Random Bar Advice #2

I’ve personally noticed that these spikes tend to follow hopeful or pleasant times. It’s like your mood shifts too far, and then swings back the other direction to equalize, which, when repeated along a period of time, looks like instability. One way i’ve approached managing this, is to stay neutral, and don’t let yourself get too far above the baseline. If you don’t get “too happy,” you won’t have such a hard crash when it wears off. If you let yourself become elated, in a scenario where that elation cannot be perpetually maintained, or lead to a higher plateau, it’s inevitable to experience a painful crash, much more painful than what happens when you just “get a little down” from the neutral baseline. I try not to let myself get too up or too down. But i also try not to resist that which i do not want to persist.

Which leads to where i was going with this:

“That which you resist, persists.” -Jung

Which gave me an idea to try to hack that process by resisting the cues and triggers that lead toward elation. If you resist the “illusory” elation triggers, they will persist… which should result in a sustained encouragement toward positivity… so if you keep resisting it, you should have a sort of automatic “pull” toward better thoughts and motivation toward choosing the better actions, which should ultimately result in real progress, which can become the next plateau of self-development.

If you want to make progress, you’ll have to protect that progress… and if you want to protect that progress, you have to focus on creating and maintaining the foundations of a progress-conducive scenario.

In other words: rein it in, and try not to fix your gaze too far ahead of your current position.

But when those spikes and valleys get out of hand, you have to work to stabilize them, to maintain that foundational basis of stability.