Today, more and more people are beginning to enter a state of decadence and despair.
We live in a highly stimulating world; it is easy to feel that the body is hollowed out. The sense of achievement and harvest is less and less and often caught in the rush to do something for no reason, slowly becoming miserable and meaningless, and entering a kind of depression.
Depressed people like to procrastinate, like self-doubt, self-criticism, low sense of self-worth, fall into the trough of emotions, and feel self-pity, so they are not interested in doing anything. It is more challenging to be motivated; I am too lazy to argue about everything, too lazy to work hard, and gradually enter a state of “it is what it is”. Day after day, the daily unwillingness accumulates more and more depression and frustration.
With the rapid advancement of technology, it seems that we have more and more control over the world. We have automobiles, which greatly expand human freedom and can go anywhere we want, but when you look at the traffic jams in big cities, you will find that our time is taken up by anxious waiting.
We have more material supplies and more choices, and educational resources. However, today’s children are not happier than us in the past. In the past, as long as you went to work on time and saved money regularly, you could buy a house within a few years, but now, if you still work step by step and work hard, you often still cannot afford a house.
When we feel more and more uncertainty and a stronger sense of losing control, we are prone to anxiety and restlessness, which breeds a decadent and depressing emotional state and wants to escape the burdens and responsibilities of life.
When you are trapped in a decadent and depressed emotional state, here’s are five ways you can do to get out of the negative form of decadence and depression.
1. Be mindful
Many times, our depression is dragging us step by step into the abyss of anxiety. One of the most effective ways to get yourself out of depression is to keep yourself mindful of expelling those depressing thoughts that pop up from time to time.
Our mind tends to drift to past experiences and patterns or future outcomes that are not happening yet. Either way, we let the present moment slip through our hands. Ended up, we cannot construct an inner order for ourselves that faces the past and is not afraid of the future. Instead, we are lost in the cognitive dilemma of passive burnout and self-imposed limitations.
Mindful of our emotion, our state of mind can help us make conscious choices, the meaning we associate ourselves to the event and decide how we react to it. The person who can help us out of the state of depression, there is no one else but ourselves, because in this world, everyone else is just a projection of your inner self.
2. Anything that happens, aware that it is not about you
How we experience reality is a product of the meaning we give to an event.
“Hey, I’m almost a waste…”
“I’m so useless, and I can’t learn at all…”
“I shouldn’t have tried….”
“I don’t deserve it….”
These are the common negative thoughts that show up in people based upon the outcome they received from their actions. I believe that most people are full of hope in life initially. Still, sometimes life will be played as a bad card in our hands, and if we associate the event negatively and “it’s about us”, it easy to go downwards to biting yourself up and hard to get back up. End up feeling powerless and ended up in a state of decadence and despair.
So to change the state of depression, the first step is to aware that it is not about you; see in bigger picture greater than you. In another words, don’t take it personally. Knowing that you have tried your best and if the result did not happen as you desired doesn’t mean anything negatively. Accept the status quo, face it and take it as a lesson learned instead of resisting it. Because resistance means that we are held hostage by our immediate depression, which is like action and reaction in physics, the more you resist it, the more pressure it puts on you.
3. Accept emotions are just temporary; it comes and go.
When we accept the current decadent emotions, we realize that the current decadence and frustration are only temporary. As long as we re-understand ourselves, we can reshape a new value that can make us make better choices, and then we will get a different result. You can truly accept yourself, adjust yourself, and have the opportunity to change your current state.
To accept the state of depression is to stop self-criticism, self-doubt, and self-criticism, give yourself a relaxed state of mind, and admit your shortcomings and problems.
4. Let go of a competitive mindset and build a sense of meaning.
The higher expectations you give to yourself result from comparing yourself with others; for example, comparing how much salary, how big a house, how much power and social status, and how good a car you possess will drift your way from having a real sense of meaning in life and makes you choked with enormous pressure and anxiety. Anxiety and stress can build up by lingering fears of missing out, losing what you have, fear of being judged, and failure.
At this time, we need to let go of demanding ourselves by secular standards and give up following the crowd. Let go of expectations from a competitive mindset and stress on the outcome, take baby steps and focus on the process, adopt a step-by-step continuous behaviour model, progress is all matters and build the meaning of personal persistence.
“Don’t compare yourself with other people, compare yourself with who you were yesterday”, Jordan Peterson
5. Take power back and own your life
Feeling powerless due to decadence and depression is very common, especially when we think more and more about uncertainty and a stronger sense of loss of control. Most people subconsciously choose to escape the burdens and responsibilities of life, and saying “I have no choice” has become a common excuse.
Acknowledge you have a choice. Even in this dark moment when you feel choice is so limited, you still have a choice to choose what to do. Ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded. Sometimes things happen that are out of what we can control, and we can choose how we perceive the situation, people and ourselves, and how we will react to it. Ignorant and clinging to comfort can cause people not to realize their power of free will.
Own your life and utilize the superpower of free will to craft your way to success. For example, you can choose to do 20 sit-ups every day, starting from the small things within your ability. When you establish your sense of ritual and meaning in your daily life, then you can allow yourself to feel in control of your life. And this inner sense of control and fulfilment of life will gradually dissolve the state of depression and affect other aspects of life. Your body will get better and better. And you will become more and more confident in yourself and the sustainable process to your end goal.