When you just focus on yourself and stop comparing, or analyzing everyone elses moves, life gets a lot easier. Focus on you because that is the life you are living. When you think about it, this is really quite easy, we just make it complicated, how?
1. Judging with only half the story
2. Reading trashy magazines like People, US, Star and who knows whatever else is out there (I’m out of the loop)
3. Listening to too much gossip in person and on the radio, internet
4. Watching too much T.V., where we don’t realize it but we allow ourselves to believe that what we are watching is how it really is (hello, can you say editing).
5. Caring more about what everyone else is doing and less about what you yourself is doing.
6. Checking Facebook, Twitter and who knows what other site every second, and posting every single thing that you are doing and then watching how many people care.
How to stop it:
1. Stop taking so much interest in others lives just to feel better about your own.
2. Do not pick up those trashy magazines, don’t even look at them in the isle of the grocery store, stop your subscriptions, most of that crap is photo shopped anyways.
3. Just walk away from life sucking conversations, just smile and walk away.
4. Just turn off the T.V. (and Computer for that matter, being on that thing is just as bad as the T.V. in some respects and maybe worse, remember your mom saying to move away from the T.V., well, look at you now).
5. Start caring more about yourself and hold yourself to the highest standard, not to feel belittled, but rather to see yourself as important and worth a heck of a lot more than all that crap you are allowing yourself to take in.
6. Stop checking Facebook, Twitter, and yahoo every 5 minutes to see what everyone is doing in their lives, and stop needing everyone’s virtual approval for every thing you do, the number one person’s approval you need, is simply your own.
I have observed my own life and the lives of those around me and really noticed how much time and energy we put into what everyone else is doing, or not doing, or how they are living, or looking, rather than our own.
Are we really that boring? Do we really think so lowly of ourselves that we feel the need to spend our valuable (at least we call it that) time with junk like this? All those things you say you are going to do, or don’t have time for, well you are wasting it on all that stuff listed above.
A part of my business is social media, so I try to be very careful not to get sucked into this junk when I am doing my thing.
That being said, we easily get into ruts and find that watching T.V. is an easier “mindless” activity than say reading a book, or sewing, or spending quality family time or going outside. We go on the computer to do one thing and end up killing hours surfing the internet looking and reading stuff that has no real value for our lives.
A few years ago I noticed how much I was reading the covers of the trashy magazines in the grocery checkout, and how afterwards I felt like sh*t about myself. In this discovery I decided to make it a challenge not to look at the covers of those people just like us, beings scrutinized for being too skinny, or too fat or that they cheated on their spouse or drank too much. I see that stuff and think, we are all just as guilty of that except we don’t have cameras following us everywhere we go, and cutting and editing everything we say and how we act.
Finally, I spend years having extremely low self-esteem, feeling like I had little to no self-worth and value, it took much of what I have mentioned and more above to see that I was in-fact valuable, I had something to offer, and in recognizing and admitting that I was guilty of much of the above, I was and still am, able to change it.
Namaste, my friends!