Have you noticed in this world how it's glorified to run on fumes? What I mean by this is that it's to live in constant survival mode, to constantly be stressed, to be burnt out, and to keep going, going, going, and push so much until you're just left on fumes. It's glorified to avoid, as much as you can, blowing off steam and it's glorified to just keep on running on fumes and working harder and harder. This is not a good thing. It's not a good thing for your mental health, obviously, and it's even not a good thing for your productivity. Picture this: there are two people. There's one person who just works and works. They do it even while they're running on fumes and they never give themselves a chance to recharge. Or there's the second guy who gets to the point where they're running on fumes but then they allow themselves to recharge while they were about to face that. They miss a few days, sure, but then when they come back they are hard-hitting and their work is much higher quality. Who do you think wins there? It's person number two.

Let me tell you a story. Whenever I first started to open up to people about my traumas and things of this nature, I thought it was great and it was something that we all should do with everyone. But I did this, the wrong person heard it, and things did not end well, let's just say. I want to say, while it's great to open up to people about your mental health and all these things (it's great for your healing journey), but you need to be careful who you show this side of yourself to. Because if you show it to the wrong person, the consequences will be bad and you really need to just trust your intuition and answer these 2 questions: Have you been able to trust this person in the past more than once? Does this person have a history of keeping secrets and etc? If this person matches those criteria then this is actually something you can open up about.

Let me tell you a story. I used to think that having any time for yourself and doing anything enjoyable, even if it wasn't productive, was actually a bad thing. We weren't meant to enjoy our lives whenever we got on this path of improvement and all that. I remember I was just sitting on my bed one day and I was thinking to myself, "Surely this is not a good life." Then I just went to my computer and dove deeper into researching this. I discovered that motivation and enjoyment are obviously important. I kind of knew that already but I got too blinded by influencers. Let me explain what I mean by having time for yourself: simply scale down your time so that you actually will enjoy yourself and just do what you actually want to do, and don't let it be destructive, of course. If you do that you just have such better life quality because it's important that you recover from whatever you're doing. These things, like healing trauma and all this heavy stuff, definitely can be... And if you do something you enjoy every now and then, then it can definitely be a good way to recharge, blow off steam, and just come back stronger. Remember this.

Let me tell you a story. Back when I was younger and I was first looking into mental health and healing traumas, I was too arrogant for my own good. What I mean by this is that an expert would say some advice and I would just be like, "Ah well, no, I disagree with that. No, I think that's false." This was how I was with so many things and of course that did me no good. I didn't get any results because I was too arrogant and egotistical. I just needed to take some advice from an expert. The same applies if there's some advice that your mentor or whatever gives you and you're like, "Ah, I don't want to. It sounds uncomfortable. I don't like that." Then you just need to not listen to that part of you and simply do the work anyway. It's going to be uncomfortable. It's going to be hard but do you really think healing trauma and mental health would be easy? Of course not. It's difficult. Remember this.

When you picture discipline you probably think of someone waking up early, doing deep work at their computer, and taking cold showers, that sort of thing. Those things are excellent and really good and healthy. But that disciplined mindset still applies to something as sweet and wholesome as mental health too. Let me explain. To get results in something it's all about being disciplined and just doing the work even when you don't feel like it. I'm sure you know that. Whenever I was first started my improving mental health journey about 3 years ago now, I thought that all that advice about working hard, cold showers, going to the gym, and all that would just make your life more depressing. Generally speaking whenever you live that life and you delay gratification, you just enjoy hard things more. They're actually good for you and that will help yourself. It will just make your life better and it will get you the things you want, like wealth, health, and relationships. An actionable step for you is just for discipline: you should really have a routine jotted down for your entire day, like 6 am wake-up, 7 am commute to work, something like that for every hour of the day. It just helps you be organized instead of being all over the place, not knowing what you're doing and when you're doing it. You just won't be able to achieve much if you don't have a routine and a schedule. Just do that and put your healing trauma journey in a block in this timetable and your mental health habits. Make the routine on google calendar.