Some Days

After one of the dreamless nights, you get up tired even after twelve hours of sleep. It is one more morning that you have zero next to no desire to wake up. You do not feel like getting out of that bed. You do not want to do anything but lie there just thinking. You feel like there is nothing you would want to accomplish at the end of the day. Yep! Just one of those days.

You have no energy to feed yourself and you do not even have an appetite in the first place. You do not want to see anyone yet you do not want to be alone. You do not know what to feel but again there is no point in finding out either. Your emotions are all over. You are sad, you are excited, you are regretful, you are anxious and you feel sorry for yourself; there are just too many feelings. The funny thing is you do not even want to sort them out.

Some days you wake up and you are just thinking of so many things all at once it makes your head hurt. Your thoughts are scattered all over. Your brain is like an overloaded CPU. It feels like some memory slots are causing deadlock. It is as if you cannot control your thoughts. It is as if some malware affected your system. You feel weird. It leaves you feeling helpless and that is when you start to overthink.

I remember reading some very great book called The Magic of Thinking Big by Dr. David Schwartz and he explained how our mind is like a system with two channels: a positive and a negative channel; whichever you request for is which you will be given. I do not argue with the logic because I found it to be true. It does make a lot of sense, does it not? If you think you are great, the mind gives you more instances of why you are great. If you feel like a failure, the mind gives you many reasons and instances that prove how big of a failure you are. I like comparing minds to an echo; it gives you back what you give it. Your mind is like GIGO (Garbage In Garbage Out), you feed it garbage, it gives you back garbage. Just like how a mango tree will never give you oranges.

During these “some days”, we fill our minds with negative thoughts. We want to look back in our past and see just how many bad decisions we made, how much we are losers, how many bad things happened to us, how we are never happy, we want to analyze how many people have wronged us. We only want to find the negatives of our past and our minds being very responsive will give you every bad instance. As I was telling a good friend of mine, there is nothing wrong with going back to our past. How we see it is what matters. Instead of being so negative about it, try to see how it built you to who you are today. Appreciate all those who wronged and hurt you because you learned it is not always merry; appreciate the challenges because even if some broke you back then you got up stronger. Be positive, it makes it easier.

When you have so many negative thoughts for so long, it becomes your character. Negativity engraves itself in you. I do not know if you have ever been in a situation where you are walking with a person and all he does is talk negatively about someone who passed you. The person is ever looking for that small negative thing to make fun. He will never say “His shoes are nice” or “Her
hair makes a great afro” but he will always say, “That guy has very big ears” or “Her dress looks cheap”. I remember some chap taking Vet Medicine in a very good university saying he would not interact with someone doing Arts, as they would not have anything to talk about because the person is ‘daft’. That is shallow thinking.

Recently, I was arguing with a very good friend about overthinking. I was of the idea that when you overthink stuff you end up being negative and he believed you can overthink good stuff too. I think it is possible but I have not really tried it. Do you think it is possible? Anyway, he won because at the end of the discussion he succeeded to convince me because his arguments were pretty convincing and realistic too. It all narrows down to what kind of thoughts you choose to overthink.

I do not know if it has happened to you people but since I started being positive, life has become a tad easier. It is not easy to remain positive in a hard situation but it pays. I developed a habit of telling myself I feel great and it did work. You can try it too. Tell yourself you feel great with conviction and mean it. You do feel better, don’t you? When you have a bad day, smile. A genuine smile, not the plastics you give people you are tolerating; you will feel better. You will be tempted to be negative: your very demanding boss, a lecturer who gives very little marks, a backstabbing friend and yadda. However, as I always say, a situation is what you make of it. Remember that you have a choice to be either positive or negative.

So when it is ‘one of those days’, do not let it the way you down. Remember you can get above anything for as long as you set your mind to. When you think you cannot do it anymore, stay positive. Nothing is too big for you to overcome; you just have to keep trying and never give up. My beloved people: talk positive, eat positive, breathe positive, think positive and stay positive. ALWAYS.