Recipe for Urgent Recovery 🖐

Over the past years, I have had tough times in which I became anxious, negative, or pessimistic. My productivity hit the lowest point and my motivation wasn’t there anymore.

We all have been there. I call that place the Sad Place.

But the issue is not falling into the Sad Place, in fact, it helps us think, meditate, and correct mistakes. It allows us to overcome difficult times and steer our wheel in the right direction.

The REAL issue is remaining there for TOO LONG. When you spend enough time in that place, you get used to it, consequently losing perspective and seeing the world through the same window: the sad one.

After visiting the Sad Place a couple of times myself, I managed to learn a couple of tricks that helped leave that place when I was spending too much time inside it:

I call it the Urgent Recovery Recipe, and these are the steps:

1. Cut the Distractions ⛔

The first thing you need to do is to focus. You need to put your attention towards the goal of leaving the Sad Place, any distraction can easily make you forget what you were doing in the first place, thus, losing your progress.

Shut off your communication with the external world for the rest of the day, if necessary turn off your phone. It will bring you relief and peace.

2. Take care of your body 🏋️‍

Leaving the Sad Place requires teamwork between your mind and your body. Your body is the device that will carry you out, therefore you need to make sure it is comfortable at all times, otherwise, it will not move and keep you in its favorite place: The bed 🛌

Some activities you can try are:

• 💤 Sleep well, especially if you haven’t done so lately.
• 🍝 Eat healthy stuff, chocolate or banana are great temporary cheats.
• 💊 If you are sick, take some pills. It is harder to go back to normal when your body doesn’t feel well.

3. Declutter your mind 🧠

We are almost there, now we need to get the other member of the team onboard: The mind.

Inside the Sad Place, the mind does a lot of thinking. Unfortunately, biased by the negative emotions, the mind falls into negative loops of thought that lead nowhere. It accumulates so much momentum that it’s hard to make it stop.

To make it cease, you need to let your mind speak its mind, i.e. let your mind speak. To achieve it you can:

• 🧘‍♀️ Meditate, i.e. sit down still and pay attention to your thoughts as they come and go.
• ✍ Write down the thoughts that pop up in your head.
• 📢 Talk to a friend who is a good listener.

Either way, don’t stop until you feel like your mind has nothing else to say. This will give you a better perspective of your current situation and will help you understand your feelings better. It will also serve as a temporary relief.

4. Consider other narratives 👀

During your stance in the Sad Place, you focused on a narrative that has caused you a lot of negative feelings. Now it’s time to take a look around and find other narratives that give you more perspectives to approach the issue that put you there in the first place.

I’ve gathered some videos that show life from a beautiful perspective:

• 📺 Wear sunscreen (5 min) by Baz Luhrmann
• 📺 You are not depressed, you are distracted (10 min) by Facundo Cabral
• 📺 Oh, the places you’ll go (7 min) by Dr. Seuss
• 📺 When I grow up (3 min)by Teddy Saunders

But you might as well:

• 🌞 Do activities under the sun such as playing sports
• 🤼 Hangout with friends who project good vibes
• 💚 Do something nice for someone else
• 🙏 List things to be thankful for
• 🤣 Watch some comedy shows

By the time you finish doing some of these activities, you will have left the Sad Place already!

You will realize that, for some reason, you were completely distracted from the life around you! You locked yourself in the Sad Place, and despite it felt like it was never gonna end, it did! And now you are back!

But not for too long…

5. Change, Leave or Accept 🙌

While you did leave the Sad Place, it will only be temporary…unless you figure out what put you there in the first place and fix it. Some of the things that have put me in the Sad Place are:

• 💃 High expectations over a person: 3 months inside the Sad Place.
• 💼 Awful job conditions: 2 months inside the Sad Place.
• 🐈 The death of my cat: A couple of days inside the Sad Place.

So according to Eckhart Tolle, you have three options:

• 🙋‍ Change the situation: By taking action or speaking out.
• 🚶 Leave the situation: By leaving those circumstances and going somewhere else.
• 🤝 Accept the situation: By embracing it for as long as it is necessary, working on top of it, and letting time do the rest.

This is how I applied it:

• 💃 The high expectations I had over that person was something I could change, so I did it and stopped worrying about it.
• 💼 The job conditions I tried to change but it proved useless. So left the situation by quitting and finding a new job.
• 🐈 The death of my cat was something I couldn’t change or leave, so I did the only thing I could: I accepted it. I accepted that life is ephemeral and embraced the memories we shared. Then I let time heal.

Thank you very much for reading! 💜

I’m very passionate about self-development and this is something that reflects on the work I’ve put into it. If you like it too, ping me! I’d love to talk about it!

In the meantime, I heard 50 claps is also a great way to leave the Sad Place, just saying! 😛