Vol. 517, October 3,  2019 – How Do I Stop Avoiding Things That are Difficult For Me?

The best way to change this is to realize that you are avoiding difficult things to not have to deal with what we in the psych world would call ‘fear of failure most likely.

I can only tell you that it is only through walking through the fear of seemingly difficult things that we can find that most of these difficult things were not at all difficult. I will give you an example from my yesterday.

I am off to Isreal for a year to do a master’s degree over there. I had to go to the Israeli consulate to apply for my student visa. I was very concerned that my paperwork would be illegible, or that they would find some reason to deny it forcing me to redo what I had done because I hate filling out forms. In fact, I always print off two of them knowing that I need that many to get it right.

It so happened that I got to the consulate very early and was out of there 15 minutes before my appointment was supposed to happen. The paperwork was fine – so I built up this whole problem in my own mind. Now, to be honest there were many others who did not have whatever they needed for passports or visas and had to return – however, I was not among them because I took the time in advance to have everything done exactly as I was requested including leaving my cell phones at home. It ended up that it didn’t matter because almost everyone had their cell phones, but I do believe that because I followed the directives on the Israeli consulate page, things went a lot smoother for me than the majority of people who just want to do what they want to do irrespective of what they are asked to do.

Another example was writing the literature review for my master’s thesis in July. I had no idea how to go about doing this even though I looked up every resource the university had to offer. It took me quite a few tries and a few times with tutors at the school to get the thing written. For all that effort I was awarded a 7 out of 7 points. Doing the thesis in total was also a new situation and I wasn’t sure how the professor was going to grade it, but again it was 35 out of 35 points – because I did what I had to do to the best of my abilities. That accomplishment was most fulfilling to me given all the hours of work that went into it, including figuring out what sections had to be included in the final paper.

I tell you these stories so that you can understand that it is only through overcoming the difficult things that we learn that we can pretty much handle anything that life hands us – because one learns how to think critically and inventively to get things done.

So, for you, the outcome is to feel much better about yourself by learning that you can indeed figure out how to do the difficult things in life along the way.

What Do You Do When You’re Down to Feel Better? – Vol. 516, Sept. 26, 2019

This was a question that was asked by a Quoran on Quora back in June. I thought it was a great question. This is how I answered it:

I am completing my master’s program in medical sociology. So, I have to write a master’s thesis on a research project. One piece of this is called the ‘literature review.’

I spent 3 full days researching and writing the literature review than had a tutor review it. I knew that I really hadn’t a clue what I was doing even with taking advantage of all the materials given to help with the process.

When I got the tutor’s review back I was devastated. He wrote it in the kindest way possible, but I hadn’t gotten the manner in which to write the thing – though my research was on point and my conclusion was fine.

Talk about frustration!

So, what did I do next? I took a breath, sat at my computer, rewrote it and sent the first two paragraphs to a tutor who with whom I had on online chat. I rewrote it again, still having missed the point and went online again with another tutor who explicitly explained what I needed to do and where to place the information.

I rewrote the whole paper again sent it into Grammarly, made the 60 corrections it suggested and then uploaded it for grading.

I received a perfect grade to my astonishment for all that effort.

So, in short:

Allow yourself to be upset for a few minutes then fully apply yourself to figuring out how to resolve the problem, with humility asking for help as often as necessary to do a great job on said project.

Those of us who care about those things we endeavor to do can be very hard on ourselves. However, it is best to realize that we all have areas in life that are challenges and to be humble and ask for help.

Getting down on ourselves is only useful to the degree that it forces us to take productive action toward a respectable solution. This includes apologizing for our hurting someone, failing at something or anything in life where one could be down on one’s self.

What Specific Aspects of Social Media Seem to be Triggering Mental Health Issues? – Vol. 515 – Sept. 19. 2019

Too many people believe that social media is the same as socializing face-to-face, eye-to-eye and soul-to-soul and it isn’t even close. People are social in nature like ants and Beas needing to be with people in person to feel the sense of belonging that goes back to our tribal survival ways of living back in our histories to cave living times.

When people rely too much on social media they are actually isolating themselves and that is very unhealthy.

People lie or exaggerate about how their lives are going leaving out the normalcy that most people live. So others compare themselves and feel that they are living lesser lives than those explained in the comments made by others. In these cases, depression can occur. For others being bullied by others can happen. I have seen this happen even between professionals on linkedin. It happens because one person believes they have the right to tell others what they may or may not post, without having any idea who the person is that they are trying to contain, crossing the boundaries between the questioner and the person who answers. It is a total travesty. 

Others go endlessly on about how disordered they are and that too can be problematic I see a ton of this on Quora (a forum where people ask and answer questions). I no longer answer those questions that are phrased in what I consider a ‘victim’ mentality especially if the questioner is using psychiatric terms that are obviously being misused in the context of the question.

Social media is good for business building, but that is becoming ever more crowded and difficult. It is good for keeping up with a certain group of people that you associate with like business groups or groups tied to an educational program that you are in and to share family photos with those family members who live far from you.

Social media is disastrous if you truly believe these strangers are your friends. They are not real friends because the only way one knows them is through their very well thought out posting and nothing more.

Go out into the real world and interact with real people doing something that you enjoy doing. You will definitely find yourself having a much better time and perhaps you will create a long-time friendship that could never have happened had you not gotten out from behind your computer.