The bright whiteness of the canvas reflects back onto your face. You take a mental snapshot of your picture, envisioning every little detail, so you won’t miss a thing. You pick up the paintbrush.
It barely scratches the blank canvas when, at the last second, you remember you have another task to work on, another test to study for, another thing that urgently needs doing. Suddenly everything feels overwhelming and you have no desire to continue. The only thing that will make you feel at ease is indulging in your distractions, which, you know, do not actually make a difference in settling your unease. You see two roads ahead: your canvas to your left, which looks bare and unfinished, and your sweet and easy escapes to your right. You go right, picking to feel the guilt over the satisfaction of effort.
Everyone wants to feel like an artist, in other words, the creator of their own world. But with induced stress from external forces, our goals in life can get muddled with our anxious thoughts. Some coping mechanisms we developed to reduce our stress are less than ideal. We end up forming destructive habits that only contribute to our stress and problems, not take away from them.
One example of a destructive coping mechanism is emotional eating. More commonly known as stress eating, this coping mechanism attempts to manage anxiety and stress by overconsuming food.
Another harmful coping mechanism to our health is our addiction to our phones from doom-scrolling. Addiction is a strong word to describe a phone dependency, but that’s exactly what it is. The more phones make our lives easier, the more we are bound to them.
Food and phones are very easy to access in our overconsumptive nation. The problem isn’t how to get rid of them but how to control ourselves from them.
Here’s where it gets messy. I could write an ideal article where as a high school student I somehow assume all the wisdom on how to outgrow these destructive habits and give all the answers to you on a silver platter. You could follow my steps to a tee, but still not see any changes. The only way your future actions change is by how you set your mindset today – something no one else can control but yourself.
Ignoring your inner voice telling you to do something better with your time can feel awful, but we often choose this guilt inducing route because the familiar pull of bad habits is comforting.It’s turtles all the way down. It’s a spiral. The only way to stop a spiral is not by abandoning ship, but by taking a step back. Breathe, mentally check up on yourself … is what I would love to say if I had no conscience.
In reality, you cannot get better by just “checking up on yourself.” Setting goals of waking early in the morning, journaling, doing pilates or whatever is trendy right now will not magically fix your life. These goals will not heal you like they claim they will without a clear purpose of what you want to achieve by following them in the first place.
Become more mindful of your day-to-day actions, even small, seemingly trivial actions will show you that you have more control in your life than you think so. Thinking with a minimizing mindset, by transferring your power to your easy escapes, only cuts away at your valuable goals; you end up boxing yourself in your no bigger than a Post-it note dreams when you started with larger than life goals.
Be compassionate to yourself; you’re just human. If you feel isolated in an issue, talk to someone and maybe you’ll realize you are quite literally never alone on this planet inhabited by eight billion other people.
I need to be transparent. Outside of this article, I have gone against my own advice. I served myself more treats, went on my phone more and then came right back to finish this sentence. While contradicting myself I thought, “What are you doing, don’t you want to stop this? Prove to yourself you are stronger than your impulses?” In response, I reeled back my guilty conscience to the depths of my mind and served myself more screen time and desserts, reassuring myself, “It’s okay, I’ll stop after this.”
The funny thing about cycles is that we never know when we’re in one. We’re like hamsters on a wheel. We are relentlessly running to a vague, shapeless goal and never really getting there because there was never a clear destination to get to in the first place. You need to commit to a clear goal if you want to move on from a sour past experience.
Success is not an upward trajectory. It takes baby steps, patience, consistency and commitment to get anywhere in life. But it takes even more patience, even more consistency, even more commitment and a million more baby steps to outgrow our bad habits.
Take back control of your paintbrush. You own it, no one else and no tempting distractions can tell you otherwise. So the next time you come across the two roads, go left.
