First, meditate. Start with ten minutes. I like to do an hour.
Then, create a chunk of time for no problem-solving. Set aside an hour for that.
Pause anything that has to do with any kind of problem solving for any problem in your life (unless it’s internal).
That means all practical things and chores: checking emails, organizing the counter, finding a new doctor, any problem you’ve been working on.
And ask yourself repeatedly during that hour, does this give me joy?
You’re not asking yourself in general, you’re asking yourself if it will give you joy RIGHT NOW.
What gives you joy at this second constantly changes.
Somehow, I’ve found that joy is often an incredible guide, once you are in touch with yourself, via meditation or some other medium that allows quiet time beforehand.
Oftentimes, we put ourselves in a bad mood by going against doing what we really want.
And always, what we really want is the grandest guide there is.
There is also often a difference between what we think we want and what we really want.
Your joy could appear abstract, even to the personality you thought you have.
You have to allow for the randomness.
So for this one hour, try to follow the randomness of this joy - change course as much as it does, and see how you feel after.
Do you feel better? Happier?
Here’s a really big life secret: it takes great strength to be able to step away from a problem.
To be able to press the pause button, take a step away, and say “I am not going to think or work on any of these practical matters for an hour”.
This one hour of pause is a method to find out who you really are in a short period of time.
It’s so easy to confuse practicality and the needs of problem-solving with the bigger-picture guidence that comes from our joy.
They are both important things, and often we need to prioritize problem-solving, but we can’t have one without the other. For this purpose, we’ll call the other thing “joy-solving”.
When we deny ourselves of what we really want, and keep going against ourselves and our joy to meet some kind of worldly expectation, we get angry.
We get angry when we don’t trust ourselves enough to know that our joy leads to good places.
We think it’s good to solve problems all the time, as much as we can, fill every little hole, go as fast as possible, obsess over solving them - not sometimes, but ALL the time.
Sometimes this is good.
Often, it is not.
How do we know?
See if obsession is bringing you joy.
Experiment.
Go at your own growth rate.
Go at the speed of your joy.
We get attached to problem-solving. We even get addicted. It’s hard to stop for just an hour, or two. But it’s a good exercise. We see tabs open as we go to the computer, and before we do our desired task, we start closing the tabs. We get people not understanding that we need a break and try to cram tasks down your throat even if you say you need an hour. All these tasks are good, but to get true objectivity and clarity, we need extended breaks. Other people get stressed, but we can avoid a lot of stress if we hit the pause button and keep returning to joy as a guide. A lot of us turn down joy when it knocks at our door. When we detach from our problems instead of constantly solving them, we can see what is the cause of our unhappiness. Just because you CAN solve a problem now doesn’t mean you should. We often think that packing in the problem solving - even if it is painful in the moment- will ultimately give us greater joy. We completely forget that joy is accessible right under our nose if we can just say no to problem solving for a moment. We think it’s guidance coming from the inside, but it’s really a sense of obligation and often just making other people happy with you sad at the end of the day.
The so-called “practical” taking up the well-being: hang up the towel, charge the phone. A million little tasks become our enemy. We’re running around like a chicken without a head. All the while, our craving for ourselves becomes greater and greater. But we keep telling ourselves that it’s “too important”, or that it’ll “pile up”, or that it “can’t wait”, or that it would “make us happier”. In a way, it becomes like self-imprisonment. You get stuck. It becomes like a merry-go-round.
Suddenly, identity gets erased. Denial and illusions come in. And we are left with feeling like a shell of ourselves.
But often, we don’t even know that we’re doing this because we have forced ourselves to become overdone, overstimulated, to do the impossible, almost every day. Because the stakes are too high. We need to do this to pay the bills, to cover the bills. Try not to get yourself in this kind of situation. You will likely get stuck and not be able to hear the inner guidance as well. When you take on jobs, try not to work more than 40 hours a week. Otherwise, you likely won’t be as happy. You won’t have enough time to evolve and grow the way you need to.