The Consequences Of Not Being True To Yourself
Me contemplating on my balcony in Malmö, Sweden.
Being true to yourself, (and towards others) takes a lot of courage. We get glimpses of this in meditation and yoga, but we also have to get “micro-training”, meaning that we need to practice this every single day — to repair the “inner trust bank” and the integrity we have lost over the years of not being true to ourselves. Many of us live our lives not knowing what we want, what we value, why we live the way we do and work where we work — until there is so much discrepancy between how we live our lives and what we actually want to do if we had only learned to listen inwards a long time ago, that we eventually burn out. This is our wake-up call. This is our time to reset, dig deep inwards, and start to be true to ourselves.
It was like this for me before I had my two burnouts. I lived my high-performance lawyer life, semi-professional /national team athlete life, and fashion model life — at the same time. I didn’t know how to say “no”, how to prioritize rest, to feel inwards what I needed and what was important to me. Everybody else’s needs were my priority, and my goal was to make them not disappointed in me. Was this my primitive, inherited, way of trying to not get excluded from the herd, for not risking rejection? Probably yes – both unconsciously and consciously, because even if I did everything with passion and loved what I was doing, I also told myself that I am going to be as good and perfect in everything I am doing so that nobody can ever reject or say “no” to me. I wanted to be unbeatable, unstoppable, almost inhuman.
As a result, I was given the nickname “WonderWoman” by people in my surrounding; someone who seemed to have more hours of the day than the rest of the population, and someone who was just capable of succeeding in everything they did. To do everything with perfection. I took this as a compliment, and it became my drive to live up to these high standards I had set for myself towards the outer world. And simultaneously, that the world had set for me. But was I being true to myself? I lived in an illusion that performance gives me love. That it’s perfection or nothing. That’s a pretty high bar to aim for every single day, in every single activity. When having my mind wired to think (and getting it approved by society) that my value as a person was based on how I performed rather than who I was as a person – to myself and towards other people – then of course I thought that I “had it all”. It was like perfection became a way for me to stay out of, or at least not show, my flaws. Weirdly enough, the anxiety arising from perfection (perfection IS anxiety!) eventually actually became my flaw. Became my deep fall.
When I crashed completely in my two burnouts, I realized the emptiness of being evaluated based on perfection and performance alone, and it lead to an existential crisis, to put it mildly. Who am I now that I can’t perform? Now that I can’t get out of bed, have to sleep at least 17 hours per day and still feel exhausted afterward, can’t watch two minutes of TV or have the lights on in a room due to too many stimuli, can’t construct a single thought or write a sentence, can’t remember what I did yesterday, or to complete a seemingly simple task such as to choose what color toothbrush to buy in the supermarket in less than 30 minutes due to overwhelming anxiety and inability to take even the smallest of decisions… A pretty tricky situation for a lawyer/semi-pro athlete/fashion model. I had to relearn everything — not just to remember things again, but also to relearn who I am, who I want to be, and what makes me truly happy in the long run? 4 years of my life on 100 % sick leave from my lawyer job with two additional years thereafter years gradually increasing workload from 0 to 100 %. I spent countless hours in therapy, at stress courses, at sleep courses, at the pain rehab center, numerous doctor visits, meditation retreats in the rain forest, and periods with as well as without medication. I have gone through it all – hell and back – and gotten so much insight into my behavioral patterns, and thinking patterns, and gotten tools for how to deal with pain, performance anxiety, stress, depression, burnout, etc etc.
This experience makes it very easy for me to see when people around me are in tune with themselves/ have found a healthy and sustainable balance, or if they are led by performance, prestige, and perfection. If they let their ego and fear of being left out of the “herd” be so strong that they will do anything for other people’s approval. To please. To be “someone” in other people’s eyes. Many times we are so caught up in what other people think of us that we forget to think about what we think about ourselves.
However, we can’t blame ourselves for thinking and behaving this way. It is hundreds of thousands of years of survival of our ancestors that have created us this way. This is described very well by the famous Swedish psychiatrist, Anders Hansen in his new book “Depphjärnan”, in which he is trying to clear out why we feel so bad when our lives are so good, by highlighting the evolutionary aspect of why we have anxiety and get depressed. In the chapter about anxiety, he explains that it has filled a purpose in the past, and although we do no longer live on the savannah and risk getting eaten by a tiger, we have to understand that our brains have not developed in the past 40 000 years, so the response to stress, anxiety, and being “left out of the herd” remains the same today as back then.
Learning about how our brains function has helped me to see that anxiety has served an important purpose (to not get eaten by a dangerous animal!) and the fact that we are the result of countless generations staying this way for survival made me realize that a healthy brain is the one with anxiety and the not healthy/not normally developed brain is the one without anxiety. To conclude, anxiety is normal, and not having it does not correlate with our history. Without it, all ancestors would be dead and we would simply not be here today.
However, although we might sigh in relief now knowing that the anxious people are not the “crazy ones”, but in fact the ones who are completely normally developed from an evolutionary perspective, this doesn’t take away the fact that anxiety can be extremely draining and, in some instances, completely unbearable. This is where awareness becomes important.
Back in the day, the desire to fit in was not just about having the right clothes or getting many likes on a social media post. Thousands of years ago, being approved by the herd and not getting excluded could mean the difference between being eaten by the tiger on the savannah or not – between life or death. Keeping in mind that our brains’ development is still at the hunter and gatherer stage, while our society and the pressure therein is in rapid and constant development, it is not hard to understand that we are probably expecting too much from our brains. They are not adapted to modern society with all the stimuli, choices, and pressure. Our brains are not made for our modern lifestyle, so we can’t be too angry with them for reacting the way they do – for not coping with stress the way we want (as opposed to the way that has historically ensured survival), for wanting a quick fix and following the path of least resistance, or for developing anxiety and depression. Our brains are still in survival mode. But instead of being angry with their inability to cope with modern life, we can help them. And one way to help our brains is to become aware. To become aware of why they respond the way they do. And to become aware of when they do. One way to practice awareness and hopefully be able to look inwards, as a result, is to dare to be silent and to do nothing. To still the constant influx of impressions, and to create space for the mind to calm down in order for it to be insanely good at the things it was meant to do.
I see in my surrounding where people, instead of looking inwards and staying in the uncomfortable feeling of anxiety and looking at their ego and getting curious about it, instead get quick relief from it through alcohol, extensive use of social media for validation, drugs, shopping, or any other addictive behavior that makes us feel good for a second. Many people are unaware of why they have a coping mechanism in the first place!
If you have no anxiety, you don’t need a coping strategy to remove the anxiety. But since we have just concluded that anxiety IS a completely normal state of being for almost all of us, we shouldn’t strive to get rid of it, but instead, become aware of it and learn to handle it when it arises. But if people are not aware of the fact that they do have anxiety, and that the anxiety is in fact controlling their lives, they will not understand why they drink so much, why they crave validation on social media so much, or why they feel temporary fulfillment when they drive the most expensive car on the street. They don’t even understand that they do what they do, and why they do it.
This enlightenment only arises when daring to look inwards and stay in that realization — however uncomfortable it may be. It is only through self-awareness and an honest audit of one’s life that real and long-lasting change can happen. I hope people can get to this realization without having to go through an existential crisis or burnouts like the ones that I have been through. There IS a way to stop this mental madness and help our brains to cope with the stressors of modern society, to increase awareness of our constant need to feel awesome and “anxiety-free” all the time, and to reduce the risk of mental illness: Meditation. Silence. Deep breaths. And lots of Nothingness planned into your everyday schedule.
