The road to self-discovery is tasking and can get stressful and frustrating. How, when, where, and what kept popping up in the brain and heart. It gets more worrying when there is no proven success on how much you have worked.
Every man has a specified purpose in various sectors in our world today. Annually, more people graduate from school and don’t even know which direction to go outside the school community, hence the stress of where to begin their lives.
Stress is a common word every youth says indirectly as, “I don’t know what to do.” Or “I don’t know where to start from.” Or “I feel frustrated about everything. “. This stress gets even worse with a lack of resources materially or financially. The six-lettered word, stress, can affect man psychologically, thereby bringing about confusion, anxiety, and depression. Meanwhile, some stress is not avoidable, but it can be managed.
Today, the most common stress is money, work, and poor health and statistics by the American Institute of Stress, about 33% of the world population suffers from work stress, what to do, or what they are doing presently, and about 77 percent of those stressed experience a decline in physical health.
Now the purpose here is not to scare you but to help you realize a better way to manage yourself wherever you are either you are just starting the journey of self-discovery as a fresh graduate, and you have been on the journey for a while.
1. Take your time; the first mistake most people make on this journey is that they rush into whatever they can do with the motive of making enough money and living a comfortable life. Now, taking your time is different from wasting your time. During this period, you want to know who you are, what you do to the best of your abilities and efforts, and what makes you happy. You give yourself to understand, observe and develop yourself to solve societal problems. Medically, meditation is encouraged because it’s a period where you can be calm. The moment of calmness is the ability to think clearly. Amidst the chaos, demands, troubles, and economic situation, take your time reviewing the pros and cons.
2. Identify your stressor; a stressor could be a person, place, or situation, and stress could be a combination of any. After taking your time to meditate, settle down to identify why, how, when, and what gets you stressed out. Answering these questions would help you get a better understanding of your personality.
3. Schedule your worry: Yes, you can schedule your worries at a specific time of the day. It is similar to a to-do list you strictly implement into your day-to-day activities and helps you focus on solving one problem at a time and help place priorities.
4. Take a step at a time; resist that part of you that seeks to accomplish multiple tasks within the same time frame. It is the reason the majority feel so stressed as they focus on many problems together. After you schedule your worries, solve them one at a time to reduce how much you stress and help you accomplish more than you imagined in a shorter time frame. A great nation was not built in a day.
5. Set limits: cutting off unnecessary visits or journeys, eating unnecessarily, wasting resources, buying unnecessary stuff, and more could help reduce mental stress. On the journey of self-discovery, discipline is required, that is, setting limits on what you want and focusing from what you want to what you need. Setting priorities right would help reduce stress psychologically.
6. Develop a hobby; be it playing games, strolling, chatting with friends, and more, develop a hobby that takes your mind off your troubles. Interestingly, every game on the Web today has an advantage for the brain, for example, candy crush is a game that tests your patience and persistence, watercolor sort helps you in problem-solving, and 2047 helps you helps to test your level of concentration, exercising relaxes you. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, take a break from work to help the brain cool off and keep a clear mind.
7. Learn to ask for help; I understand that you have been refused many times and have developed this independent mindset that you can do everything on your own. This is where the importance of association has emphasized the type of people you keep in your association, what your association offers positively from the friendship factor, what you gain or give to your association, and who your mentor or role model is. No man is an island.
8. Have an open mind to learn and unlearn: On the journey of self-discovery, you need to be open-minded and flexible. The journey is not about what you know in-depth but a time for you to learn new things and become a better individual. Keep your mind open and seek opportunities to learn new things every day. Being open-minded helps keep a clear mind towards achieving your goals because an outdated individual who cannot meet the positive changes of time gets outdated in society.
9. Journal your track record; I understand that keeping up with your set goal can be overwhelming and hard sometimes, but you can reduce the stress by keeping a journal or a calendar to record how close you are to achieving that goal. You compare what you have done to what you are yet to do and plan. This is not to stress you but to know how well you are doing. Not having a comparable record result in mental stress most of the time.
10. Refuse to be compared: on the journey of self-discovery, you are to discover who you are, not what the people around you want or what they see. Resist living the illusion people create about you. When you determine what you want to be, how to go about it becomes clearer and having a defined goal and imagery of yourself helps you work towards achievement.
11. Build your self-esteem; the common saying, “the way you dress determines how you are addressed,” is not about dressing in a typical sense but about your composure to your goals and responsibilities. Being wealthy with low self-esteem is no different from a mediocre. In our world today, your self-esteem defines how you view yourself. Take time building your self-esteem and confidence in who you are and want to be.
12. Change your perspective; your mindset determines your approach. A change in your perspective would help to see things differently and approach a situation Skillful and vice versa. Take part in self-talk, read positive books, watch positive videos, and engage in productive activities.
One or two of the methods listed above are probably missing when you are seeking what to do in meeting ends means. Search through and ask yourself which is missing and engage it productively and you’ll be amazed how much progress you make on your journey to self-discovery