Get More Out of Your Life
Life is full of choices, and most people try to make good ones. Most people choose well throughout life. Even if you make generally decent decisions, it doesn’t feel right. Do you base decisions on your principles, morals, and values or others’ suggestions, thoughts, and opinions? Do you make decisions to please people only to regret them later? You can’t please everyone, so don’t try. It’s unhealthy to worry so much about others’ opinions. Focus on yourself instead. Being careless about what others think doesn’t mean you’re being unkind or disrespectful. Instead, it involves making self-centered decisions. Once you learn to care less, you can run your own life without fear.
Understand Why You Care So Much
Dig deep and analyze yourself to discover why you care so much about irrelevant problems and others’ thoughts. Three techniques can help you clarify why you care.
Journaling
You can journal using your computer, a specialist journal, or your notepad. Try to convey your thoughts, emotions, and stream of consciousness without judgment or censoring in your notebook. When you’re attempting to understand why you care, write every day. You may find your life’s purpose or a new cause to wake up each day.
Meditation
Before utilizing your journal, try meditating. Meditation is about not thinking and not evaluating your thoughts or feelings during meditation. Each time you meditate, you can seek self-discovery or relaxation. Find a quiet, comfortable location to sit or lie down for this meditation. Then close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Clear your head, then consider the circumstance. Refocus on your breathing to dismiss intrusive ideas. You can’t be distracted by outside information or sensations.
Therapy
You may get psychological therapy on your computer or smartphone today. Find an expert therapist to help you overcome people-pleasing and putting yourself last. You matter, too. Most therapists can help you find what you want and feel good about it, despite others’ reactions. Any or all of these strategies will help you understand why you need others’ approval and quit doing it. Following someone else’s dreams won’t deliver what you need to succeed or be happy.
How to Make a Choice: 5 Things That Make It Hard to Choose
Could any of these be making it hard to decide?
• Overthinking – If you take too long to decide, you may never choose, leading to default selections. Feeling out of control can result. Set research and decision-making deadlines.
• There are too many possibilities. You need improved decision-making criteria if you keep mulling over options without narrowing them.
• Listening to Others – While it’s OK to get opinions occasionally, especially if they’re experts, such as when hiring a CPA, listen to yourself more if the choice solely affects you.
• Guilt controls you – Some people may push back when you start living for yourself. Listen to your internal thoughts based on your knowledge. Perfection doesn’t exist. Trying to generate it is futile. Perfectionism might lead to inaction since it’s unachievable. If you dread making the wrong decision, ask yourself if it will matter in 100 years.
• You Forgot Your Overarching Goals – Each action you make keeps you the same, sends you backward, or advances you toward your goals. If you don’t know your goals, it’s hard to make good decisions. Clear goals make choices easier.
Train yourself to think differently to overcome decision-making barriers. Instead of these difficulties, consider your goals and whether this decision affects them. If so, ensure they get you closer to success; your choice may not matter.
Do you need approval all the time?
Some people have an addiction to external validation instead of being naturally motivated. You may be addicted to approval if you can’t inspire yourself without it. Any of these reasons could lead to your need for constant support.
You can’t stop thinking about how to get people to like you.
You like being on social media, dating sites, or anywhere else where you can attract people and get their attention by having them show interest in you. You might even find it hard to settle down with someone because you like dating more than being with someone.
You need reassurance all the time.
When dating someone, you often wonder if they’re “mad” or “upset” with you. This can happen every day between lovers, friends, and even family. If you often ask people to tell you how they feel about you, this could be a validation or approval need.
Your beliefs change based on who surrounds you.
If you often do things you don’t want to do to make someone or a group like you, you may be a people pleaser or even have an approval addiction. To get past this, you need to figure out who you are and what you value and then make a plan to reach your goals that fit your values.
Do you feel bad about having interests or hobbies?
Having the funds and time for a pastime that makes you happy might help you grow your self-esteem, feel more confident, and learn new things. If you have the time and budget, it’s good to have outside interests and hobbies. The benefits will outweigh the costs.
How caring less can help you feel less stressed and get healthier
Stress contributes to heart disease, asthma, obesity, gastrointestinal difficulties, and other health concerns. Stress can cause sadness, anxiety, Alzheimer’s, and early mortality. Training yourself to care less and cease seeking acceptance can help immensely.
Stress is a natural reaction of the body
Many people think that stress is “just a feeling,” but the truth is that the feeling is a sign that your body is reacting more significantly by releasing hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. When your body releases these chemicals, your whole body responds, not just your mind. Your blood pressure increases, your heart beats harder and faster, and you may take shorter, more rapid breaths. Unfortunately, these changes in the body can lead to many serious health problems over time. This is why it’s good for your health to learn how to care less.
Use the right tools to deal with stress
Now that you know stress is more than just a feeling, you can use the right tools to deal with it. For example, learning to focus your breathing, using guided imagery, keeping a journal, and meditating can help you find the root cause of your stress, which is often just caring too much about what other people think. Using these tools can help you focus on what’s most essential and put your thoughts and feelings about a subject into perspective rather than just those of other people. When you learn to stop reacting to the things that stress you out, you’ll stop overthinking and make better decisions based on your life goals, morals, values, and principles. If making decisions stresses you out because you worry about what other people think, think they are always mad at you, or don’t think about what you think about a situation, the extra stress can make you sick in a physical way.
Find out what’s making you stressed and deal with it by learning more about yourself, your ideas, and your opinions. You’ll stop second-guessing yourself when you find out what other people think. Learn to pay more attention to the present so that you are always aware of what you think and feel, not what other people think and feel. Since you can’t read other people’s minds, most of what you think about how they feel is probably wrong.
Be Care-Less!
Focus on yourself and do what you need to, and you’ll feel much less stressed.
I’m Bethann Gilson, serving fellow introverts by helping them embrace their introversion as a superpower. My friend, Connie Ragen Green, has a great free program to take action on building new habits. Join me in this free program, Action Habits Challenge, and see where the journey will take you.