30 Aug How to reconnect with yourself

Do you constantly feel dragged down by the weight of something that happens to always cling on to you even though you have a perfectly normal life? If you feel overwhelmed, depleted, overly stressful, fragmented, used up, discontent or even out of control at times, then these might be signs of you having become quite disconnected from your inner self, your real self. This is when one might need a reset to reconnect which most of us might not probably be aware of.

This overwhelming yet strange feeling is more common than you might think. After all, all of us have so many things to juggle in our stressful daily lives that we often keep losing sight of the one thing that needs focus more than anything, our own selves. Running through days and months, time often turns into a haze with a few selective memories we find close to our heart kept aside deep in our minds to fend for us during our darker times. But is that all we should have in our lives? With all the balls of our lives in mid-air, daunting and scary, are a bunch of distant good memories enough for us to call our lives normal? You might think so but we’d beg to disagree.

All of us are constantly desperately trying to balance things everyday that are not quite in our hands as much as we’d think and yet we lose control over the one and only thing we truly do have control over, our own selves. So what is it that we should do to strive towards self-fulfilment in this difficult, non-ending feat that we call life? Because acting like we are on a perpetual treadmill only to work hard throughout our days in order to fulfil all our responsibilities, then sleep only to wake up and repeat cannot be the only answer to our very existence. Of course  getting lost in our daily activities and even the stresses of our external worlds might seem way easier but you need to ask yourself the question as to whether that will make you feel better. If you find that deep inside yourself, the answer to that question somehow necessarily urges you to reconnect with yourself through a strong impulse, we might be able to help you on the how part.

Before you start working yourself up over this list of things that could help you evaluate on yourself and reconnect with your inner psyche, we want you to take a slow and deep breath. While you continue doing that, we have prepared a list of things that might help you fill up that bridge between you and yourself.

Identifying the core values: Try and get in touch with your innermost values. Make a list of those values. You don’t need to stress over them, they could be anything, just include the things that are really important to you. Now compare the list of things with your life. Does your life comprise of your core values and the things that really matter to you? If not, try focusing on one component of your list at a time and try including more of it in your daily life. By the time you finish with your list, try evaluating your life again. You should be more connected to yourself than you were when you made that list. We often lose sight of what is truly important to us. Which is why, it is important for us to take some time out regularly in identifying our core values and synchronizing our lives with the same in order to stay in touch with what matters the most. Therefore this should be a priority in all of our lives.

Real conversations with intimate people: The mere fact of conversing with our loved ones and our closest friends itself helps us feel a lot better about ourselves. People we care about deeply, love and respect often help us feel more energized, confident as well as calm at the same time. However real conversations with them might even help us reflect on our true inner selves more than we would think. They might even help us get in touch with our innermost values, with what is truly important to us, even help reset our mindset while helping us regain a deep sense of connection to ourselves through our meaningful interactions with them.

Writing down thoughts, contemplations and aspirations: Writing is a brilliant way to let out some of those piling emotions or contemplations stuck deep inside your mind. Through writing you will be able to give those thoughts or feelings some room to breathe that in turn will help make some headway for them. Your writing does not have to be complex or properly phrased even. Just try writing the simple things that are on your mind in a simple way so as to help yourself achieve some clarity on them. Write about what you feel, think, want to do, about your goals, interests, hobbies, plans or even dreams, etc. This can also often bring out many truths about ourselves that we wouldn’t have gotten to know otherwise, and help us immensely in a regular self-evaluation. Writing can help you free whatever mental debris have been accumulating deep inside your psyche, and will ultimately help you establish a deeper connection to your own true self moving you nearer to your final goal of self-fulfilment.

Taking a self-evaluating trip alone or with a close friend: Amongst the daily hassles of our fast lives, we might be losing focus on our own selves and things that are truly important to us. Taking a much needed break from our hectic schedules alone or with a close friend might help us bridge that connection with our own selves and might ultimately end up leading us down a path of the long-needed self-assessment and hence, self-fulfilment. Also, pure essence of nature can prove especially calming and helpful on this meaningful journey.

Meditation and mindfulness practises: Meditation and mindfulness practices are proven to have deep effects of mental healing and increases mental sharpness when practised on a regular basis. Meditation and mindfulness practises being great equalizers for all your runaway emotions, might help you immensely in reconnecting to the real you. Try practising it consistently for fully unleashing the subtle yet extremely powerful effects of mindfulness, and with dedication and time, you will achieve great results in your goal of reconnecting with your inner psyche. Once you establish it as a habit, the idea of connecting to yourself that seemed like a difficult idea once, will gradually become a cakewalk.

Other activities or habits that we can instill in our daily lives that can be crucial towards helping us reconnect with our own selves are as follows:

• Sorting out a regular and proper diet and sleep schedule for yourself.
• Quitting a harmful habit or adapting to a new helpful one.
• Indulging in hobbies and activities that you are deeply passionate about.
• Setting a few meaningful short term goals for yourself.

When you manage to push your mental or emotional reset button, you will once again feel deeply connected to your ownself, and this in turn will help you take charge of all the components as well as experiences in your life. You will be rebooted to take back power over things from the front end, instead of the back end of things. You can successfully be proactive once again instead of being reactive. You can finally breathe.

-Sreya Dutta