For many years, I’ve attempted a multitude of various hobbies and pastimes, from various sports activities to reading and blogging, there is a repeating pattern of me being super excited about something, trying it for a while and then moving on to something else. Repeating the pattern and extinguishing the passion for the previous activity just as quickly as the new passion appears.
The thing is, this has served me pretty well in some aspects — I have managed to (and become very good at) injecting myself into communities and hobbies very quickly, experiencing what the hobby has to offer to a degree and jumping out of it just as quick.
I think of myself as a hobby tourist.
It’s not good or bad, to each their own, but this pattern has a side effect: I often behave in the same way with things that shouldn’t be short term flings.
Things like
- daily physical activities
- reading
- journaling
- meditating
- paying attention to what I eat
These should never be initiated or driven by whatever excites me this month, as that leads a circle of passion for and neglect for life-critical things. For example, when I got into boxing, that was the driver for me watching what I eat, getting better at boxing was the reason I exercised etc.
So when I inevitably got a flare-up of my recurring back injury and couldn’t box anymore for a while, my passion died down, I stopped exercising and fell off the good-diet wagon.
Reprogramming my mind
The trigger for this round of self improvement focus was this brilliant video by Niklas Christl. I highly recommend you watch it, if you haven’t. It’s flawed in many ways and the whole Dopamine Detox craze somewhat misses what actually happens in our brains when we go on this detox, but the video did open my eyes to all the doom scrolling and content consuming I was doing.
I followed the same detox routine as he did, for a couple weeks and by day four was absolutely blown away by how much better my mind felt.
- I was at peace with myself
- I was hungry for creating content
- I was laser focused on each task that I set for myself
- My motivation to do everything and do it well was off the charts
Things I was leaving for tomorrow for months were getting done effortlessly.
I started (and since have kept up for months now) daily self improvement routines routines and am now much more aware of things that take me off my targets.
So what’s next?
Being aware of the cyclical nature of my failures is a great start, an understanding of what is going on is enough to start working on a problem.
I guess the main take away for me was that the healthy habits are now my drivers in themselves.
Daily physical activities are a routine part of my life now and they will always be, if I want to do boxing a day or a few days per week, that’s great, but I do boxing as a part of my principal core value — always staying active, not the reverse, as I used to think before.
It seems to me, that my core personality used to shift and adapt to whatever I was excited by for the short term and was ever changing, but somewhat empty when unoccupied.
Now, I have concrete pillars and core values, that hold me up. Is this what becoming mature feels like?