I am gonna come clean from the start, in the past couple of years life for me has mostly been very difficult, numbing and without much of excitement. In fact there are moments where it seemed too much to handle. Though, after a careful observation, ironically, I have traced the source of my own suffering, most of the time, to be myself . How am I the cause for my own misery you ask? Well this is a question whose answer might literally fill up a page but if I were to cherry pick, overwhelming myself with unrealistic expectations both from myself  and from the world, endless overthinking, obsession with the trivial, demanding immediate result from anything I try to do or teach myself (hence colossal disappointment when results take their natural due time to arrive) and most of all an incessant self judgement and validation based on a distorted past image of myself would be the top contenders for my self sabotage. I would say 50-60% of my daily thoughts are these exacts thoughts or a derivative of them.

I don’t mean to imply all my problems are mind related, in fact I do have many physical problems. Last summer I was hospitalized for a day due to kidney stones (Now I don’t consider myself extremely tough but I also have never expected a pebble with a less than 2mm diameter to totally shatter my endurance making me wish my own immediate death 🙂 ). A year and a half ago while playing football I twisted my ankle and broke some ligaments therefore abstaining from any physical activity (even walking 2kms) for 6 months and from football for one year.

The silver bullet for most of my psychological problems I believe is mindfulness. Mindfulness as a remedy can address this problem in different forms. One can be for example observing my troublesome thoughts as soon as they arise instead of passively plunging myself into the emotional roller-coaster which is triggered by these thoughts. This is activity, which actually is the essence of mindfulness, saves the mind from being taken as a hostage by any thought that arises. After breaking the spin the natural second step would be refuting the thesis of these negative thoughts with a logic. All negative thoughts start from untrue premises and end up making unsound logical arguments. Anyone who is aware of the fundamental tenets of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can eventually master the habit of logically disputing these thoughts.

When it comes to my case the nail that seals the coffin of mindfulness is writing. I have to admit I haven’t been writing for a long time. In fact even on this blog there are a handful blog posts which had been started but never completed. Writing, at least in my case, used to give me the ultimate clarity into whatever I was writing about. The reason for this is simple: Before writing one has to think about what is to be written. The thinking continues also during the writing leading to a further clarity and a fine-grained understanding/misunderstanding of the matter. Consider this a public pledge to write at least one blog post a week.