Staying on Top When Your World's Upside Down

“Ultimately there is only the one impediment, and that is laziness. If we overcome laziness, all the other impediments will be overcome. If we do not overcome laziness, none of the others will be hurdled.”
M. Scott Peck, MD: The Road Less Traveled

Ouch! I don’t know about you, but for me that hurts to read – because it hits too close to home.

It’s not just physical laziness – more important is mental laziness.

We’ve seen that Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow and The Evolving Self) says that the most depressing thoughts have to do with the self. Unfortunately, when we are not consciously structuring our thinking it tends to automatically and spontaneously gravitate toward the self. And often when our world has turned upside down (as in the loss of a job or the failure of a business) we don’t have nearly the motivation to think about anything other than ourselves and the plights we have found ourselves to be in.

So we tend to wallow around in worry and self-pity and other forms of negative emotions and negative thinking. It’s just too hard to focus our attention and our conscious awareness on something more positive and constructive. In a word, we need to overcome our laziness.

Even if, in the case of the recently unemployed, you don’t have a job to go to where your thinking must be structured in a more positive direction for at least part of the day, there are things you can do. You can read an intellectually challenging book; you can work on building a personal website (or improving the one you have); you can volunteer for a worthwhile cause; you can spend more time at the gym and less time in front of the television set.