Can you imagine an athlete in the middle of a 200-metre race not sprinting as good as she wanted, thereby deciding to restart? That’s what we do all the time. Restart whenever something goes wrong. As if everything is supposed to be perfect. As if nothing could possibly go wrong. As if failure is not part of the journey. There is a difference between restarting from scratch and restarting from experience. You’re restarting from scratch if you keep making the same mistakes. You’re restarting from experience if you keep making new mistakes.
The Illusion of Restarting
The truth is, restarting is really an illusion. We’ve just decided in our minds that we are restarting when you and I know that we cannot rewind life. Life is like an online video game. You can’t pause it. As you throw all previous progress out the window and start afresh for the 1000th time, know that time itself never started afresh. It simply kept moving as you while it away.
Perhaps, that’s what we ought to do. Keep moving no matter what. Always remember this; there is more progress sticking to something worthwhile – not matter how long it takes – than hopping from one thing to another, starting from scratch every time. Try the same core idea from different angles, approaches and procedures. It’s better to try one thing 1000 times than try different things 1000 times. Persistence is key, so stick to one core idea.
You Don’t Need To Figure It All Out
The good news is that you don’t need to figure it all out before you start. The Western world popularizes the idea of figuring it all out right before you start. They tell you to write down your goals for the year and have a detailed plan on how you’ll achieve it. Thus, people write to the utmost detail what they will be doing each day for the entire year. That is too rigid, my dear.
Looking back over the year, we don’t even remember into detail what happened each day. If our past is that blurry, how much more the future? See! Live one day at a time. It’s the days that add up to make a year. Don’t count the days; make the days count.
Don’t Restart; Rejuvenate
The reason why we keep restarting is not just because we want it to be perfect till the end. It’s because there’s a rush of enthusiasm whenever we start something. Restarting gives us fresh energy, vitality and optimism. Subject to the law of diminishing returns, the energy from the beginning slowly fizzles out till we are back where we last stumbled.
As a matter of fact, it is easy to get addicted to the idea of restarting. Feeling too cluttered? Let’s clear everything and restart. Why not simply organize them and continue? Stuck in old bad habits? Let’s clear everything and restart. Why not consciously create new good habits and move on with life? If you need a new zeal and ambition, don’t restart. Rejuvenate. You gain new strength to overcome the situation you’re in at the moment. Rather than running away from it by restarting.
So instead of quitting the marathon only to start over again, why not face your insecurities? For some of us, this is the message we ought to hear. You don’t need to wait for another year to put your life together. Don’t quit, yes. But quit restarting if you really want to make it to the finish line. Perhaps, it is by quitting this restart that you’ll break your cycle of failure and face your real underlying problems and weaknesses.
Happiness is an emotion that takes its root deep within our being. The human body secretes and circulates about 50 different hormones. These hormones include growth hormones, male and female hormones (hormones that produce secondary sexual characteristics in our body), stress hormones, sleep hormones and many others. In fact, hormones are chemical substances that are important in every activity within the human body. Consider hormones to be the magic spell that can change the physiology and behaviour of a person once released into the bloodstream. Happiness is no different.
There are 4 main hormones responsible for our happiness;
D for Dopamine
O for Oxytocin
S for Serotonin
E for Endorphin
Dopamine – the Reward Hormone
Also known as the pleasure hormone, dopamine is released when we achieve a goal or accomplish a task. That’s why women love shopping. Even drinking cold water on a hot day releases some level of dopamine. It is released while having sex, when we eat the food we crave and when we partake in an activity we love so much. It is the feel-good neurotransmitter, an essential part of the brain’s reward system.
Well, first of all you need to know an addiction is anything you do to reward yourself when you’re not in the mood. Our bodies release stress hormones whenever we are low on dopamine, thereby increasing the edge to do something pleasurable. Thus, choose your addictions wisely. Simple ways to increase your dopamine include eating healthily, sleeping well, listening to music, getting a massage and going shopping. Also, learn to reward yourself appropriately when you accomplish tasks.
Oxytocin and cortisol (stress hormone) oppose each other in our bodies. When one rises, the other falls. Thus, a deficiency in oxytocin has the same effect as an excess in cortisol. Signs of high cortisol include not sleeping well or waking up tired, weight gain (especially around the abdomen), cravings for unhealthy foods, backaches and headaches, low sex drive, anxiety, and depression.
Do you feel tired even when you’ve not completed any task? Do you feel disconnected in your relationship? You don’t even feel like yourself recently, right? Do you suddenly don’t feel like talking to anyone anymore? It’s like you just don’t have the energy to socialize, n’est pas? Have you walked by people you know and didn’t say hi, not because they annoy you but because you didn’t want to interact? That’s why sometimes when we feel this way, we just hug someone close for no reason.
How to increase Oxytocin levels
Oxytocin is a bonding chemical. Spend time with the ones you love, be goofy with your friends, share something valuable with someone, have a fruitful conversation with another. Laugh, share, help, touch, spread the love. Oxytocin is controlled by a positive feedback mechanism where the release of the hormone causes an action that stimulates more of its own release. It is nature’s way of passing on the love. It is making someone happy because you find happiness in that. At the end of the day, everyone’s happy.
Serotonin – the Calm Hormone
Serotonin is the hormone that is responsible for our emotional stability. It is considered the natural mood stabilizer. It is also present in animals, plants, and fungi. Thus, food is one good source of serotonin. You can’t directly get serotonin from food, but you can get it from tryptophan, an amino acid that’s converted to serotonin in your brain. Serotonin can be produced in the digestive system independent of the serotonin produced in the brain.
Function
Serotonin is associated with mood, sleep, digestion, blood clotting, bone density and sexual function. It makes us feel calmer, happier, more focused, less anxious and more emotionally stable. This hormoneis also influencing when, how much, and how well you sleep. It can also influence the frequency and intensity of the sexual feelings you have due to its effects on the body’s libido.
Excess Serotonin Effect
When people use certain recreational drugs, such as ecstasy, the body releases large amounts of serotonin. This can lead to serotonin depletion. Fluctuations of serotonin levels in the brain, which often occur when someone hasn’t eaten or is stressed, affects brain regions that enable people to regulate anger. The old adage was true; a hungry man is an angry man.
Do what you would usually do to lighten up your mood. Go for a walk, listen to your favourite music, opt for a massage, eat some good healthy food, especially those rich in fibre and protein, remember the fun times; those old happy memories, and most importantly, pray. Do you ever feel the burden suddenly lifted when you down on your knees in prayer? You sure have! All such activities calm you down and uplift your mood.
Endorphin – the Willpower Hormone
Contracted from endogenous morphine, endorphins are chemicals produced by the body to relieve stress and pain. It produces a feeling of euphoria that is both healthy and safe, without the risk of addiction and overdose. As an anti-anxiety hormone, it blocks discomfort and makes us excited. When endorphins are released in your body, it gives you the ability to power through any form of pain. That explains the name.
Function
Since humans naturally seek to feel pleasure and avoid pain, we’re more likely to do an activity if it makes us feel good. Endorphins alleviate pain even during childbirth, reduce stress and anxiety, boost self-esteem and reduce excess weight. It is the happy feeling produced when we exercise and feel good about ourselves and our bodies. This phenomenon is known as the runner’s high.
Excess Endorphin Effect
With high endorphin levels, we feel less pain and fewer negative effects of stress. Endorphin is the body’s naturally produced pain killer that is released in relation to the level of pain it’s feeling. Without endorphins, the pain of labour and childbirth would have been practically impossible to bear since such pain exceeds a human’s threshold of pain. In such cases, the female body still produces high levels that are both healthy and safe, without the risk of addiction and overdose.
What are your coping mechanisms to get through the pain again? Yes! Eat chocolate, eat your favourite food, create art or music, laugh out loud, watch your favourite show, do what you had always loved to do. This adage was also right. When you do what you love, though it may be really stressful, your body will release just the right amount of endorphins you would need to get through it.
I believe everything in nature was purposefully designed to keep us happy. The beautiful sunrise, drinking water, the cosy weather, having a conversation, the bright flowers, laughing, eating your favourite food, walking out to soak it all in simply make us happy. It’s the simple things in life, to be honest.
Everyone will die but not everyone has lived. By that, I don’t mean that there are more people to be born, but that there are some existing who are not living. Is it possible to exist and not be fully alive?
Priorities
A sign that you probably don’t have a life is when you’re always going with the flow of events that suddenly pop up. People who have a life have priorities. They understand the idea that time is a precious commodity and that it should be allocated to matters that are deemed important and/or relevant at the time.
People who are going nowhere want you to go with them. Be careful of people who rather parasite on people’s lives. They feel okay in their mess as long as they have someone in the same soup as them.
Balance
Productivity and busyness are not alike, they are opposites. The most productive people are not those who brush off almost everything because they have “priorities”, deadlines or tight schedules. It is actually those whose priorities and schedule are pretty much balanced.
Once in a while, they may even go in their way to brush off their tight schedules and go with the flow of events. No matter what you make your life, it will eat you up if you don’t balance it with other priorities. Be flexible!
Identity
Life is basically about purpose. So whenever we’re sluggishly going through life though we’re partying every weekend, getting high every moment and getting laid every time, we still feel unsatisfied on the inside and we actually do not have a life because we can’t get our heads around the meaning and purpose for our doings.
If we do not have a deep sense of meaning, we distract ourselves with pleasure.
Daniel Good
Remember, a purposeless life – no matter how fun it seems – is encapsulated with depression. Make sure your life isn’t centred around a job you can be fired from or friends you can lose.
Life is an art. Every mistake is a new style. There are no rigid rules yet there are certain aspects that must be ancillary to the life we live. These aspects are meant to complement our lives rather than be it.
Be mindful what you invest your life into. If it’s a job or position or relationship you can lose, don’t make it your life. Trust me. It will leave you devastated when it’s all gone. Invest your life in your identity; something you’ll always be no matter what, something that can never be taken away from you because it’s basically what you are. Live from within!
It is yet another new year of our lives and aren’t we so grateful? The new year always starts with a pure type of energy of hope and serenity where we think anything is possible, every goal is achievable, every wrong is forgivable and every moment of our past is far out of reach. Over the years, we get caught up in the enthusiasm and make resolutions that are basically baseless solutions. When this occurs over a considerable number of years, we tend to walk into the new year with a kind of indifference that scoffs at the whole idea of making resolutions. The fact that you failed in your business approach doesn’t mean the whole business thingy is useless. The fact that you suck at fishing doesn’t mean those who fish are wasting their time. The fact that you made resolutions in the past that changed nothing doesn’t mean resolutions change nothing. You simply need to change your approach rather than decimate the whole idea.
The questions we need to ask ourselves are,
how are we going to be consistent?
how are we going to keep that same energy till the end of the year?
how are we going to actually do what we know we should do?
1. Clear Objectives
More often than not, we focus on the struggle rather than the objective. If you want to go the gym, what is your objective? The vaguer your objectives, the more likely you are to fall along the line. When you ask people what they want to do this year, they say basically the same things from the past 4 or more years; get closer to God, pray more, exercise more, eat well, save more money, get organized, live life to the fullest etc. These are extremely vague. After you have identified these vague objectives, clarify them the more by asking two simple questions; why? and how?
Save more money.
Why? I want to purchase a new LG phone. (amount = 750-1000 Ghana cedis)
How? Save 100 cedis for 10 months.
Save 25 cedis each week.
Save 4 cedis a day
Once the objective is clear and explicit, accountability is possible. Once you don’t know what the end result must look like, you wouldn’t be able to track your progress properly. If you don’t know where your destination is, you’d never know how far you are from there.
2. Accountability
In order to be consistent, we need to be disciplined. In order to be disciplined, we need to be accountable. Of course, we all know that it takes discipline, but we struggle with discipline all year long because of, perhaps, this one missing ingredient; accountability. Want to save more money? Then you should be able to review how much you spent every month. Once you keep a gradual track of your progress, you find new momentum to continue. If you first of all know how much you spend, then you can choose to either compromise your expenses or earn more. Once you have a goal, you need to have a plan.
See! Everybody wants to save money, even the richest man in the world. There are several ways of saving money. Find out which one best fits your situation and break it down to an everyday lifestyle. Once you know you have to save 4 cedis today, you can at least make it a point to. There are times when you’d fail, no doubt. But at least, you’re well aware of it. There’s nothing worse than failing and not being aware because there’s no accountability. There is a need to review your life on the daily. Every day is a new day to be better than yesterday. But remember that it’s only possible with accountability. It is highly recommended that you have a friend or partner who holds you accountable for your actions.
3. Time Allocation
One factor that is most essential determines whether something is achievable or not is TIME. Everything is possible, but some things become impossible when time is not on our side. In other words, what makes the impossible possible is time. Time is the x factor. Everything is possible with time. Therefore, your time allocation will determine whether your set goal is achievable or not.
Once you get the time factor wrong, your set goals become unrealistic. On the other hand, where there is no time allocation – what you’d do every day, every 2 weeks, every month etc – the goal becomes “immortal” and is never achieved. Even with goals concerning behaviours which must last a lifetime, time allocation is very essential;
Want to spend more time with your spouse?
Why? To have a more intimate relationship and communicate better as a couple.
How? Go on a trip to resorts in the locality.
Time allocation: Every last weekend of the month.
Progress takes a long time to materialise suddenly. Realise that you’d need more time than you think you would. Even in matters of faith. At the end of the day, it wouldn’t be able about how long it took, it would be about how long it lasts. Take your time and establish something concrete that will stand the test of time rather than riding on the illusion of progress in taking less time and seeing everything fall into shambles later. Choose deeper roots first; taller trees will follow.
There is a thick line between what we need and what we can’t live without. Chemically, that has to do with the levels of dopamine. Drugs like sugar, coffee and spices produces dopamine which makes us feel good. But they don’t produce dopamine as such a high level that we can’t do without it. Yet we go back to it all the time. Just like soft porn.
Watching porn, in my view, is a habit that can be altered if one has the needed info.
Some can’t prepare food without spices. Others can’t eat food without drinking water afterwards. Those are habits that could be changed with time and preference.
Research
When I researched on porn and saw the stats, I realised it’s becoming epidemic. One research was to see what porn does to our brain. And when they searched for an American male teenager who had never watched internet porn before for studies, they found none. That was a shock to me. So I’ve provided a list of important info to help y’all willing to break this unhealthy habit.
One Huge Misconception
Watching porn does not make you sexually healthy. Watching porn will not stop when you marry or start having sex. It doesn’t even give you the right info about sex. Don’t believe those filthy lies. That is not how to feed your needs. Your sexual attraction needs are not a justification to indulge in porn. Pornography is an instant gratification activity. It does not satisfy you, it sucks from you.
Breakingthepornhabit
1. First of all, don’t make it a priority to stop watching pornography. This may sound wrong but what is actually wrong is that the focus is still on porn. It is like me saying, “don’t imagine a white bear.” You have already subconsciously imagined it. It is called the white bear effect. I’m not saying don’t face the problem head-on. All I’m saying is, fighting a problem that has become a part of you fights back harder. It rather needs to be starved. Dr. K V Anand said it better;
2. Your belief in porn addiction makes things worse. The label of “porn addict” causes depression but porn watching doesn’t.
People who believe themselves to be porn addicts need help with understanding what their use of porn means, and why they may have problems around their sexuality. They deserve help unpacking the conflicts between their sexual desires, and the moral/religious society around them. They also need help to understand how and why porn use is not an addiction, and how viewing themselves as a porn addict may affect their self-image and emotional health. These men (and some women) deserve help in understanding their sexuality and their porn use. They don’t need the shame and stigma that comes along with the “addiction” label.
3. One major reason why people who don’t want to watch porn, go back and even watch it in excess is boredom. Whenever you are bored, you do what subconsciously makes you feel good instantly. This is because boredom is unhealthy and health is multi-dimensional. Our body needs fun. Our soul needs adventure. Our spirit needs intimacy. Stop blaming your old man which is dead or even the devil. Change the cycle.
4. Life functions because it is in an ecosystem. Society thrives on culture. Our body has a rhythm. Even the weather has a pattern. Pornography is not the problem. It is the fruit of the problem. Whether someone is addicted to drugs or porn or any form of perversion, it is because they didn’t understand their inner needs and misunderstood their emotions.
Change the pattern
Set in motion another chain, another culture, another ecosystem. Don’t focus on stopping. Don’t count the days you didn’t watch it. Don’t entertain those thoughts in your head to watch a little bit. Rewire your brain. Renew your mind. Do what you have always loved to do as a child. Don’t be afraid to be bored. Don’t entertain boredom either.
Everything all around us is calling for our attention, but when you change what you are aware of, you change your reality. People who see sin everywhere make sin omnipresent in their minds. People who see love everywhere see the omnipresence of God. Develop healthy habits that make you spiritually, mentally and physically healthy.
Habits are not difficult to develop if we look at it from this perspective; we always develop new habits when we renew the old ones. Habits are set in motion with our minds not our wills. Don’t fight your habits, consciously change them. Whatever you force yourself to do cannot really become a habit until we set it in motion with our minds. Easier said than done but hey..you gotta start from somewhere. It is time to live at your utmost potential and be your best self. Greatness is within us and ahead of us. You can start off with a good read by Derek Doepker
Flee also youthful lusts; but pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.
II Timothy 2:22 NKJV
