Keeping Things in Perspective

Perspective is everything.

Perspective is one of the tools I use to keep myself grounded and prevent unnecessary worry, anxiety, and fear from stealing my joy.

Our mind can start racing at 100 MPH and the next thing you know, you’re in crisis mode thinking you must solve world hunger by next week or the world is going to end.

This sounds crazy, but many of us do this to ourselves every day.

It starts out as a thought or small concern.

We start running with this thought and it starts to pick up momentum.

The thought turns into worry, anxiety, and full blow fear.

At this point, it’s the only thing we think about.

All common sense goes out the window.

You’re now in in full panic and crisis mode and don’t feel there’s a way out.

Has this ever happened to you?

It’s happened to me plenty of times and it’s one of the worst feelings.

You feel like you have no control, and you can’t stop what’s happening.

Your mind continues to obsess on it, and it makes you the worst person to be around.

You’re extremely negative and shut everyone out.

What if I told you there was a way to prevent this from happening.

It’s not easy, but there’s a way.

I’m going to share with you how I deal with these initial thoughts and prevent them from turning into manufactured catastrophes.

Yes, manufactured catastrophes.

In the Navy, everything was a priority.

There was always an emergency, and many of them were actual emergencies.

However, if you want to think calm during an emergency, you must know how to control your mind, especially when you’re in charge.

I had a hard time with this for many years.

I worried a lot, and the stress would get to me.

I had to come up with a way to keep my calm so that I could make good decisions.

I started putting things into perspective.

The first thing I realized was that not all emergencies are created equal.

I would stop when my mind started to go down the path of crisis mode and take a few minutes or longer to put things into perspective.

The first thing I would do is stop, take a deep breath, and slow down my mind.

Next, I came up with a quick and easy way to decipher what type of emergency I was dealing with.

Here’s what I came up with, “If nobody’s going to get hurt or die, I’m going to slow down, deal with the situation, and not worry about it”.

I’m not going to stress about it if nobody is going to get hurt or die.

I’m going to take action and handle the situation.

This sounds extreme, but this is what I needed to do at the time.

It helped me slow down and calm my mind.

If you don’t want to use this one, let’s take a look at another example, money.

Many people stress about money.

Some people have a very good reason to stress about money because they lost a job, can’t pay the bills, or feed their family.

However, many are manufacturing a money crisis that doesn’t exist.

Put your money situation in perspective.

If you can pay your bills, put food on the table, keep the lights on, etc., then you’re’ not in a situation where you need to be stressing out about money.

Take the time to add up your bills, how much you make each month, whether you have savings, etc., and put things into perspective.

Get the facts in front of you and put everything in persepctive.

You may not be where you want to be financially, but it’s not worth stressing about.

The bottom line: we have a tendency to manufacture emergencies and don’t take the time to really think about why we’re making it such a big deal.

It all starts in the mind with controlling our thoughts.

We stress about a future that may not happen.

You have no idea how long you’re going to live.

You have this moment right now and that’s it.

Do your best in this moment to set yourself up for a better tomorrow.

Don’t waste this moment stressing about things that may or may not happen in the future.

Your joy is important, protect it.

So, the next time you start heading down the path of manufacturing a crisis, take a deep breath, stop, and put things into perspective.

Most times you realize there’s nothing to stress about.

Smile and enjoy the moment.

Stay positive and take action!

1. Thank you for reading, I truly appreciate your support!

2. If you would like to see more, check out my website at: marktoner80.wixsite.com/survivor-to-thriver.

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