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Mental Hygiene

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Cleaning Your Kitchen

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Making money and being successful in life is like cooking a meal. The ingredients are your ideas, but in the end, you have to get cooking. I went all over the internet getting great ideas on how to get ahead in life, but my mind was not ready to take those ingredients and turn them into the end goal. My kitchen was dirty meaning my mind wasn’t ready to turn those ideas into meals.

What Does it Mean to Clean One’s Kitchen?

I started using the phrase cleaning your kitchen a while now and don’t know if I made it up or got it from somewhere else. The kitchen in this sense is one’s mind. Like a real kitchen, I do my best cooking when the kitchen is clean from the start. When it comes to my mind, there are so many things that cloud my thoughts and act as noise that keeps my mind from working at maximum efficiency.

Really, this is what this site is all about. Getting the mind in a position so that it can do the things it is destined to do. I want to get where I want to go. I want to live life on my own terms, but until I clear out the mess in my mind, I will never be able to do so. I am, however, on the right track and I started with the biggest step which was me deciding that I was WILLING to do what it takes to start down this road. For me, it was to start taking accountability for my actions. I had a 20 year old DUI that I finally went to the courts to face the charges. I ended up doing jail time and I was on probation for a year and a half. I was told by many people at the time that I was treated unfairly, but I wouldn’t be where I am now without it. I’m not saying that everyone needs jail and a probation sentence to get thorough their mental hurdles. What I am saying is that a person may need to put themself in a position to encourage a change in behavior. So what could I have done to mitigate my shortcomings and get myself in this same position without having to involve the court system.

What Could/Should I Have Done Differently?

I see now the easiest thing I could have done was surrounded myself with people who were making their self better in some kind of way. A part of my sentence was to become a part of a sobriety program. Going through a program would have been a great place to start since I needed to get sober, but I wouldn’t have done it on my own. I had such a stigma about those programs that I would never have subjected myself to one.

Church could have been an option, but it could not have been the church I grew up in. I needed an entirely different environment. I had to fundamentally change everything, from friends, to habits, to where I went to church, to the books I read. They all needed to change, but I didn’t truly know that until I was on my path to mental fitness.

“I see now the easiest thing I could have done was surrounded myself with people who were making their self better”

Breaking Seal

Breaking the Seal: How To Get Derailed From Accomplishing Any Goal.

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Whether the goal is to quit smoking, cut junk foods, or anything else that takes work to achieve, sticking to the goal and not relenting to internal or external pressure is they key to success. This is the “Old Self” coming to seize control. The further along towards a goal we go, the more the old self wants to regain control and subvert progress. Old self is resilient and will always lurk until it finds a weak moment to pounce and regain its position as the one running the show. The first time a promise is broken to oneself is the most difficult, it only gets easier from there. No matter if that it was agonizing or easy, the first time is the most resistance the mind will put up. This makes coming back from the broken promise more difficult.            

           The easiest person for me to break a promise against is myself. With others there seems to be some moral obligation to fulfill what I’ve promised to do. With me, I have an easy time going against what I’ve set out to do. Why? I just racked my brain trying to find an answer, I thought I should have three things that came to mind. I thought they would come quickly, but the only thing I thought was that it is ok for me to be lied to which is an issue with worthiness. So why do I feel unworthy of having promises kept towards me?Whether the goal is to quit smoking, cut junk foods, or anything else that takes work to achieve, sticking to the goal and not relenting to internal or external pressure is they key to success. This is the “Old Self” coming to seize control. The further along towards a goal we go, the more the old self wants to regain control and subvert progress. Old self is resilient and will always lurk until it finds a weak moment to pounce and regain its position as the one running the show. The first time a promise is broken to oneself is the most difficult, it only gets easier from there. No matter if that it was agonizing or easy, the first time is the most resistance the mind will put up. This makes coming back from the broken promise more difficult. 

           
            I am capable of handling disappointment or is it that I expect to be disappointed and it is my way of fulfilling that expectation. Thinking about it, I believe it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I feel comfortable, in some twisted way, of being mistreated. It makes me comfortable and is probably a way of me not achieving excellence. Why? Because I am not comfortable with these feelings. My brain is not comfortable with achievement to this level, if I were to stay my commitments to myself it (my brain) would feel there is a threat to my wellbeing. The brain’s purpose is to keep us from being harmed so if it is fed the wrong information it will produce the wrong solution. It is seen all the time with athletes. If an athlete’s brain is not comfortable with a high level of success, he may post a scathing video online making a team think twice about drafting him, in a declared for draft situation. His mind will lead him to act in a way that is detrimental to his success because he is not psychologically ready for success. Not pre-draft, but afterwards at the onset of his career, Ryan Leaf comes to mind. He sabotaged his whole career because he was not ready for success.

            

            A lot of people see others who seemingly have it all and wonder how they can throw it all away. The change that needs to happen is not to delete their online profiles or if the person drinks too much, to stop going to bars or have liquor in the house. Though those may be good temporary fixes, they are nearly bandages and the source of the problem needs to be addressed to truly fix the problem.

            Breaking the seal can start out small. It is much easier to start with a little white lie than to jump right into the deep end. It is like the way you cook a live frog. When an action is done to sabotage oneself, it can take the urgency of trying to save one’s own life because, in a way, it is. Or at least that is how the mind sees it. The mind can be like a drama queen and think “if I fuck this up, I’ll just die.” It will not say it to its host like that, it will say things like, “you deserve to go out and get wasted after all the work you’ve done.” It is lying to you. The devil does not attack the heart first, it attacks your mind and it has you kill your heart.

Not to do list

The Not-To-Do List: Eliminate time wasters and bad habits

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I don’t know about you, but I can be creative when it comes to wasting time. My old standbys are social media, video games and online shopping. The biggest problem is I can feel like I’m actually being productive doing many of these activities. There are so many distractions nowadays and most of them are right there in the palm of our hands. Self-induced distractions, friends, family, and advertisers are all vying for a piece of our time. We’re lucky we have any time at all for ourselves.

What were the issues?

When I open Twitter or turn on a video game there is a feeling that washes over me. A small tinge of guilt that I have learned to block out and dismiss. It is still there lurking in the background chipping away at my happiness and esteem (have you ever felt that?). Still, there are time wasters like agreeing to meet when I really don’t want to that has become a habit. Finding a way to combat these, can save precious time, and consequently happiness and esteem can and will increase.

I wrote down a list of things that would curb those distractions and eliminate the guilt associated with them. I created a list of things I won’t do to increase my productivity. Bad habits, time-wasters, and saying yes to frivolous activities had to be written down and they needed to be read daily. Some were to be exercised in life and some pertained to a given situation. The first place I started was life.

Where I started.

I started with my phone. I swiped down from the top of the screen and looked at the number of app notifications. Most of them had no business interfering with my life. An online sale or an app alerting me that Lindsey ate crawfish for the first time was not necessary. I looked in the settings and saw what apps had permission to send me notifications and removed the unnecessary ones. If I wanted to see what’s going on in that world, I would hop on and check it out. I don’t blame the companies, they are trying to increase and maintain their customer base, which is fine. They do not pay any price as it is all automated, so I stopped around 90% of them.

My list contains about 10 items for anything I feel guilty about or that I must rationalize to do. If I can’t do something, I let them know I am busy or that I wish I could. I really hope they have fun doing it. I wish I could find what they are doing to fulfill something inside me. If it doesn’t move me then I politely decline. I eliminated the rationalization of “well, I’ll do it just this one time”. The first time I break a pact with myself is the hardest, it only gets easier after that. 

            Other things on my list include:

  • No caffeine after 4 pm
  • Many restrictions on playing the football video game I like
  • No rabbit holes on social media or YouTube
  • Don’t stay up past 11 pm during the week
  • No email before 4 pm (For important emails, I have a VIP list that lets those select senders through)
  • No social media before 4 pm

The goal.

             I’m not 100% on these things, but they are what I know will move me forward. I strive for progress and not perfection as I am human and this is life. So, in your life what are some of the things you could implement today? What will increase your inner peace and make you more productive? Whatever it is, write it down, and don’t fret when you’re the last person to find out about the crawfish.

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