If you’re feeling lost, stuck, or out of touch with yourself, these three questions will help you re-align with what you want in life and how to get there. It’s helpful to do these questions as a journaling practice, so grab a pen and paper if you have one and write these down to journal through!
Rachel Havocost is a writer and mental health advocate. She has been in therapy for 19 years for her own mental health. Her mission is to help one person feel less alone.
When we're experiencing transition or change, we oftentimes experience a sense of loss. To find myself again, ask yourself three questions that I ask myself when I feel lost in life. Make a list of emotions that you want to feel on a regular basis. Then create a framework and a system to cultivate those feelings.
If you're feeling stuck in life, then this video is for you. Hi. My name is Rachel Havocost. I am a writer and mental health advocate. I've been in therapy for 19 years for my own mental health, and I also have a master's in psychology. And my mission is just to help one person feel less alone. Along the way, I like to share things that have worked for me in therapy, things that haven't worked for me in therapy, and some of the lessons I've learned just from being so focused on my mental well being for a huge portion of my life.
So today, I want to share with you three questions that I ask myself when I feel lost in life. In the last several years, I've had so many impasses where I've just felt completely lost, especially after getting divorced, after the pandemic, after starting a new career, I just kind of felt like I was starting from scratch. And I had a lot of questions about who I was and where I was going. This is really normal. When we're experiencing transition or change, we oftentimes experience a sense of loss, loss of self, loss of identity, loss of what we thought the future might look like.
And so it's really helpful sometimes to be able to have some questions that we can ask ourselves and look inward and say, okay, how can I create a path forward? So to find myself again, these are three questions I ask, and I encourage you to do this in a journal or write it down. You can use a notes app or record your voice speaking out loud. It's really helpful to have sort of a notation of the answers to these questions because then you can look back on them and reflect later on. Question number one is, how do I want to feel?
This might be a list of emotions, right? So these can be feelings that we want to experience in life. So for me, if I ask myself, how do I want to feel? I want to feel at peace. I want to feel content. I want to feel trusting. I want to feel open. I want to feel well. And so I make a list of emotions that I want to feel. Gentle reminder that when you do this, don't hold back. Don't think about how am I going to make this possible? Or is it even feasible for me to feel these things? Make this as if it was a dream list of emotions that you want to feel on a regular basis.
The second question to ask is, when are times in my life that I have felt this way? So think about the past and think about experiences when you've actually felt these emotions. So go through each emotion and write down a memory or a time when you have felt those emotions. If you can't think of an example for an emotion, ask yourself, what is the scenario or an experience I might have that could create this emotion? The third question is, what is one way that I can start to recreate these behaviors, the actions or the experiences that are tied to the emotional states?
You can take a look at your answer for each emotional state and you can start to ask yourself, what clues can I draw from the times that I felt this way? Right? What themes emerge? Who are the kinds of people that were there? In what ways are some of those activities or relationships or behaviors missing from your life right now? And then you can start to sort of create a framework and a system from which you can start to add in some of these actions or behaviors or seek out those kinds of relationships so that you can start to cultivate those feelings and start to create a direction.
I hope this was helpful. Let me know in the comments how you want to feel and what you plan to do to make that happen. I'll see you next time.
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