Stop worrying – start living!
I’m not good enough. I’m doing my best and I still can’t advance. Everyone around me lives in houses, and I’m still stuck in a studio apartment. Jolka’s son is an A-level student, and my son can barely get three grades – I’m a hopeless mother. Weronika added a photo from her vacation in the Caribbean, and we are in Dąbki for another year. If you see yourself in any of these sentences, it’s a sign that it’s time to stop comparing yourself with others, constantly striving for perfection and blaming yourself. How to stop worrying and start living? Dr. Katarzyna Czyż, author of the bestseller “Miejej f**k, it will be given to you. About the Difficult Art of Letting Go, tells you how to stop caring about everything.
It has never been so good, and at the same time it has never been so bad. Theoretically, we can afford everything, technology has opened up opportunities for us that our parents and grandparents did not have, we have our own apartments, houses, jobs, we can travel to any place we dream of. And at the same time, we have never felt as much pressure as we do now to succeed in every field. The education system rewards the best, at work we are assessed based on results, and social media tells us what we should have and what we should be like. It is therefore not surprising that we gradually lose contact with ourselves, with what we really want, what we desire, and we decide to take part in the rat race. What are the consequences? Of course, they depend on many factors, but the statistics on depression, suicide attempts, and even various diseases (somatics are important here) are significant. So what should you do to take care of your mental comfort? How to break out of this rat race?
Ada, this is not appropriate!
Dr. Katarzyna Czyż herself did not care about balance in her life for a long time and mainly met the expectations of others – her story can be read in the book, and it mainly serves to show how the author’s transformation began, what methods and techniques, proposed in the following chapters, in her case they worked. The story about the girl allows you to relate the reading text to yourself and your history. “What are your beliefs?”, “Is life hard?”, “How did you gain the love and attention of the most important people to you?” – we will answer these questions while reading, and at the same time draw conclusions that will become the basis for further work on ourselves and letting go of what we want to let go of.
Working on our beliefs and patterns will not be easy, but the author does not promise it. However, he encourages us to write down answers to the questions we ask – if only because if we write something down, we consider it more valuable. Just facing them forces us to think and stop the crazy rush of life and take a closer look at ourselves. It may then turn out that – as in the author’s case – the ideal life is not so perfect at all, but is instead a fulfillment of the dreams of our parents, guardians or the result of the expectations of those around us. However, maintaining such a facade requires a lot of energy from us, does not allow us to be ourselves, and may also have health consequences. Because even if we meet the requirements of others, do everything we have been programmed to do, even trained, if we know dozens of languages and have extensive knowledge about the world, it turns out that we cannot do one thing – we cannot live!
There is hope!
“There is such a thing as neuroplasticity, which means we can gently change our structures, build new neural connections, create new thinking habits (to put it simply, by thinking positively you can become an optimist… it will take some time and it is a bit more complicated, but it is possible)” – he writes Dr. Katarzyna Czyż, proving that this property of the brain helps us let go. He lists tools that should be used, such as repetition, creating new thoughts, recalling them as often as possible, exaggerating these new thoughts until we finally believe that they are our way of life.
The author of the book offers us to work not only on patterns, but also on stereotypes stuck in our heads, on the tendency to generalize (because “he always”, because “she never”, because “we only”), as well as on our emotions (to learn to accept them and deal with them).
Dr. Katarzyna Czyż presents her own method of letting go, consisting of seven steps, each of which also works separately, although combining them creates a synergy effect and allows you to achieve spectacular results. What are the steps? The first involves naming emotions (which is not that easy), the second involves breathing, which gives you the opportunity to stop for a moment, the third involves self-coaching, i.e. thinking with questions in order to get into the discomfort zone and look at everything from a different perspective. The next step is four agreements, i.e. dividing the love process into pieces, into four stages: tolerate, accept, like, love. The fifth is learning how to rest and relax, a skill that many of us have completely lost in our pursuit of productivity. The sixth step is managing our energies, and the seventh and final step is humor. The author walks with us on the path towards change, towards self-knowledge and letting go. By proposing exercises, asking questions, sometimes uncomfortable ones, presenting examples and providing us with many tools to work on ourselves and cope with life, it helps us work on ourselves. And while change is never easy, the results can be surprising. And when we first say to ourselves: “I don’t give a f**k about this!” and it will be completely consistent with us – it will mean that the work with the book has brought results. So I encourage you to read it and radically clean up your mind!
