Self-help TikTok strikes again. Going to sleep isn’t a choice for me tonight, so I’m mindlessly scrolling through TikTok when some dark aesthetic pictures capture my attention. They come with sets of habits–an overwhelmingly long list of them, randomly grouped.
I won’t name the creator; there are thousands of them doing the same kind of thing: throwing everything into the mix, on these headless accounts to gain followers for the sake of it. There isn’t even a sense of community here, with the comment section going unchecked, and only a few of them getting liked by the author.
Somebody looking for a change might think it’s good advice to “lock in” on this. I did too, and hit the bookmark button. It wasn’t until doing a necessary cleanup as a result of burning out hard at work, that I came across the saved post.
The cynicism might (definitively will) get the best of me, but I’ll try to mind my rambles here.
Change just isn’t possible without direction. It becomes a spiral of despair because you think you are not getting the results you should be getting.
How can you change something you don’t even know?
You need to understand where you come from and where you stand before taking on any life-changing journey toward improving your life with no direction.
It may be a good idea to ask yourself a very good–and very uncomfortable–question: What do you want from life?
I’m not talking about goals. I’m talking about clarity on who you are, what you want, and why you want it.
Here are my two cents on this, as someone who has tried, tested, and especially failed at the whole “changing my life in X months” shebang, several times, by following random advice on the internet.
“Know thyself”, the maxim says. But most of us don’t look inward enough. It takes courage to accept you’re not who you think you are–and even more courage to forgive yourself for who you actually are, where you are in life, and still move forward towards where you’d like to be.
Biohacking and self-improvement are great–when you know why you’re doing them and where you’re starting from.
Sleeping more won’t inherently improve the quality of your sleep if you’re shutting down under the stress of not being the person you think you should be.
Take it from experience: lock in on being more mindful of the person you are inhabiting. The you who used to enjoy certain things or feel sad about others. The child. The teenager. The young adult. The woman. The man.
Their deepest feelings. The beliefs they’d never admit to others.
That particular hunger–and its origins.
Only then, with a fuller idea of what’s creeping underneath your skin (that tightened fascia, baby) and beneath your conscious mind (the fascinating world of the unconscious mind, shadow work for the win!), will you be able to integrate habits that work for you, and not against you.
I’ve done it all. Disappear. Don’t tell. Change some habits. Incorporate others. Force-feed myself “only educational” content. Hell, I’d be ashamed to admit how many times I tried to do a 21-day challenge to incorporate a 10-step morning routine. I crashed.
Above all, I forgot enjoyment. I forgot myself as a person, and tried to erase my personality by telling myself I should embrace the struggle for the sake of my “future self”. But self-erasure isn’t discipline. It’s self-abandonment.
I burned out harder by forcing myself into something I thought I needed at the time: more grind–instead of slowing down into the sweet waters of giving your body, mind, and soul what it actually needs. Another tough-love question only you can answer.
If you have to take one random piece of advice from the internet today, let it be this:
Disappearing won’t save you. Knowing yourself will.