Raise Your Baseline
Proverbs 17:22: "A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones."
How would you generally describe yourself? Introverted ? Extroverted? An ambivert? How do you feel when there is no outside stimuli? What is that emotion/s yov’e communed with in an uncharted marriage? What is your emotional baseline? Unconsciously, you come back to this baseline despite an exciting event or a life-crushing experience. This baseline is your default mood; it could be happiness, sadness, calmness, anxiety, etc. Your baseline of well-being can determine how you allow yourself to live. It determines how you go through life.
It’s like an innate working system. Temperament can be shaped by temperament’s biological, innate predisposition for how you react and respond to the world. Your past experiences can also shape it, as the lessons you’ve learnt become your guiding rules.
For some of us, our baseline is primarily emotions of sadness and anxiety, which can be crippling.
When you're coupled with a general emotional state of sadness or anxiety, your baseline is generally low, and you experience life in a state of low subjective well-being. It can be hard to enjoy the highs in life without expecting lows before the good event has even passed; you anticipate the ‘fall-off ’.
Do you really have to experience the ‘fall-off’ though? This uncharted marriage you have with sadness or anxiety should be explored. What is it about sadness/ anxiety that made you consummate this marriage, birthing a lifetime of dejection?
Whether you feel like you have always just been this way or situations that you've experienced anchored you to this seemingly unconscious commitment, you can escape from this. You have to elevate your baseline, make it higher so that your daily life is operating from a threshold that’s pleasant, more optimistic, and peaceful. Turn up your awareness and listen to your thoughts and observe the agreements you make about how you feel. How many of them are negative? Why do you have so many, and why do you mostly seem to agree with them? Come into disagreement with all the unrealistic, sad, and anxiety-filled emotions that surface and choose to agree with the opposite of that. Even if you feel like you have proof (past situations) of why you should feel this way or anticipate bad things, you still don't have to choose that feeling at the moment. It is not happening at the moment. At the moment, you should choose to feel happiness, calmness, and peace.
You have to want to be better and make small increments to your daily well-being to improve your happiness. Always think of the best outcomes, believe that you’re a good person and that you deserve good things. Once you've got the belief system on a rolling basis, even if it's not perfect, actions to materialize this new agreement will follow.
You'll soon come to realize that even agreements that have had a binding contract for years can be annulled.
