Contents

1. Introduction
2. Allowing negative emotions to control you
3. A lack of strong personal boundaries
4. Taking on more than you should
5. Conclusion

Introduction

Those who take self-improvement seriously often find themselves wondering (and worrying) about what to do to improve themselves. Oftentimes, changes like a good morning routine, a better diet, and more exercise are thought of as the necessary elements for a healthier and happier life.

A good routine, diet, and exercise is extremely important to boost your overall health and productivity, and these factors certainly form a solid foundation for a healthy life that’s built to last (find out more here). Despite this, there are many lesser known factors that often have a great impact on our lives (albeit indirectly) and can actually undermine our positive efforts towards health and well-being.

Oftentimes, these negative factors are emotional and/or psychological in nature, which is what makes it more difficult to handle, considering they require a different kind of approach in order to be dealt with. Additionally, considering they affect us indirectly, their impact can be a lot more insidious and therefore capable to cause a lot more damage than if we were able to perceive them directly.

In this week’s post I’ll present three common mistakes that can undermine your progress towards wellbeing and I’ll also highlight also how to deal with them.

Allowing negative emotions to control you

When we think health, we often think about physical health. It’s no surprise then, that our journey towards personal health and wellbeing often starts with changes that improve our physical health.

This is a great starting place, and of course, physical health is extremely important (even Socrates, the grand-father of Western philosophy, was known to emphasise the importance of physical fitness in relation to mental health). However, I cannot stress enough the key role that mental health plays in relation to our physical health.

For clarification, mental health does not only include maintaining the integrity of our psychological wellbeing, but it also involves the active pursuit to develop ourselves psychologically – indeed, to embark onto the journey of individuation, in the paraphrased words of Carl Jung, the 20^th century depth psychologist.

For the sake of our psychological wellbeing, we have exercise a degree of wariness when we go about our daily life in case we are presented with potential threats. These threats don’t always come from our surroundings; it’s just as common for them to originate within us. This is particularly the case with the negative emotions we experience.

For example, how many of us enter into a state of road rage when the driver (or God forbid, a cyclist) in front of us, holds us up for a few seconds. This is a prime example of a lack of emotional control, especially when we consider how out of proportion the emotional response usually is to the actual situation.

Another useful example is ranting about something that has ticked us off. Though ranting feels like a relief as we are releasing a flood of negative emotion, it ultimately serves us no benefit as we are simply allowing ourselves to wallow in negative emotion without actually doing anything about the issue at hand (at least in the moment).

The solution

Control over our emotions has been an age-old practice, and the Stoics (and many other schools of philosophy) were ardent supporters of (emotional) self-mastery.

The first step in combatting a lack of emotional control is to understand the significance of our emotional outbursts – ask yourself the following: why do I feel so strongly about something that is quite insignificant and most likely will have no impact on my life in a day’s time.

Oftentimes it’s our lack of awareness – the fact that these emotional outbursts are actually really harmful to our overall wellbeing – that is to blame here.

However, if awareness by itself does not fix the issue another technique may be useful: try to appreciate the situation from an objective perspective. You’re the one that might be feeling road rage in that moment, but is it truly warranted?

Let’s say: you like to drive fast, but the person in front of you does not, what gives you the right to feel such anger towards the person in the car in front of you that is driving slow; after all, you are both equals on the road.

A lack of strong personal boundaries

Another common occurrence that sets us back in terms of psychological wellbeing and development is a lack of appropriate personal boundaries. Oftentimes, this lack of boundaries is the result of people pleasing behaviour, which usually has its roots in a person’s psychological makeup.

Though it is important to be a team-player and to be able to give, the people pleaser feels compelled to cater to others out of a specific self-perceived insufficiency or weakness in character, which gives this behaviour a pathological spin. Perhaps they grew up in a household with domineering parents, and as a result were taught from a young age onwards to always give in. Otherwise, they might experience low self-esteem and value the needs and wants of those around them more so than their own needs and wants.

The lack of appropriate boundaries, either at work or in one’s personal life, sets one up for exploitation. The purpose of boundaries is to create a set of physical and psychological barriers that serve to protect our personal interests when dealing with the external world.

Having appropriate personal boundaries is a key component of being a confident and productive individual; without them we would be unable to operate efficiently in the world. Moreover, having appropriate boundaries also plays a key role in the way others see us.

As such, we are much more likely to respect and admire someone that knows what their boundaries are and is not afraid to signal that to those around them. Indeed, strong boundaries are a sign of confidence and assertiveness and demand a degree of respect.

The solution

The only way to solve any issues experienced from a lack of personal boundaries, is to set personal boundaries. Of course, this is easier said than done.

Setting personal boundaries can be extremely difficult for some people. It takes a certain degree of courage and assertiveness to stop someone from getting too close, be it physically or psychologically.

The first step to correcting this behaviour is to recognise the fundamental need of boundaries; they prevent exploitation, give you breathing room, and give you a degree of agency that is sure to help you build your self-esteem.

Once you have recognised the need for personal boundaries, go about your day and recognise instances where setting boundaries would be helpful. Simply recognising them in your daily life gets you one step closer to actually implementing them.

Once you have some experience recognising the instances where personal boundaries can be effective, it’s time to actually set them. Perhaps you have a colleague at work that is a bit too keen about gossiping about others and you feel uncomfortable with it.

Take your stand and demonstrate, either verbally or through body language, that you are not interested in partaking. Practice your technique of putting a barrier between yourself and the offending party regularly – et voila, you have become a master of setting boundaries.

Taking on more than you should

I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again, modern life is complex. A great majority of us live a fast life: we are continuously running around trying to fit in as many things as possible in the measly twenty-four hours that we are given each day.

Whereas we once lived an unconcerned life (as children), we are now constantly worried about every single thing. It might be striving for a promotion at work, worrying about a rise in the bills we pay, or perhaps car troubles – there is always something going on, or going wrong. It takes its toll.

We now consider the above as the baseline of our lives. Now, if we were to add anything else on top of our existing troubles, we’d most likely collapse! The problem is that many of us have become so accustomed to the fast life that it has become the new normal. As such, all these tasks and errands seem like the minimum thing we ought to accomplish in a given day.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is a sure-fire way to burn out. For this reason it’s important that we take a personal stock of the number of commitments we are juggling at any given time. After all, there is nothing more important than our health.

The solution

This particular habit can be a common consequence of a lack of appropriate personal boundaries, and solving the issue of a lack of personal boundaries is likely to improve this issue as well.

Additionally, in order to deal with overburdening ourselves, we have to understand that as human beings we have a limited amount of time and energy we can spend on tasks and productivity in a given day. Though work and other commitments would love to demand our full attention, twenty-four hours a day, it is highly detrimental to both our health and our productivity to push ourselves past a certain limit.

This limit will differ for everyone, and it is important that we understand where our limit lies. As such, I would recommend experimenting and listening to what your body and mind have to tell you, especially in stressful times. Sometimes it’s good to be selfish!

Signs such as the ones listed below can point to an impending burn-out:

• Feeling tired all the time
• Feeling overwhelmed
• Feeling less optimistic about work and life
• Physical ailments such as frequent headaches and body aches.
• Losing interest in fun activities
• Losing the desire to connect and socialise with others

Conclusion

It’s all to easy to overlook common but altogether negative factors that are setting us back as we go about our daily lives. I’m certain that we’ve all been guilty of the points listed in this post, as they are very human things to do.

However, at the end of the day, it’s important that we recognise the role that our psychological wellbeing plays in our life (or at least the role it should play in our life), especially as our mental health is intricately tied up to our physical health.

It is for this reason that the above points (and the numerous other ones not mentioned in this post) are solved, or at least minimised – so as to minimise their negative impact on our health, but more importantly, to create happier versions of ourselves.