Physical health and mental health are both 99% practice and effort.
The moment you stop working out or doing things mentally, the state of your body moves in a different direction.
That is not necessarily good or bad, but if you want to keep a sharp mind, you have to do the majority of the thinking yourself. You also have to practice thinking proactively to keep your brain healthy.
I know that I am not saying anything new here, but in this era of individualization, sitting behind a computer and not communicating with each other, you lose the basic skills.
If you are used to blocking your own voice, you don’t know you do that. It’s normal for you. You don’t recognize not speaking out. If you’ve been doing that from a young age, you don’t know the other things. If you’ve been doing that for 20 years, 30 times a day, you have added 219,000 instances of extra tension to your body.
The trick is to bring your awareness to yourself and see where you block your own voice.
The other side of things
Maybe you recognize this scenario.
You never think about money. Or, at most, a few times a day. Because you don’t really care about money.
Until you have money problems. Now, you think about money way more often. You think about money hours and hours a day. How can I get more of it? You feel stress going through your body.
Money has become you, in a sense. From the 1,000,000 thoughts you have, suddenly 700,000 are about money.
People who went through things recognize these instabilities within themselves. You recognize periods when all you could think about was money, and that was not good.
You call this awareness. Awareness means recognizing the state you are in, especially past states. ‘This is what I want, and that is what I don’t want.’ This is surprisingly hard if you are used to being in an extremely stressed state, for instance. If you are used to practically being in psychosis 24/7, then it’s hard to spot the difference between that and living a more balanced life. If you are in a state of blocking emotions, having an eating disorder, or punishing yourself, that is very hard to spot too if you have never seen the other side of things. You don’t know the other side. This is your baseline, this is your normal.
My point is this: there are people who have normalized being in an extremely stressed state, and it becomes dangerous. So, for people who grow up in a terrible environment, feeling awful is normal. That is their baseline. They never went through a phase where they had money and then didn’t, and so they can’t notice the difference.
I was in psychosis a few years ago. But I experienced love when I was younger. So I knew that there was another side of things. There are also people who don’t know there is another side of things. Their baseline is blocking love 24/7, for instance. You can’t see that from the outside.
So when you are in a state of starvation, that is your baseline, your normal. You don't recognize it as an abnormality anymore.
You don't recognize blocking emotions, your voice, or your sexuality as something abnormal. That is the feeling you are used to; it's what you do.