I feel like I’ve always been quite restless. I’m always thinking about the future and my current state and get a bit antsy.
But in the past, I feel like it made me uneasy and anxious. Now it makes me feel motivated.
So what changed?
I wish I could say it was some huge, profound realization inside myself that allowed me to break old scripts and get out of self-destructive patterns.
But it wasn’t at all.
I owed a lot of money before, and now I don’t. That’s it.
More specifically: I owed a lot of bad money like credit card debt, and it wasn’t really going away at all. It wasn’t growing much but it was still always this huge burden that made it feel like I wasn’t succeeding at all.
Recently, after a string of good financial moves, I’ve been able to quickly pay off a ton of debt, including all credit card debt. Every month, I’m able to pay everything down to zero on personal cards and in my business. I also paid off my student loans completely.
And it’s made all the difference.
In the past, I’d be thinking about the future and just worry about all the debt I had, and how it’s been years and I still hadn’t managed to really get control of things financially. It always just felt like this specter I couldn’t get away from.
And when I started feeling that way, I feel like it just turned to general anxiety and actually crippled me from getting things done and really succeeding, which probably kept me in that state a lot longer than I should have been.
But now that’s gone! I’m running a massive surplus of cash every month which I can use to pay off anything or even start investing. Whereas before it felt like I had no opportunities at all, now I can do anything I want!
And so when I feel that familiar sense of unease, I’m interpreting it as excitement and a sense of unlimited possibility in the future, and that’s actually quite liberating and motivating. Suddenly I feel like if I really focus on something, I can really take this business off the ground and do whatever I’d like with it.
That’s a great feeling.
And it really just comes down to interpreting how I’m feeling differently, not even necessarily feeling differently. I think the Buddhists would have a lot to say about that, but it’s still a really interesting thing to experience myself.
It’s easy to forget about this time. It really was totally different, and it does make such a difference. It makes me feel for people who are struggling. Everything is just so much harder when you’re barely getting by.
Something that hadn’t been explained to me at this time was the difference between emotions and feelings. In this case, I felt a physical emotion of anxiety, and my “feelings” were either restlessness or motivation. My outlook and situation molded my interpretation of the emotion.
It’s interesting now, though, looking back and realizing that I’ve been experiencing anxiety for quite some time. I remember that – by this time – I had felt fairly strong anxiety for many years. Which I mostly just attributed to struggling financially. I know suspect that was only one small part of the equation.