’t help myself"

As if no matter what you do, your efforts will be wasted.

This is originally what I thought too. The routine that I had been following for months fell apart.

I had too much work and not enough time for self-care or learning. I felt lost, drained, and a little bit sad too.

I tried to ignore the feeling but as I did, I found myself making bad decisions that I normally wouldn't. Which nearly led me to a big mistake. I also stopped doing the good habits, using lack of time as my reasoning.

Psychic Entropy: Disorder Of The Mind

Let's go back to that robot from earlier, what if we could view it from a different perspective?

From the lens of entropy.

Some of you may recognize this word from your chemistry class. But it has a meaning outside of thermodynamics.

Entropy is a measure of disorder and it affects all aspects of our daily lives. Some say it's nature’s tax. If you don’t control entropy, it will increase over time. Energy disperses, and systems dissolve into chaos.

Similar to Murphy's law in a way.

Psychic entropy, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a disorder of the mind.

"Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals." -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The self is just your identity, or you could describe it as your egoic mind.

It’s who you think you are.

This influences everything from your thoughts and emotions to the actions you take.

The self is what brings you a sense of peace in your life. Whatever you identify as makes up the self. Even if that identity is something that is objectively bad. And you will feel threatened if something tries to take that sense of self away from you.

Let's look at mental illness as an example. After getting through all of my own mental health problems, I've noticed a few things about people who suffer from it.

1.It’s part of who they are and their actions reflect someone who is suffering.  But they seem okay with it.

When you're in a negative vibration with anything, (anger, depression, self-pity) those emotions will take over your thoughts. Eventually, you'll identify with them. By identifying with the pain, you're feeding more energy to it and it can become almost impossible to feel anything else for an extended period of time.

This is what happens when you revolve your identity and personality around pain. And I'm not saying that you aren’t allowed to feel pain. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't be constantly carrying around negative energy from something that you have no control over.

Something that doesn't exist. The past.

The way I'm speaking right now might offend some people.

This is because it’s part of their identity to be constantly in pain. In a way, it brings them peace. This is also why people like to listen to sad music when their sad.

This is essentially the victim mindset. You feel like all your efforts are worthless so there's no point in trying. You adopt the mentality of a survivor and carry that with you wherever you go.

When people like me, try to take that away from you, you resist.

2.They glorify mental illness.

I watched a video by geeze louise, who brought to my attention that people should stop joking about their trauma and illness.

How many of you use jokes as a coping mechanism for your mental health problems?

How many of those core core videos have you watched?

How much sad music do you have in your playlist?

This is not healing. This is all just you resisting change.

Opting for comfort in those hardships that make you who you are. Or who you think you are. Reliving that experience over and over again gives you peace because its familiar.

Disappear

You need to eliminate all the distractions. If you scatter your attention (psychic energy), you can't gain understanding of your current situation.

Pull back from all the instantly gratifying activities and the internet if possible and take a break from people if you have to.

You may need to do a complete dopamine detox for a few weeks to level your mind and come at this from a state of clarity.

Especially if indulging in cheap dopamine is what got you into this situation in the first place.

Your attention is your trump card in this game of life if used wisely.

But your mind can only process so much information at a time.

Even if you're consuming good content that is conducive to your goals, you may not be taking action on those things.

Its comfortable to sit and fantasize about your ideal self but uncomfortable to actually take the first step.

You'll end up building an identity of someone who knows what they should do but doesn't take action; making you feel bad when you aren’t making progress.

Aware that there is a problem in your life, but not aware of how to fix the problem.

The real clarity comes when you hear something that you feel may be beneficial for you and applying it right away. Like the steps that I'm giving you right now.

Retrospective Analysis

Pull out a journal. Here you'll pinpoint everything that is going wrong in your life right now. This is the problem.

An easy way to do this if you dont know what to write is to ask yourself:

"What am I feeling right now, and why do I think I feel this way?"

When I did this, it helped me identify the emotions I was feeling at that moment, and helped me retrace my steps to find out the source of the problem.

If you think far back enough, you'll take note of the main underlying factor that caused your life to fall out of control.

Maybe your routine just isn't working anymore and you need a refresh.

For me, I worked to much over December and didn't take care of myself. I wasn't even properly eating.

After a while I started to experience symptoms of burnout. I fell into bad habits and made bad decisions.

Those were the problems, and me overworking was the source of it.

So write down everything that is currently happening.

The Comeback

Once you know whats going wrong, you can develop a plan.

Take a look at everything that is going wrong and write out every action that you need to take to get things back in order.

For me, it was to get my finances in order and remove myself from the internet (hence why I've been gone for weeks). I also stopped checking YouTube Studio.

The views and comments were affecting my mental health. But, I’ll talk about that another time. Lastly, I started eating three meals a day, even if it was at the expense of the quality of my work. I also practiced self-care and engaged in deep, restful activities like long walks and meditation.

For you, it might be similar things.

Things that demand time, which is why I recommended the detox.

As I wrote this I was still in this phase of getting things back together.

I gave myself another week to get some deep work done without spending much time online and posting content.

Im also experimenting and developing a new system to get what I need to do in a day, done without working all day.

Right now I’m feeling amazing. I have clarity for the new year, drive to go after my goals and i’m living purposefully.

And I’ve made the decision to start a second channel following something ive been passionate about for a long time. Tech and lifestyle.

Ive always wanted to make videos about tech and also just cinematic storytelling videos too since I was a little kid. I looked up to people like Marquez Brownlee, Raymond Warner, Casey Neistat, Peter McKinnon, Seth’s Bike Hacks and many others and have always been impressed by the camera work.

This year that’s something that I’m actually going to try out and use the skills that i’ve developed thus far to help me.

Anyways, 

I had grown accustomed to working 4 hours a day for a while and that was the baseline, but in December, I was working closer to 8 hours of deep work. Not like the typical 9-5 shallow work days where you get a good 2 hours of actual work done and the rest is just distracted and low quality.

Im talking about deep work with lever moving tasks that drain your psychic energy. Once of the heaviest, being coaching calls.

I hit a new high in income but that way of working is not sustainable. So I need to develop a way to get more work done and in less time.

In the past few days, I've systemized a way to get all my important work done in about 5 hours.

This was after eliminating the things that were sucking up my time.

You don't have to live your life like that robot. You can help yourself.

It will take constant effort and accountability for a while.

Recognize and confront the aspects of your life that may be causing you distress or dissatisfaction.

As you gain clarity through your retrospective analysis, you will control your psychic energy.

Look beyond your current situation and don’t get stuck in the emotional thought patterns it brings you.

Use that psychic energy to order your mind and your life.

You’re in this for the long game. It wont be the last time that things fall apart.

But staying resilient and taking action on what you can do now will

leave you better equipped to handle things in the future.

That is all for today.

Be sure to check out 14 Days To Purpose to build a daily journaling habit, and gain direction in life through questions you’ve never asked yourself…

Enjoy your week. See ya.

-Abraham