Adult Life Getting You Down? The Solution is Closer Than You Might Imagine

Couldn't wait to become an adult. Right? But now that you're fully fledged, things aren't quite as rosy as you imagined they'd be. You're faced with a whole new set of problems and you suddenly realize it's all a little too overwhelming.

For a variety of reasons, today’s “adults” are not ready to assume complete responsibility for their lives until much later. Though it may not be present, they still need the guidance and love of of a caring parent or mentor to modulate their impulses and heal their wounds when circumstances get out of control. In the absence of that, young men and women will need to mature more rapidly and find their own inner voice early on, if they are to avoid making critical mistakes that may effect their future in profound ways. If you’re a young adult or caring about someone who is, it’s important to keep in mind that all of us come into this world with innate strengths and weaknesses.

Some can use adversity to fire their passions, while others take it personally, becoming cynical and sabotaging their own success without realizing it.

Amazingly though, most of us will survive to fight another day.

But the degree to which you do more than merely survive will depend increasingly upon your own ingenuity: your ability to take the resources you have and rearrange them or apply them in different ways to achieve a new result. 

Through reflection on my own life and that of those around me, I have concluded that our desire to create and encounter events that will lead to sustainable happiness is all too often undermined by the very mental processes that Nature designed to help us.

As infants and children, information about the world around us is streaming in. We don’t yet have the tools or capacity to make sense of it. Our senses are alive with new sounds, sights, smells and feelings that get stored in our memories for future digestion. As our neural pathways develop, connections are made between current and past sensations. Joy is associated with one experience, while emotional pain is associated with yet another.

These associations morph into primitive and rigid patterns of thought that we will later use to make snap decisions about complex issues that may have profound consequences for our future happiness.

What we might call our “Fight or Flight response”. This ability of our mind to quickly sum up the relative safety of a person, place or thing is an essential survival skill that protects us from danger.

 

 

But when our defensive conditioning becomes the filter through which we see and react to the world, we are likely to either stagnate from fear, or lunge toward a counterproductive situation because it seems familiar.

We must develop another “objective view” of events and feelings in our lives. A way to look at them telescopically, as if from afar to determine if following a particular course of action is advisable.

One way to do this is to imagine a dear friend has come to you for advice on the very situation you face. How would you guide them? So often, we advise others to do what we know is right, but then ironically ignore that very wisdom in our own lives.

 

 

Why? Answering that question can reveal much about our inner process and what motivates to stay stuck in counterproductive patterns. But it only gets better if you choose to act on those revelations. Knowledge is only power when it is put into action. 

It seems to me that the goal of adulthood is to take calculated risks, make mistakes, then learn and grow from the experiences.

The challenge is of course to limit danger to an acceptable level and increase the chances for success through preparation. This ideal path forward requires us to step out of the pattern based reactions of our ancestors and employ critical thinking to evaluate all the variables of a given decision so we remain in control of the outcome as much as possible .

Some may have a different philosophical bent, preferring to allow life to “just happen” and then adapting accordingly. I understand and don’t completely disagree with this approach, but it does assume that there is a predetermined path which we are meant to follow and any that interference with that process might cause us to stray from our ultimate destiny. This is more of a spiritually inspired way of living, some of which I believe also has merit.

I must admit, I struggle to find a balance between these two poles and as you grow to understand the benefits of each style, I encourage you to seek a blend that suits your evolving personality. 

Although our parents may have done their best to raise us, they too were on a steep evolutionary curve, taking risks, making mistakes and unintentionally saddling us with issues we now deal with as adults.

 
Often, those issues arise from emotional pain we buried as children: pain that is now attempting to be expressed and overcome.

Additionally, either through observation or a need to cope, we learned negative “patterns” of behavior that no longer serve us and cause us to create and maintain relationships with others that are eerily similar to those we witnessed as children.

A great deal of introspection and personal work is needed to get us off of this unpleasant carousel. The process necessary to free yourself from these negative patterns of behavior is to understand and employ the very skill set you're learning by reading articles like this. Stay open to knew ways of seeing yourself and the world around you.

Read, go to seminars, seek out new and interesting people to converse with. Don't be afraid to change anything. Set your mind to be aware and engaged in each moment, question everything, remain determined to make continual improvement your life’s mission and you’ll be fine.

In the long run, perhaps the worst mistake we can make is to avoid trying. 

 

-S.E. Mathias

I would love to know if you enjoyed this article, how it may have helped you, what country you are living in and what aspects of the human experience you might like me to write about.

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- Shane