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The Self-Improvement Process

It is absolutely normal and even necessary for us to want better for ourselves; better physical health, better mental health, better education, a better home, more money in the bank, more friends and so on. The beginning of such a journey may take place when we compare ourselves to someone else who seems to have more of the thing that we want or when we begin to question the path that we’re currently on, asking ourselves “What good could come from continuing forward without making some big changes?”. After all, each of these “upgrades” aren’t just going to happen automatically happen by themselves, manifesting from a dream into reality. You have to be your own dream maker and go out and win the prize for yourself. It takes genuine effort and a sincere desire for something more that doesn’t require a “motivation hack” just to get started. The point that many people seem to misunderstand is that if you need to find motivation to even begin making these changes, chances are you were never truly interested in changing anything to begin with.

For those actually interested in results, they might begin with a simple, rational question like "How do I get from where I am now (point A) to where I want to be (Point B)?”. It’s very easy to become inundated with online myths about waking up at 5:00 AM and taking cold showers every morning, before drinking plain black coffee on your way to work or school. These ideas sound enticing and promising because they invite discomfort and the assumption is that discomfort would build the character needed in order to surivive the hard work that is sure to be ahead, but discomfort by itself is not necessarily the same as discipline or structure. While discipline and structure often are uncomfortable to establish when working towards a new goal, the point isn’t to get used to doing something hard, but rather to do the tough thing anyway, regardless of how you feel. People can have different motivations for going after certain things. You could be motivated by ego, by altruism, by achievement, by greed, by better health or even the possibility of a more stable future and a better position in life. I personally feel like the motivation you use can actually determine how successful you are, but I base that on my own experience which is of course subjective, though it is likely to be true of more than just one person.

Personally, I’ve found that when I pursue a goal for ego based reasons only, I find that I am less likely to achieve what I want in the end and more likely to encounter frustrating psychological barriers. Failures and setbacks seem to hurt more than they otherwise would, if I had more than just my pride backing me to motivate me in reaching my goal. While different people are more successful with different motivating factors, the one I personally find most useful is pain and discomfort. I have a very difficult if not impossible time tolerating any chronically uncomfortable circumstance or condition that puts pressure on me. Overtime I tolerate it less and less and the weight of it begins to feel oppressive to me until I reach a point where I say to myself “Okay, screw this crap. I’ve had enough, it’s time for a serious change!”. Discomfort for me could range anywhere from chronic boredom with life itself to being tired of feeling overweight and the symptoms of lethargy that are associated with it.

It’s often not until I can no longer take it, that I become willing to take the necessary actions that add up over time into an eventual success story of overcoming whatever it is that I feel is harming my peace of mind and destroying my sanity by the second. I would compare it to the physical sensation of sleeping on your arm and waking up with it feeling numb or maybe having a sibling or schoolyard bully twisting your arm behind your back until the pain becomes unbearable. You may not be successful at fighting the source of your pain, but at least on some level you can’t help but resist the pressure you feel is being forced onto you. Maybe this is just a conspiracy on my part, but this is exactly the type of discomfort and agony which compelled me to get off of drugs. I think my inner addict screams whenever the pain goes up.

The Role Of Stimulants And Mental Health Disorders

“Self-Care” could be a number of different things from treating yourself to an occasional brownie, to working out, to treating yourself to a mental health day where you binge-watch something or play video games. But in the most basic sense of the term, it means behaviors like brushing your teeth, getting the proper amount of rest each night, eating a healthy and well-balanced diet, drinking plenty of water, taking a shower, avoiding excessive sugar intake and all of the things we learned in school growing up. With the exception of a few phases in my life where I followed these pieces of conventional wisdom to a T, I have spent most of my existence cluttered, disorganized and utterly disinterested in taking any of these basic steps towards better health.

My baseline “well-being” looks like me eating as much of anything I want whenever I feel like it, remaining physically inactive, binging YouTube videos or playing video games for hours, listening to music for hours, taking occasional walks, vaping, smoking, using nicotine in every form, not brushing my teeth, avoiding taking showers, having an inconsistent sleeping schedule and every bad habit that you might imagine could make a person mentally and physically unwell. These habits are second nature to me, I’ve lived like this for years but not without a cost. The results have been about what you might expect for someone in my shoes; I’m usually overweight, lethargic, tired, ambitious but ultimately too lazy for that ambition to be of any use to me, always seeking stimulation in one form or another, going from feeling highly motivated and energized to being sapped of strength at the drop of a hat and so on.

As a person who lives with conditions like OCD and bipolar I disorder (a condition which I am hesitant to claim, but for the purposes of this blog still will) it is not abnormal for me to have sudden “bursts” of energy or to be an anxious mess. Sometimes I might have so much energy that I just stay up well past midnight, pacing back and forth in my messy bedroom or kitchen as I let my imagination run wild with endless hours of entertainment at my finger tips, doing me no favors other than allowing me to indulge in my worst habits. I might stare at my computer screen for many hours on some nights, just waiting for the next blog idea to hit all while neglecting the basics that I know from experience would free me from my hopeless state of being if I could only find the strength to make it happen.

So then why don’t I change? I have, in fact, I’ve managed to overcome some of my worst habits and even succeeded at losing considerable weight while transitioning into a healthy lifestyle, with fewer addictive habits and triggers. This has only happened maybe twice in my entire life and only under extreme anguish and pressure did I finally manage to find the strength to make some big changes that genuinely improved my quality of life. The problem that I keep running into is that I can’t seem to hold onto my progress for very long before I slip up again, making the effort of changing feel exceptionally pointless. I often neglect basic care like brushing my teeth or taking a shower because I’m too wrapped up in some activity, side project or even school to care about much else. Whatever it is I’m trying to do, that takes precedence over any kind of self-care. Sometimes I’ll even let myself starve, because I’m too invested in this or that other thing.

I have this obsessive trait where I love to give my all to whatever it is I’m trying to accomplish. I don’t believe in half-assing anything, except for the fact that once my motivation disappears (which actually happens alot), I find myself moving onto the next thing and quickly devoting excessive interest and time into that instead. Sometimes I might switch back and forth between two “projects”, getting bored of one before switching over to the other and then getting bored of it again too, just so that I can once again go back to the first thing I was working on. Not surprisingly, my confidence in my ability to succeed at anything in life is pretty low because of that tendency. Having high emotional intensity and interest in one specific thing for a short time always seems to backfire, as I can never seem to actually get anything done. Attention is sharp but somehow still divided, which feels like it takes up a lot of mental energy. In the opposite extreme, I find myself unable to stop paying attention long enough to take care of myself.

Inevitably at some point, I’ll find myself up against a wall where the pain of chronic mediocrity and anguish becomes great enough to inspire a heroic effort to win the war raging inside of my head. I’ll wake up one day and say to myself “Not another day of this!”. That’s when the real work begins and suddenly I’m forcing myself to be as uncomfortable as is necessary in order to start feeling better. It would probably look like one of those training montages from the Rocky movies where you see Mister Balboa hitting meat carcasses in cold factories, running up and down large sets of concrete stairs and drinking egg yokes straight from glass cups. That sort of thing. As it turns out, I can’t stand being miserable forever but the same could easily be said of just about anyone else. Maybe I’m just more sensitive to pain, who knows? In times of great desperation, I’ll abide by the advice of doctors or psychiatrists to get medicated but this is usually with great reluctance on my part.

A Breaking Point

On both of the occasions where I actually started taking my health seriously and changing my life for the better, I had found myself in a position where I was so physically ill and chronically tired that I couldn’t stand it anymore. The lack of self-care over a period of many months and perhaps even years became a nightmare for me. The reason I didn’t brush my teeth or take showers wasn’t because I was lazy, but because it simply felt like it would take too much energy to even try. Any little change I could’ve made felt like “just one more thing that’s going to make me feel tired and be pointless”. Likely these indolent behaviors were symptoms of anxiety and depression which I had not been aware of, that were running (and ruining) my life.

It was a vicious cycle; because I didn’t take care of myself I felt worse and because I felt worse, I just lacked the energy or desire to take care of myself in the first place. I wanted to feel better, but wasn’t willing to put in the effort to make it happen. I kept getting what I was putting in, which was essentially nothing at all. My body was like an abandoned building, hanging onto its last months of life, begging to be burnt down in a glorious blaze of compassion so it could finally be put out of its misery. It barely had a soul left in it, nothing but an empty and shallow shell of a human was left. What made taking care of myself even less appealing was knowing that it wasn’t something I could do once a month or once every couple of weeks.

That it had to be consistent in order to have any meaningful effect whatosever. Even beyond that fact, it was realizing that it couldn’t depend on how I might feel on any given day, I could be afforded zero excuses to neglect myself if I was ever going to have any hope of turning things around. Being the all-or-nothing thinker that I am, I found this a very difficult and disturbing fact of life to have to accept. Plus the underlying perfectionism of “I can’t ever miss a beat or I will have ruined everything I’ve tried to build!” with even one missed day at the gym or having eaten one unhealthy thing, ever. I was very strict with myself and though that’s usually a recipe for failure, I had managed to channel my desperation to change into a success story.

Turning The Ship Around

The combination of sleepless nights, the icky feeling of a dirty unkept mouth, the constant lethargy of carrying around excessive weight, the unclean feeling of not having taken a shower in many days or even a couple of weeks and the overstimulation all eventually add up to an unbearable existence for me. During one such occasion, I remember staring up at the ceiling in bed late one night saying to myself “Tomorrow, I will change everything!”. I woke up early the next morning to hit the grocery store for some apple cider vinegar after having spent a night of research, after hearing about intermittent fasting from my A.A sponsor Matt. I bought some supplements ranging from multi vitamin gummies to protein powders. Then I began fasting, only leaning on my usual homemade morning coffee, but this time without any milk or sugar. Just protein powder. I put on some clean clothes and walked to the gym rather than drive there.

Once I got to the gym, I immediately hopped onto the treadmill and just kept walking for hours, only taking a break every hour and a half. I made a rule for myself; every hour that I chose not to take a break, I would increase the speed by two MPH. Everytime that I took a break, I would head over to the Wawa Gas station nearby to purchase more black coffee and maybe some nicotine in order to keep me going on an empty stomach, then I would repeat this process 3-4 times a day before walking back home. I’d drink seltzer water to help me feel full so I could tolerate the pain of starving myself. I got into this routine of doing that every single day, from morning to night. I’d go days without eating and when I did eat, it would be something healthy like a bowl of fruit or some other carefully prepared meal.

Over a period of weeks, I lost significant weight and as the weight came off I realized that I had much more energy than I had had in a very long time. I went through the process of swallowing multi vitamins, combined with Vitamin C Pills and three spoons of apple cider vinegar per day. I began taking showers regularly, brushing my teeth, staying neatly shaven and I managed to drop down from 260 Pounds to 180 pounds within about two months of continuous exercise and intermittent fasting. Friends and co-workers began complimenting me on how good I was looking. Some people even said I was attractive. It was a very long, uncomfortable process but once I got past the first week, it became much easier to continue as I had already managed to get past the toughest part. It felt nice for a change to recieve some positive attention on how I looked and the fact that I felt like a million dollars only sweetened the deal!

Regression

I was doing quite well for a couple of months, but then I made a decision which seemed to threaten everything I had worked so hard to build. After having worked at Amazon for years, I decided I had wanted to go back to school in order to earn a degree so that I wouldn’t have to keep doing hard physical labor to make a living for the rest of my life. This was (and is) to me, still a great decision, but once I started going to school I went from visiting the gym and eating healthy after days of fasting, to eating loads of junk food while spending many hours on my computer, completing assignments and dedicating myself to hours of intense studying sessions. I didn’t gain back the weight fast, but after around three weeks it was becoming clear that I was regressing back to being fat and unhealthy again. Like the addict that I am, I went from obsessing over one goal to obsessing over another and it just so happened that by focusing so intensely on my school work rather than continuing the habits that had once taken me so far in my weight loss journey, I was gradually setting myself up to become just as heavy and unhappy as ever.

Working towards one major goal was threatening to upset the progress I had achieved with the other through pursuing another major goal. The way I unraveled was that when I started taking college courses with the goal of earning a degree for my chosen career path, I became obsessed with “the grind” and did little else but study and complete homework assignments. During these many hours, I’d stuff my face with handfuls of trail mix and other junk food. Trips to the gym went from being multiple times a day, to zero overnight. I sacrificed my body and mental health to reach for a better tomorrow. It felt like one more thing I had to be willing to sacrifice other than my sanity, whenever I struggled to understand direction for my assignments and grasp reading materials for learning new ideas and concepts.

Most people would probably expect that regression of progress would take place because someone gave up, but it’s not often you hear about someone failing because they tried too hard. In an effort to build a new future for myself, I put my present health and well being at risk. I’ve now reached a point where I’ve decided I won’t start working on my mental and physical health again until I’ve earned that damned degree, but as anyone who has ever accomplished something worthwhile understands, telling yourself “Maybe later” is the best guarantee you have to ensure that you never actually reach that goal. You have to have this attitude of “Everyday counts, every decision counts”, but because it feels like school is the only thing that destroys the kind of hard work it would take in order for me to change, I feel that my only option to improve my mental and physical health is to wait until that barrier is removed before I can start trying to get healthy again. But how long could that be? Many months to maybe a couple of years at least, can I really afford to let my mental and physical health suffer that long until I actually earn a degree or am I just making excuses for myself?

Challenge And Failure

A line from one of my most popular blog posts tackling the subject of hard work and success was “If There’s No Failure, There’s No Challenge!”. And to me, I think the risk of failure is what makes achievement so much fun in life. This idea that the risk of failure is very real but that you could potentially overcome it, if you are willing to push yourself just a little bit beyond what you think you’re capable of. That you could be successful at something if you worked very hard at it. The satisfaction you feel when the results reinforce the value of everything you had to go through in order to get the reward you were looking for. It’s tempting, it’s fun, it’s addicting, it’s frustrating, it’s satisfying, it’s painful.