Welcome to Step 1
Congratulations for making the choice to face your existential crisis. You’re about to take the first steps towards a true sense of purpose.
Step 1 is for you if:
You think negative things about yourself and others.
The people you spend the most time with are jerks to you or others.
You feel like you don’t have enough time to do the things you want to do.
Improving your outlook on life involves facing a ton of cognitive dissonance, but people do it every day, so you can too. In fact, people who are way lower down on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, (like refugees, recovering drug addicts and anyone who ever volunteered to throw a magic ring into the fires of Mount Doom), do this every day.
If you don’t need this step…
Skip to Step 2 if:
You mostly feel positive about yourself and others
You have a person or people you trust, and you can mutually discuss feelings and thoughts with them
You feel like you have time to learn new things
Click here to skip step 1.
Resources
These are some things to read and watch to help you change the stuff in your life that’s affecting you in negative ways. You should also look for other things - think of this as an adventure for your mind. Or a brain gym. Or some kind of personal outlook makeover.
This isn’t like a class with a test at the end, it’s more like learning to play piano. You have to keep practicing to get better, and at the beginning you’re gonna feel like you’re not great, but that’s okay. Practicing this stuff gets more fun the more you do it.
>Thinking Positively
>Forming Positive Relationships
>Managing Your Time
>Self-Evaluation
Thinking Positively
A Cognitive Behavioural Therapist can help you learn to recognize and correct behavioural patterns like self-deprecation and negative self-talk. There are also many other forms of therapy that can help. If you cannot afford to or prefer not to work with a therapist, here are some things you can practice to change the way you think and develop a more positive attitude.
The key word here is practice. Changing your behaviour is something that takes time. If you want to think and feel more positive, here are some important steps you can take while you practice changing your inner dialogue:
1) Tell people you’re closest to that you are working on thinking more positively, and give them permission to correct you gently when you slide into negative behaviour patterns. Remember that you need to receive this correction with gratitude, even when you don’t agree with it at the time.
2) Start and end every day by reminding yourself that you have worked to improve yourself. Maybe while brushing your teeth, because then you will also be improving your dental hygiene, which is also important.
3) Do at least one good thing for your physical body every day, and take note of it. Exercise and healthy food is a gift we can give ourselves, so when you make a healthy choice about your diet or your activity, learn to think of it as a gift you’re giving yourself, rather than a sacrifice you’re making.
4) Give yourself permission to feel the entire spectrum of emotions. We learn to think of some feelings as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’ long before we have the cognitive skills to question those classifications. The fact is that emotions are a chemical reaction triggered by our thoughts and experiences. They evolved to help our species survive, so it’s natural that you want to avoid experiencing ‘bad’ feelings. Try to reframe ‘bad’ feelings as a natural consequence of a negative thought or experience, acknowledge the feeling as valid, and make a conscious effort to understand and accept why the feeling is happening. Then give yourself permission to feel whatever you need to feel in this moment. Explore the feeling. Try to draw a picture of it, write a song or poem about it, cook a meal inspired by it. Put that feeling into creating something outside yourself.
5) Learn more about how your mind works, so you can choose a positive thinking approach that is appropriate for you. The videos below helped us, and we believe they will help you.
The Good Grief Network (one of the Hotline’s Patreon Supporters) has put together a long list of suggested books, articles, courses and videos that can help you learn to think more positively if you are among the millions of North Americans feeling paralyzed by grief right now.
They also offer a podcast and their own 10 step program to help you achieve psychosocial resilience. If you are having difficulty functioning productively in the face of today’s social or political climate, these are excellent resources.
Forming Positive Relationships
Relationships are an essential part of being human, but social bonding is a learned trait and we don’t all learn how to do this. In fact, some of us totally suck at it.
Another hard fact is that some relationships are part of your life regardless of your wishes. You may be a caregiver or relative to someone who is abusive, (or just a jerk), and leaving the situation may not be an option. Feeling trapped or ‘stuck’ in a negative situation can make you feel helpless.
The healthiest and easiest way to improve negative relationships in your life is to actively seek positive ones. Recognizing, forming, and maintaining a good relationship takes practice. Make a conscious decision to seek, form, and continue developing relationships that meet these criteria:
You feel supported by each other
You trust each other
You respect each other, even when you don’t agree on something
You see qualities in each other that you would like to develop in yourselves
You don’t feel like you are trapped in the relationship, or that the other person is humouring you
You don’t feel like you have to hide who you really are
When the relationship is going through difficult times, you’re comfortable talking and working together to resolve any issues you’re facing
The more you work on your positive relationships, the less time you will have for negative ones. If you’re starting from a place where you have few or no positive relationships, here are some ways to meet new, like-minded people. These suggestions are based on things we’ve done ourselves.
Join an improv class, a maker-space, a sewing circle, a book club, toastmasters, or another group that has regular, predictable meetings.
Volunteer at a community center, hospital, animal shelter, or other organization that requires you to work with other people on a cause you care about.
If you are in a committed relations, or working on improving a close friendship, schedule regular ‘dates’ to spend time talking. It;s easier to do this on neutral ground at first, so it’s worth the effort to find a quiet, calm place like a library, coffee shop, or park to meet in for these discussions.
It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken
Although self-help books tend to be hit or miss, ‘It;s Called a Breakup Because it’s Broken is an entertaining personal story about getting over a bad relationship and learning to find what you want in life, told by two people who both documented their personal journeys with a surprising amount of humour and honesty.
If your relationship adjustments include breaking up with a romantic partner, this book is highly recommended.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres–literary biography and self-help manual–in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.
As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust’s life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date.
Managing Your Time
Compared to the last two topics, this one will be an emotional cakewalk, but you’ll need to make sure that the people in your life understand that you need time to do stuff so you can better understand the meaning of existence. Don’t worry, if they’re awesome they’ll understand, and if they aren’t awesome you’ll feel less bad about not having as much time for them.
Here are some tips to help you feel more in control of your time:
Build new routines around the routine you already have. If you eat, take a shower, or pee at least once on a daily basis, you already have a routine. You can build on this. For example, exercise before you take a shower. Drink a glass of water after you pee. Ponder the meaning of existence for ten minutes after every meal.
Don’t overcommit. If you find that all your free time is occupied caring for others, you need to talk to your family and friends and work out a prioritization system so that less urgent commitments can be rescheduled or removed from your list of commitments.
Ask for help. Some of the things you do can probably be done by someone else. If you’re able to get some help with things like housework.
Pay attention to how much time you spend consuming passive entertainment. Recreation is cool and stuff, but you can use some of this time to learn new things, and if you’re searching for a meaning in life, you probably won’t find it watching Netflix.
The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
If you don’t have time to read the entire book, the tips in this review are super useful. It’s amazing how much of an impact you can have on your time management simply by organizing your space.
Marie Kondo will change the way you look at (and prioritize) all the stuff in your life, and her philosophies spill over into how you look at stuff in general.
If you’re looking for inspiration to help you get through your challenges, you may want to read The Last Black Unicorn. It’s a series of autobiographical essays from comedian Tiffany Haddish, who broke out in 2017.
Sometimes the best thing you can do to motivate yourself is to look for inspiration in someone else. Plus she’s super funny.
Self-Evaluation
The changes you’ll be making will improve how you think and feel, create a supportive environment, and help you make space in your life for the next step, but these changes are not going to happen overnight, and your life will never be ‘perfect’ (whatever that even means).
So how will you know when you’re ready to move on to the next step? It’s easy! You just need to be able to say YES to the following things:
You mostly feel positive about yourself and others
You have a person or people you trust, and you can mutually discuss feelings and thoughts with them
You feel like you have time to learn new things
Ready? Sweet! Click here!
Not ready? No worries - you still exist so you totally still have time. Keep working at it; it’ll be worth it. <3