If you’re an intense person by nature, it’s likely that up to 75% of your life energy every minute, every hour, every day is automatically being allocated to ignore what you don’t want to think about. You tell yourself “I need to ignore certain things, otherwise I can’t deal with them. I need to ignore them to get by.”
OK, but then consider how much of your total energy you have left to consciously deal with the realities of your day? Say 25%. Then it’s no small wonder that in a day you feel that you can’t accomplish very much. And at the same time when you do try to accomplish anything, you feel immediately overwhelmed. Under these conditions who wouldn’t, with only 25% of their energy available to them to manage their day?
Managing your day is hard enough, but with only 25% of your energy available to try and gain ground, it becomes a disappointing struggle, which is why people live in a constant state of overwhelm; a huge proportion of their daily allotment of energy every day is already accounted for by ignoring this or that reality or “keeping such & such at bay for now because I just don’t want to think about it.”
So you end up having to be very sparing as to apportioning your energy during the day if you want to just survive. And that’s what many people do. And that’s why they’re then frustrated that they make no progress, feeling completely spent at the end of the day and disappointed that they should have more to show for their day.
“How come I don’t have more to show for all the energy I’ve spent this day this week, this month?” is a common lament. Well, because your expectations are based on 100% effective application of your energy. Where your reality is based on 100% expenditure of energy but only 25% effective application of it!
People commonly perceive this pattern as “managing my life“. But in reality this is just a coping strategy. Personally I think trying to just cope is pointless. Far better to take the responsibility to manage your reality. Do that and you’ll never need to cope; coping is a powerless gesture because it is after the fact, and can effect no change. Managing? Well, managing means you’re doing your best, which is the whole point.
PS. People often want a “reset” because they want to “start fresh” without having to expend all the energy and experience all the stress of wilfully ignoring all the realities they are aware of but find disagreeable. In short, they want to reset themselves to a state of blissful ignorance, because they believe the adage that ignorance is bliss.
But of course that cannot & does not work. By avoiding the responsibility of their disagreeable realities, they end up struggling, which is compounded by the unavoidable price paid for ignoring &/or not managing those realities. Which is of course why they feel miserable, which in turn is why they want a reset in the first place. Vicious cycle, eh?
The point here is quite simple: Avoid the temptation to look for a “reset”. Instead, simply focus your attention on making the most of what you have.