Why You Might Feel Numb

You meet someone. You fall in love. It’s great. There’s conflict. It sucks. Your heart gets broken 💔

Fast forward however many months or years.

You meet someone else. But this time you’re hesitant to let yourself really fall in love. You don’t want to get hurt. It seems obvious why you hesitate, right? You don’t want to get hurt again. It sucked!! But are you actually creating more hurt by NOT letting yourself fall in love again?

Yup 😳  but we’ve got this funny thing called a human brain with loads of biases (like, LOADS), and this one happens to say this: although we don’t LIKE missing out on potentially wonderful experiences like love, we feel STRONGER about avoiding potential pain. Even though we create JUST AS MUCH PAIN for ourselves in the pursuit of avoiding pain 😦 We’re on a human hamster wheel.

This is the 1️⃣  FIRST reason for human dissatisfaction. At its core, it’s about our relationship to the fact that all of life is impermanent: unless trained, our minds tend to try and control things in order to keep them as stable as possible. Spoiler alert, it might work, but at the expense of our enjoyment of life 😢

We may be able to curb heartbreak, but we trade it out for an inability to feel the full spectrum of emotions. I touch on this in an old blog post you can access here.

When you don’t allow yourself to feel the sadness of a breakup, the guilt of not spending enough time with your parents, the desire for the cupcake, or the jealousy of your friends' success, for example, you inadvertently prevent yourself from feeling the happiness of your promotion, the joy of a cupcake, the pride you have in your children, the empathy when your friend is in distress, etc.

The result is confusion, frustration, depression, and anxiety about life. This murky, background sense of dissatisfaction that you can’t identify. And these feelings generally last longer and are more infuriating than the feeling you were trying to avoid in the first place 👎🏼

PLUS it’s unlikely you’ll be able to pin that existential dissatisfaction on the fact that you didn’t let yourself fall in love, audition for the play, return to an old hobby, apply for the job, which makes it that much more uncomfortable.

So what to do? 👇🏾

I wish it was as easy as a few drops of CBD oil every day, the advice from a Buzzfeed article titled “Top 10 Things to Do if You Want to Be Happy”, or a healthy diet, but it’s not. It requires deeper work to experience freedom from this deeply ingrained habit of the mind. Freedom from this sense of stuck-ness in life. Freedom from dissatisfaction in life. But trust me, it’s well worth the effort ❤️

So I wrote an E-Book that will help you begin to clear a path toward a mind that is willing to accept and allow it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly, leading to a life that feels full, purposeful, and exciting. Grab it below!