10 Simple Ways to Change Your Lifestyle 2023

Someone once said that nobody had taught him to look at buildings. Those days, walking through one of the central avenues of the city, she realized that he always walked looking at the ground, but not at the heights. This experience is very common. We walk through life avoiding stepping on dog droppings or looking for a lost coin and we forget about the beauty of the domes. These two styles of looking do not have to be exclusive. There is an up and a down; one left and one right. However, despite the mobility that the head has, our cervicals, with their osteoarthritis, show us that we have opted for rigidity.

At the psychological level, something similar happens to us: we find ourselves with another type of hardening. It is about the one that is provoked by the passionate need to ignore ourselves in our desires. In the same way that osteoarthritis makes movement difficult and causes us pain, the passion for ignorance of ourselves puts obstacles in our encounter with well-being. That is why in this Psychologyorg article, we are going to talk to you about how to change your life to be happier and live better.

1. The desire to change and the fear of change

It is not easy to live in a state of calm and well-being. Both external and internal circumstances permanently invite you to feel discomfort, restlessness, restlessness, anxiety, disgust, annoyance, moodiness, intolerance, frustration, anger, and depressive moments, among others. All of which leads you, like many, to synthesize those experiences with the well-known “I feel bad”.

There are many people looking for a manual to surviving life. Other people look for gurus, mystics, and prophets or place their trust in a psychoanalyst, doctor, or lawyer. However, these people do not possess this kind of wisdom. More and more are those who opt for the so-called “positive thinking” or “positive mental attitude”, which tries to face adversity with great optimism and fighting spirit, without denying reality at any time.

For now, let’s say that “feeling bad” is your mind’s way of letting you know that things aren’t working out the way you want them to. From the experience of discomfort, we can question ourselves and realize what is happening to us. But knowing and admitting our shortcomings and our mistakes is not pleasant at all.

how to change your life

To achieve significant changes in your life and create the conditions to live in a state of satisfaction, you need to meet these four conditions:

• Self-awareness: you have to recognize your own shortcomings, difficulties, and unfavorable circumstances;
• Self-criticism: you must take responsibility for your own behaviors that produce and/or perpetuate ill-being;
• The desire for change: you have to feel, think and do what is convenient to generate transformations in your own life, evaluating the consequences of each decision made. All of the above must be lovingly wrapped in your good faith.
• Your good faith: that is, stop fooling yourself.

2. Find out what’s wrong with you

Sometimes we lack words to designate, explain or convey what is happening to us. We feel that feeling of psychic discomfort and something inside of us prevents us from knowing what is happening to us. We say “I feel bad” and can express with this a great sadness or anger, a stomach ache or a headache, eye irritation, tiredness, etc. This little word “evil” is used for everything. In general, it is a matter of vocabulary. The fewer words we have incorporated, the less will be the possibility of expressing with some precision what happens to us.

As we stated in the previous section, the first condition to start a change in your life is to know what is happening to you. Sometimes, you do not have the necessary parameters to start thinking. Shortcomings, problems, and difficulties are suffered, but it is difficult to order them in such a way that we not only get to know them better but also allow us to start looking for solutions.

Unlike those who seek magical solutions, there are people who know that the conflict is within themselves and want to know it. They perceive it as something that they don’t quite know what it is, but that makes itself felt by a sensation of emptiness, of futility, of indefinite anguish, a deep experience that life, as it is being lived, has no meaning. A “not feeling well” cannot be talked about because, as we said, the appropriate words cannot be found to define it.

At the beginning of the great adventure of self-knowledge, there are more questions than answers. And when these answers appear, they provide us with the resources to make decisions.

3. Why does the same situation always happen to me?

More than or less all of us have a braking, permitting, and quasi-permitting structure. There are those who also have false permits that reinforce the breakers. They are disastrous, fateful, catastrophic orders that drive the person to commit an act that threatens their own well-being.

They are expressed in a friendly and approving way, often masked in a question: “It’s okay to smoke…everyone does it”; “Are you going to the doctor for that pain of nothing?”; “What will happen to you for betting a little money?”, “But if marijuana is harmless… take it, try it”, etc.

This structure formed by those restraining, permitting, quasi-permitting, and, sometimes, false permitting mandates constitutes a base from which we begin to perceive life, feel, think, and act about ourselves, about others, and about the world in general. We call it the Initial Message Matrix (IMM). However, things are much more complex. It happens that this MIM has been forming from nine months of pregnancy until approximately five years of age. It is confirmed until the age of eight but, from the age of five to twelve, year plus year less, an Internal Belief System (SIC) is configured which, associated with the MIM, gives rise to the so-called Life Argument (AV ), a term coined by Eric Berne, Canadian psychiatrist, creator of a modality of psychoanalysis which he named Transactional Analysis (TA).

In each person, we observe the functioning and influence of the VA in those repetitive behaviors that make the individual say to himself, in a tone of complaint, “The same thing forever happens to me!”. Freud titled it repetition obsession, Adler, fate neurosis, Berne, the argument of life. It is often confused with destiny, with what we cannot change when, in reality, we can. We’ll see how.

4. Strategy to fail, strategy to succeed

The primary objective of this article is to make you aware that your own life is based on an Argument that is foreign to your own desires as a person. If you came to recognize this through reading, the goal was met. If, in addition, you achieve your own goals, you have to give yourself all the credit. We will say, then, that you have gone from a strategy of failure to a strategy of success. In short: you changed.

What is a strategy

We are going to define it as the ability that one possesses to go toward a goal and achieve it. The strategy for failure is aptitude, the capacity that you have to live your life in an inconsequential way, without pain or glory, hopelessly, oblivious to your desires, melodramatically.

How do you become a skillful strategist to steer life toward disaster? Simply obeying commands? In fact, no. The commands form the matrix of our Argument, but for it to develop it needs other elements: parasitic thoughts that prevent clear and reflective thinking, imagination, sensations and emotions, the spoken word, and physical action itself.

Unfortunately, during our lives, we are giving up a large part of our essence for the sake of what is expected of us. We dilute our own being in that amorphous mass of alien speeches that inhabit us. We are what others want. In that alienation, we stop being the original beings that we were to be a copy of those who wrote our script. We will be unique in our physique, but in our behaviors, we are repetition, until we decide to be ourselves.

How to turn failure into success

In that alienation, in that lack of originality, in that not knowing who we are, we find the basis of any strategy to fail, the basis of all neurosis. Precisely, by having a strategy to fail, we can glimpse, by simple opposition, the existence of a strategy to succeed. If it is said that there is an Official Story, it is because there is Another Story. The same goes for the Life Story which we can call “official”. Therefore, there must be another argument. This hidden argument is the basis of the strategy to succeed and we must make it known. Where is? Within you and we call it an “Adult Life Plan”.

Your task is to find out what you do to continue to achieve failure, instead of success. To do this, write the negative sequence of your personal strategy and then the positive one, imagining what your life would be like if you questioned the mandates and changed your strategy.

5. Body and mind

With the help of all these new notions that we have been explaining to you, you will be able to think of yourself in a different way than you have been doing up to now. This, as we saw in the previous section, offers you a new life option, which makes it possible for you to choose to live according to the guidelines of your plot or to structure an adult life plan that places you outside the plot.

Man is body-mind. We do not have the mental on the one hand and the bodily on the other. The body is the mind and the mind is the body. All our organs, our history, our appropriate and inappropriate behaviors, perceptions, sensations, memory, what we say and imagine the transcendent goal, the family social network to which we belong, political alternatives, etc., make up the human being.

Like the simple light bulb whose individual elements cannot fulfill the function for which they were invented, the human being cannot function without the interrelationship of all its components. The key word is relationship.

some affectations with positive and negative mental states are configured between the age of 5 to 12 years, approximately, an organic procedure that is exactly known as the age of “establishing one’s own values”. One of the difficulties at this stage is that the boy has a hard time deciding his values ​​and his goals. The attitudes that are chosen as rulers of life… do they respond to the authentic needs of the child or to the needs of others? And if different attitudes are chosen… is it because the boy is out of an argument or because he is opposing, anti-argumenting, that is, in a rebellious, oppositional way, to what is expected of him? Let’s realize all this in order to make a change in our life.

6. The power of imagination

Imagination is the ability of a person to represent an object in the absence of it. In what state of the I would you locate the imagination? Correct: in the I CHILD state. According to its subdivisions, the theme of the imaginary will have variations. In this way, and making a first division, we will say that the topics to be imagined will have “pro-life” or “anti-life” characteristics. For example, facing an exam, a high school student imagines, with his Submissive Child, making a fool of himself and everyone making fun of him; another, with his Opposition Child, imagines defying the teacher, responding haughtily and returning home to play on the computer without caring that he failed; another, with his Free Child, giving creative responses while seeing, in his mind, the teacher smirking; the Educated Child imagines himself answering the questions accurately, and the Righteous Child sees himself defending his rights in the face of any off-program question or unfair comment from the teacher. Everyone, in their own way, can feel more or less anxious about the impending test.

What is stopping us

Let’s take an example of a man who is going to take a driving test to be a taxi driver. The restraining commands that cascade before this stimulus is: “You’re not going to make it. You’re not good enough to drive a taxi. They’re going to laugh at you. You only know how to do stupid things.” All this is supported by errors in his reasoning: “I will never be like my cousin Ernesto (personalization by comparison)”; “This parking thing infuriates me, so I’m going to do it wrong (emotional reasoning)”; “I should have practiced more (I should).” But this person does something else: he makes a mental movie where he sees himself inside the car, with the examiner next to him looking at him with mockery, making mistakes, throwing everything when parking, being booed and suspended, leaving the exam with the head down as he watches pass, in front of him, the taxis that go away. It is necessary to emphasize the highlights: “A mental movie is made”.

types of imagination

We will distinguish, in this vertex of imagining, two types of imagination:

• Reproductive Imagination: allows us to visualize, with the eye of the mind, people, animals, things, and past scenes.
• Creative Imagination: allows us to create people, animals, things, and scenes that have no real existence, at least for the one who is imagining.

And to suffer you can use any of the two. With the reproductive imagination, you will bring over and over again the scenes from a past that made you feel bad, like the angry face of your boss when you asked him to leave early; but you can also update the ones that made you feel good, like that sunset on the beach while you walked on the wet sand smelling the aroma of salt and iodine and hearing the sound of the waves.

With creative imagination you will be able to make yourself feel bad in advance, combining catastrophic scenes on a certain topic or you would choose to create pleasant scenes that would allow you to enjoy moments of relaxation. As you will see, you have the power to choose which audiovisual you are going to produce. If we did not imagine “anti-life” scenes, what would prevent us from reaching our goals?

7. Don’t be afraid to feel

What are you feeling right now? This question does not have an easy answer. It is frequently asked of the patients of a therapy school, the Gestalt, created by Fritz Perls, and the person is not always in a position to answer it. Perls said a famous phrase: “Leave the mind (thinking) and return to the senses.”

Unfortunately, it happens that not everyone has the appropriate words to understand what they are feeling. Therefore, instead of waiting for great answers, the easiest way to start getting in touch with what you are feeling right now is to ask yourself: is what I feel pleasant, unpleasant or neutral? Don’t be surprised or worried if your answer is “I don’t know.”

What prevents you from feeling

What makes it difficult for you to answer the question? The difficulty is that you are not used to getting in touch with your body, you don’t get its signals, or if you do, you can’t give it the proper name. The answer to the question could have been: I feel hungry, cold, a headache, a tickle in my stomach, a lump in my throat, and tightness in my chest, but also: anger, sadness, anguish, anxiety, guilt, joy, shame, etc.

If you look closely, you will realize that we have given two response categories: the first refers to sensations and they are related to the body; the second is emotions. We can discriminate, then, two “feelings” that make up this vertex of feeling: sensations are felt whose referent is the body, and emotions are felt whose essence is mental. Both are interrelated and lead to specific actions, which are not always appropriate.

The pain, the tightness in the chest, the lump in the throat, and the tingling throughout the body are sensations, and messages that the body sends you; anger or anger, sadness, and joy, are emotions that you feel in your mind. The insult, the crying, the jumping, and your screams, are actions in which the body also participates and that are a consequence of the sensations and emotions felt.

Why do you have to express your emotions?

All emotions are beneficial because they tell us what is happening to us. Some are pleasant and most are unpleasant. Many people do not recognize what they feel or do not express it because they have not had a model or permission from their parents to express them. This is the reason why people block them by diverting their energy to other places.

For example, a person with sadness (an emotion not accepted in their family) can divert energy towards anger (which was admitted), and a person who feels anger (which was not allowed) towards depression (the whole family revolved around it). Another who has reasons to be happy (unfavored emotion: “he who laughs on Saturday cries on Sunday”) becomes depressed and the one who feels love (“loving, in the long run, produces pain”) becomes anguished. Another who has test phobia (“don’t be a coward”) diverts the energy into her intestines and she has diarrhea. The one who feels envy (“you are very bad”) shows a false joy when seeing the achievements of a friend (“how good you are”) and then becomes distressed (“poor thing… take a Valium). And there are those who feel resentment towards her mother-in-law (“don’t give us a hard time”) and show her false affection (“dear mother-in-law,

These are just a few possible cases. If someone prevents you from expressing your emotions, tell them firmly: ” I have every right in the world to feel … (this or that emotion)”. Your mind and body will thank you.

8. Speaking the people understand?

Communication is a process by which one person tries to convey an idea to another with the desire they capture the true meaning of the message with a minimum of distortion. The understanding of the message with a minimum distortion would show us that the communication was successful, otherwise, it was unsuccessful. This failure in communication by which the meaning of a message is not understood in its entirety is something very frequent and the explanation lies in a fundamental fact: the interference produced by the Life Argument with your belief system. And since we all have an Argument, we can conclude that all communication, at some point, will be interfered with and will never be complete.

This will lead to misunderstandings. Although all of us who share a language have a code in common, the meaning we attribute to words depends on our experience. Obviously, we all know what a “table” is. But at the moment of reading or hearing this word, each one will have a different mental representation: one will imagine their kitchen table, another the one inherited by their dead parents, another the one they saw in the shop window and that is very dear to them.

Each person, when wanting to communicate a message, must resort to his “data bank” from which he will extract both the words and the most appropriate grammatical structure for what he wants to convey. But that database is ruled by the code of the Argument of Life and its underlying ideology. This Life Storyline is as different from person to person as fingerprints: they all look alike and they are all different. Of course, the words used in the construction of the message and its syntactic structure are common to all of us, but the meaning we give to each message depends on that database. In other words, each one understands what the other says according to their own Life Argument, their Internal Belief System. This is what sanctions the message of another.

Why are there misunderstandings in couples?

This is where the misunderstandings and misunderstandings start. This is more noticeable in the couple’s bond because, due to daily coexistence, code differences are evident. Each one responds according to a different Life Argument, since they had different vital experiences and, therefore, have a particular Belief System that, in no way, can coincide with that of the other. In a discussion about the education of children… Who can be said to be entitled to be right? Both codes are valid.

Things get quite complicated when messages are transmitted by choosing words with a low level of significance, that is, words that can be attributed to any meaning. For example, someone says “you always feel those emotions when those things happen.” Here it is almost impossible to know what is being talked about because… what are those things? who feels them? what emotions are we talking about? “always” means that there are no exceptions; that it is a universal law. Observe how many questions arise in a sentence composed of words of low significance.

9. The ultimate evidence

At a racetrack, a horse may have a long pedigree, be the fastest in trials, have a beautiful figure, and have the best trainer, but… of the six races he ran, he came last. Obviously, something went wrong. Something similar happens during the growth process. The person will be able to question their erroneous ideas of him, modify his belief system, know and alter the catastrophic images, intercept his internal dialogue, identify his emotions, and express them and, despite all that work, everything remains the same.

Sooner or later, real change manifests itself in external changes. The “internal-external” sequence is, according to Integrative Psychotherapy, the matrix of true change. This means that if you change what you think, imagine, and feel, you can change what is communicated and what is done. The question is: does the reverse sequence, “external-internal”, promote change? That is, by changing what is said and what is done… can you change what you think and what you feel? Integrative Psychotherapy considers that change occurs when the person knows, questions, and rewrites her Life Story as a consequence of an authentic desire to transcend it. In order to achieve that state of Plot rewrite, a variety of resources can be used. This means, neither more nor less, that each one must follow its own methods, according to its moment. Not all answers apply to the same question. And who better to know what each one needs than a specialist?

10. Stones on the path

From birth, the influence that others have on us is transcendental. To such an extent that we are building our identity based on the images that we believe others have of us. Later we must wear a different mask depending on the occasion. It can be said that we are what the other determines us to be and this is what alienation or alienation consists of being alien to ourselves, ignoring ourselves, or, what amounts to the same thing, knowing ourselves as long as there is another who recognizes us.

In the absence of that other… we do not exist. In this type of pathology and to guarantee his own existence, the person must adapt to the demands of his Social Network, otherwise, he will have to pay the consequences. In short: both the Network and the individual need each other. These needs, of symbiotic characteristics, contribute to forming closing bonds. This closure means that, in this type of relationship, there is neither going forward nor going back. There is no mobility, personal development, or shared growth. However, there is movement.

It happens that between mobility and movement, there are differences. A fan has movement, it turns and turns but it cannot move, by itself, from one place to another. Closing links have a similar feature. Although there is no shared growth (mobility) there are stormy, melodramatic, sadomasochistic movements, where the figure of someone who persecutes, another who suffers, and another who rescues always appears. Conflicting passions, offenses, revenge, abandonment, and reunions. They displace a lot of air but… they’re always in the same place.

So what is change

As we have already seen, we call the passage from an undesired state to a desired state change. The knowledge of the Argument of Life, the questioning of its restraining mandates, and the decision to live a transcendent life enable access to said desired state. Unfortunately, things are not as easy as they may seem. Despite being a very strong desire for change, the individual resists. But the presence of this resistance tells us that there are two forces in conflict: the one that tends to keep the person within the restrictive limits of the Life Argument and the life force that drives him to transcend it. We must take both into account for the therapeutic task.

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