9 Things About The Human Condition You’ll Be Surprised To Hear
I’ve been a student of human nature for 40+ years, and a full-time personal development coach for 3 years and in that time I’ve come to realize that there are aspects of the human condition that, when we’re aware of them, make our lives a whole lot easier. Yet the mind doesn’t come with an instruction manual, and our American school system when I went through it didn’t have any classes on how to operate my mind. Which is truly bonkers, considering that I learned how to operate a lathe in the 6th grade but had no idea how to process or understand my emotions until I was 45 years old. Anyhoo…as I coach people to understand how they are getting in their own way in order that they may live their fullest and happiest lives, I find myself doing some basic education about how our minds and consciousness work, and I’m sharing the Greatest Hits here in the hopes that one of them helps you live your best life (whatever that means to you!):
No One Is Thinking About You Very Much (and this is a good thing!)
We are all super self-absorbed, to the point that we just don’t have much capacity to think about how you walked out of the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe or how you aren’t good at math (or presenting, or telling stories, or insert thing you’re sensitive about here). It’s likely that you are connected personally to a few hundred people right now and at most one of them has a fleeting thought about you right now. And it could be a good one. But whatever the content of that stray fleeting thought, what impact does that have on you? None whatsoever. AND it’s probably not even happening.
You Are Probably Ashamed When You Should Be Embarrassed
Say you did do something dumb, as we all do. You can feel cringey about that, which you should label as embarrassment, which is defined more or less as “an uncomfortable emotion connected to a specific activity or instance that was regrettable”. Shame, on the other hand, is internalizing that embarrassment to the point where you think there is something fundamentally and permanently wrong with you. There isn’t. Really, there isn’t. We all do dumb stuff all the time. And smart stuff. You and everyone else are a hodgepodge of inconsistency and that means that you don’t get to define yourself as a failure.
Most People Feel Like an Imposter at Some Point
Maaaaaany famous people, very talented and well-regarded people like Jerry Seinfeld, Cheryl Sandberg, Oprah, Adele on and on have publicly shared their feelings of “Imposter Syndrome”, being the belief that they’ve been successful due to luck and that they’ll be ‘found out’ at some point as not having talent or whatever. I’ll refer you to the above nugget in terms of your definition of yourself – stop trying to grab onto something permanent even at the cost of that definition being ‘Imposter’. Every day you come with a clean slate.
You are Arguing With Reality A Lot
This was a gamechanger for me, when I realized how much I argued with reality. How much time I spent wishing things would, or thinking things should, be different. One surefire way to tell you’re arguing with reality is if you’re looking for someone to blame. Ultimately it’s exhausting and pointless. Accept whatever is happening right now. Take a moment to scream into a pillow if you need to, then ask yourself “So What Now?”
You Will Mess Up Again and Again
No one does everything perfectly, all the time. Really, no one does. Life is too dynamic in most cases to even define perfect, let alone achieve it. Decide instead to embrace being human, to look at ‘mistakes’ as the things that connect us to the rest of humanity.
What You Eat Significantly Impacts Your Mood in the Short- and Long-Term
Food is medicine. Truly, one of the reasons you’re chronically tired or distracted or angry or moody is what you are – or aren’t - putting in your body all day every day in the form of food. I am far from perfect in my nutrition, however when I cut back on refined sugars and started first eating healthy foods before indulging in less healthy foods, my mood improved at least 30%. Yes, that designation is totally subjective AND I’m standing by it.
People Will Disappoint You
Yup, we are all for the most part doing the best we can but we don’t read each others’ minds and we have our own priorities and we get it wrong a lot of the time, or at least ‘wrong’ in terms of other people’s priorities. You get to choose what you do with that reality. For me personally, I assume good intentions and recognize that we’ll fall short of what we intended much of the time. Also know that one common cognitive bias is the Attribution bias, in which we judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their outcomes.
Your Mind’s Job is to Produce Thoughts, Some Are Not True
When I started thinking of my mind as a 6th sense (as is done in the Buddhist tradition), I stopped taking my thoughts so personally. It was a paradigm shift to think of my thoughts like my other senses – vision, for example. If I see a tree I don’t feel compelled to relate to that tree or defend the tree or argue against the tree. The same attitude can be taken towards thoughts. I know, it sounds weird but just be open to it.
You Spend A Lot of Thinking Energy Catastrophizing or Ruminating
That is, living in the worst possible version of the past or future. And some of us do that deliberately with the subconscious goal of protecting ourselves from disappointment or pretending that it’ll make us more prepared (in the case of catastrophizing). It doesn’t actually provide much benefit, and it trains your brain to create neural pathways looking for disaster.
Which of these surprised you the most? The least? What’s one action you can take right now, in the next 5 minutes, to incorporate this knowledge in a way that will help you live whatever your vision is for an optimized life?