Feel better
4 steps to feel better in any situation, whether an argue with your friend or a bad event that happened in your life that you were not able to control. It sounds a bit too easy and unbelievable to have the perfect 4. But, from my experience, all the experiences, events, negative emotions that I faced in my life, these “4 steps” helped me a lot!
Listen
It could be hard to pay attention to your needs, you wants, your feelings in general. I know it. I know it because I hard with myself. I’m harsh with myself because I always want to be perfect, do everything right, without any mistakes. And I’m sure I can be this perfect girl that I visualize in my head: who is strong, patient, who knows how to deal with anything she faces, how to learn from any mistakes, and how to feel better, in few seconds.
But, this girl doesn’t exist. Nobody is perfect. Nobody will be. You can’t feel happy and smile everyday. You can’t feel better in a day after a bad news. Listen is just a question of looking at yourself, just look at you with an external vision. Look at you as a stranger, observe how do you act, how do you speak, how do you smile, behave, think, imagine. Don’t make any judgment or don’t try to change already. Start by just observing yourself.
2. Understand
You’ve just observe, observe yourself especially. Now, keep this external vision, and try to understand why? Why you make or made these decisions? Why do you look happy or sad? Why do you like to eat when you back home? Why don’t you feel good? Why do you hang-out every day? Why do you throw/spend your money or do shopping everyday for non-important things? Why do you want to move or travel? Why do you want to have fun right now? Why don’t you want to think about your future? Why don’t you want to visualize or imagine your future? Why are you lost? Why don’t you find what you like?
Answer all these questions, after your observations, you have to understand why. Without any judgment, without thinking your stupid or non capable of anything. It is wrong actually. Don’t try to blame yourself, but don’t try to flee your emotions also. Just, try to understand, as you may try to understand when someone look at your shirt, and you try to know if it is because you have something on your shirt, or if it is just because of something else. But, yeah, you have to try.
You will probably not be able to understand everything, but you will discover things and you will know and understand a bit more about your feelings ne your thoughts. Maybe not fully, but more than before, and this is already good. You might go to visit a psychologist, to help you understand everything, but you can start by yourself, and already understand things by yourself…
3. Accept
It is completely normal to blame ourself when we do things wrongly, according to us. We did something but we are not proud of it, We might hurt someone, we might regret it, or we might be sad about it. It is normal to react like this. But obviously, what you did is done. You can’t change it.
I guess we all wanted, one day, to come back in the past, and change something: change what you said, or what you did. But, we all make mistakes. and we can’t change it. But we can learn from it to do better next time. Last year, I was finishing my driving lesson, and I was upset about myself, because my driving lesson was not as I expected. And I was so upset that during the trip to return at the driving school, I said nothing. Whereas, we used to laugh and make jokes every minute with my professor. However, this time, I almost cried, just because I made mistakes, a thousand of mistakes during this lesson. And, I didn’t expect that. But, the more she was telling me something I did wrong, the more I was doing mistakes… And after the lesson, I arrived to my car - you have to know that I can’t drive when I’m upset, because I want to rush, don’t stop when I have to…and so on - and I wrote on my journal, during 30minutes, or maybe more, listening to classical musics to calm my emotions, breath and do these 3 steps that we’ve just seen.
I breathed. I listened to my feeling. Then, I tried to understand. And when I understood why, I accepted this angriness. Because this angriness that I had against myself, was here to help me improving myself, and change.
Here is what I wrote:
Qui ne fais pas d’erreurs? Qui ne s’est déjà pas trompé? qui n’a pas un jour vécu un échec? Au lycée, à l’auto-école, en amour, en amitié, dans sa vie, dans son avenir, dans son avis ou bien même dans ses souvenirs..
Who never did any mistakes? Who?
And, finally, a mistake, what is it? Ça sert à quoi? Est-ce si grave que ça? Really?
Mistakes, in the opposite of what you can think, help to understand, and understand yourself, correct yourself, resist, control yourself, don’t be upset - when it is useless/you are not supposed to - don’t cry, don’t laugh or give up. Mistakes build your person to give to best version of yourself, to help you grow, and improve yourself. Therefore, pay close attention to listen to those and be proud to make mistakes. Because, it is thanks to your mistakes that you are where you are today. It is thanks to those mistakes that you are who you are today, and that make you live what you lived and experienced in your life.
So, is it really worth it to be upset to yourself for a simple mistake? No, I don’t think so. Older people - adults older than you - will recommend you to make mistakes, in order to remember the lesson you learned from it.
This is the third step: Accept. I accepted my mistakes, and we all have to accept what we did, because we can’t change it, but we can learn from it.
4. Change, correct
You learned from your mistakes, you accepted what you did. Now, change/correct your behavior. You may have spent to much money to feel better and be focused on something else than your problems, by doing shopping or going to the restaurant with your friends everyday. Great. You could have keep this money for something else. It’s ok. But, stop hanging out everyday, or don’t go to expensive restaurants. Find something that correspond to you, finding you great balance between too much, and not enough - it was an example, but I hope you understood.
You observe, you understood, you accepted, now you have to change your behavior. According to the person you wanna be, according to the ideal you have, according to your models. Don’t be too harsh with yourself, don’t change everything in two minutes. As we said, take time, one at a time. But start somewhere, start being more open-minded, start accepting other’s defaults, work in your patience, refocus on your values, learn how to be less selfish, or how to give more attention to the people you love, and how to make compromises for them… Learn how to give love, how to express your feelings in a better way, to avoid hurting some people, use the right words at the right time.
If I have to give you again my example about my angriness after my driving lesson, I also wrote a second part, to improve myself, here is it:
Always see the good, because as Lena Situations says: +=+, and because you are someone positive, if you want to share positivity, happiness, and smile around you, you have to see the things in a positive way.
You can find my podcast about this subject, with a lot more informations and advices, it is a hour podcast, with few songs that I included related to the subject, if you are interested, I invite you to click on the video below.
And you can also find all my other radio podcasts in the podcast page :)
Love you all! Don’t hesitate if you have any questions, comment down below or send me a message on instagram (@guliete)
