26 Jan If optimizing your life is exhausting, you are doing it wrong
Happiness doesn’t always come easily to all of us.
But happiness shouldn’t necessarily be exhausting.
If you get your pursuit of happiness right, it should flow…
via the Ladders by Thomas Oppong
The pace of modern life is accelerating. To keep up, many people are constantly striving for greater happiness and success. Or so they are told. The demands of life in the fast lane come at a price: stress, fatigue and depression are at an all-time high, especially for those who are pursuing self-improvement at all cost.
It is quite natural for us as humans to want to get better.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve, but it can sometimes be unhealthy. How much self-improvement is too much? Where is the limit to the constant pursuit of betterment? Many people treat their lives as systems to be hacked. They want to optimize their productivity, happiness, health, and intelligence every day of the year.
They spend their time finding better ways to spend their time, instead of enjoying the time they have.
When you try to do it all, you’ll only achieve one thing: exhaustion. “We are being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, including parts that we did not previously know needed upgrading,” argue Carl Cederström and Andre Spicer, author of The Wellness Syndrome.
It can be exhausting. It can lead to burnout and stress.
If you take almost anything to the extreme, it’s probably going to be detrimental. However noble the goal of your self-improvement maybe, if it feels exhausting and draining, you are not doing it right.
“The desire to achieve and to demonstrate perfection is not simply stressful; it can also be fatal,” according to the British journalist Will Storr. “People are suffering and dying under the torture of the fantasy self they’re failing to become,” he says.
When you pursue specific life routines because someone or an influencer said it’s the perfect thing to do, you could end up making yourself miserable...
…keep reading the full & original article HERE