“Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.” - Robert H. Schuller
Are you losing interest in life?
Are you feeling yourself wanting less and less things in life and nothing seems interesting to you anymore?
Are you wandering around life and feeling like it’s meaningless?
When we are either emotional or emotionless, they both tell us messages about how our bodies are feeling.
That’s it. Just messages.
Not problems.
Emotions are things that could help us understand ourselves better.
When we see problems, we see something that we want to get over or avoid, so we want to see this as messages for growth.
Losing interest in life is no small thing. It changes the way we see and feel the world. To resolve this problem or… actually any problem, you have to understand it first.
Let’s understand it together.
Why am I feeling this way?
Losing interest in life really comes down to this.
Suppressing your emotions.
Somehow. Some way.
Suppressing emotions was what you are doing consciously or subconsciously.
How does this happen?
It can be through event or events.
Imagine that you have a garden. Inside it you have a variety of colorful vegetables & flowers. it’s wonderful, and you smile every time you see it.
Then a person dropped a bad seed inside your garden. A ugly, weird looking plant started to grow. It grew larger and larger, and it started to take away all the water, nutrient from all the other plants.
You noticed the ugly plant, and you have tried to pull the ugly plant out.
That didn’t work though, since it has countless razor-sharp thorns all around it.
Now you can only see your garden slowly die because of this ugly plant.
You don’t know what to do.
This is also a great garden given to you by your parents, so you don't want to show them that you’ve messed up! You don’t want to be a burden to them, so you don't say anything.
You keep hold on & waiting.
It will get better.
You pretend that it’s not there everyday you wake up.
I just have to be strong.
A week passed…
A month…
Then a year…but still nothing improved.
Gradually, you start to turn away your friends, coworkers, visitors, from your house, because you don’t want them to see how ugly the garden has become.
No one comes to visit anymore. It was originally such a beautiful garden that you would love to enjoy it with friends, now it’s a complete disaster.
You lost the motivation to want to even water the garden anymore.
You want people to visit, but you are afraid of showing them the ugly garden.
This is when your thoughts changed
…maybe it’s better just to be alone.
…maybe it’s better to not even want any visitors.
That is the beginning of indifference.
So just to make sure everyone got the analogy.
Garden = You
Bad Seed / Ugly Plant = The event or events that hurt your self-esteem.
Indifference = Not wanting to try to help the garden or have visitors anymore.
In our lives, there are various different events that could come and impact our self-esteem. However, we usually don’t know how to deal with it, and it damages our self-esteem.
Having a hurt self-esteem starts to eat us up on the inside making us feel worthless or flawed. Then we try to form new relationships again, but it’s not the same. The problem of the low self-esteem is still there.
Gradually, you dislike your existence and stop wanting to try to want anything anymore, because everything seems to go wrong when you touch it.
This is when you start to lose interest in life. Rather than wanting something and get hurt, it feels better to not want anything at all.
I know this is tough. Here I’m going to share with you three key points to get started on regaining your interest in life -
1) Not Ignoring Your Inner Needs
To regain your interest in life, you have to learn to be in touch with your emotions again.
Why? Because interest is an emotion.
I know right now you’re not feeling anything, but you will eventually want to let yourself experience happiness, anger, grieve, excitement, desire again.
Don’t be scared.
You just have to relearn what you are feeling right now.
The beginning step starts with desire.
As hard as it is, you will have to slowly look at your garden again.
I know it doesn’t look good, but it’s ok. None of our gardens are perfect, and we all have to start somewhere.
Start small. Don’t feel like you have to do everything all at once. One small step at a time.
First, let’s pick one plant to water and nourish.
Your desire for your own needs.
On a primal level, you are learning to take care of yourself again. You have to know what you want and go and get it.
When you don’t feel anything, you are suppressing your desires.
So right now, you need to slowly let yourself want again. You might feel scared to want again. Like for some inexplicable reason that you don’t deserve to have anything or anyone, but I want you to resist that and practice writing out what you want.
A lot of times people feel very purposeless, this is since they has been suppressing their desires or not thinking for themselves for a good amount of time.
When you start to let yourself be yourself again, you will start to feel motivation & drive towards certain things again.
First Step -
Make small decisions to allow yourself to want again.
Example -
- Plan something relaxing for yourself this week on your free time.
- Buy yourself a nice treat. [Yogurt, candy, etc]
2) Approaching the Past
This step is the start to care for yourself emotionally.
When you think of the past it might seem very scary. Like you don’t even want to touch it. It might be so horrible that you don’t want to have anything to do with it.
However, unless we remove that energy sucking plant, you won’t get better. You have to learn how to face it. Again, not all at once. Step-by-step. Small steps.
The second key to regaining your interest in life is learning to help yourself first, and you do this by facing the past.
But for now, we’re just going to approach the past first.
Why approach the past?
Part of the past has made us dislike ourselves at a very fundamental level.
If we don’t like ourselves, we put the burden of liking ourselves on the other person when we enter into any relationship.
We go into a relationship to feel loved and appreciated, but a healthy relationship involves you loving yourself first before loving others. If you don’t love yourself, you don’t know how to love others nor will you have the capacity to love others.
This is why a lot of relationships with previous emotional baggages can become destructive when not dealt with.
When you learn to see the past event and slowly accept it and come to terms with it, you will be able to give yourself grace and love yourself again.
Then with it, you will learn to love and to appreciate your interests. You will learn to value your opinions and respect yourself more as a person.
By helping yourself & loving yourself, you are helping all the relationships that you will have in the future.
First Step -
What is the past event that you are hurting from?
[Don’t publicly comment it here unless you are very comfortable with it.]
3) Resist Putting down yourself
The third key is to resist the urge of putting yourself down as a person. Sometimes, this urge can even feel addictive, but this is one of the habits that is shutting off your inner voice.
Would you silence your friends every time they try to talk?
No, so don’t do it to yourself.
It might feel like something is wrong with you.
It might be natural to keep replaying the memories over and over again, making you feel from bad to worse.
The key point here is this -
It is healthy to think about the past & review our actions, but it is only effective to a certain point. After that, it becomes destructive.
Thinking is ok. Overthinking is bad.
Some examples are -
“I’ll never be able to do that.”
“I’m not good enough.”
“Something is wrong with me.”
How do you stop this?
Learn to refocus your attention on something else. I'll talk more in the First Step below.
First Step -
The best way is to interrupt your thoughts before it gets any further. Here is a simple three-step process.
1) Catch yourself when you are putting yourself down.
2) When you start to think about your negative thoughts, you will ____________ (choose an action. I like to use tallying. It doesn’t really matter what the action is, but you want it to be short and stops your thought.)
3) Go back to your work.
Example
- I caught myself telling me that “I don’t deserved to be loved.”
- I tallied it once on a paper.
- I go back to reading.
If you do this consistently, you will start to be more and more aware of your thoughts.
…Then you can let your real self breath again! That real self has interests and opinions that he/she wants to say. Good luck!
If you want, you can tell me your favorite way to relax down in the comment section!
- Augustus
Losing Interests, Losing Relationships [Free PDF]
- Understanding the 5 CAUSES for an emotional wall between you and everyone else.