August 15, 2025 • 42 mins
Let's be real...too many of us are struggling with a sense of disconnect between who we are in our daily lives and our true selves. We feel like we no longer do the things that set our souls on fire, we have lost what makes us unique, we are bored, we are stagnant, maybe we don't even like ourselves anymore. Today on the podcast we talk about why that may be, including:
- The 3 reasons modern society has made us feel detached
- Why we need to think about our values more
- The power of daily intention setting
- The identity inventory
- The self absorption paradox
- The best ways to spend you weekend to feel like YOU again
- Why you need a bucket list + so much more
If you want to feel more aligned and alive, this episode is for you :)
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we of course break down
the Psychology of our twenties, I want to firstly, just
before we get into it, thank you all for the
(00:45):
love that you have been showing my book recently. If
you didn't know, I released a book earlier this year.
It's called Person in Progress, and in the last month
I have just been receiving some of the kindest reviews,
kindest comments, kindest messages from you all out of nowhere.
So I just wanted to give you a formal thank
(01:05):
you for just being so kind about this thing that
I put out into the world. If you are yet
to get your hands on a copy, the book is
basically well like the Ultimate and Extended Guide to the
Psychology of Your Twenties. So if you like the podcast,
I think I can make a fairly certain assumption that
you will like the book as well. I will leave
(01:27):
a link in the description, but again, you have all
of my gratitude. Thank you so much to you all.
So for today, I can't speak for you guys, but
recently I have been going through, I would say a
few periods of feeling very alien, very unlike myself. It's
been this strange experience where the best way I can
(01:51):
summarize it is that people will ask me, you know,
describe yourself, or they'll ask me what I'm interested in,
or oh, who I am beyond work or beyond my
immediate relationships, And I'm kind of in this situation of
grasping at straws at the moment, interests, values, hobbies like
I know I have them, but there's this strange wall
(02:14):
between between me and the things that make me me.
That means that I feel kind of strange and unoriginal
and a little bit bland and very detached from myself.
I remember this period right after my last boyfriend and
I broke up, where I felt very similar. You know,
that relationship rocked my confidence so much that for like
(02:37):
six months afterwards, I just felt like I was living
outside of my body in a way, and all the
things I knew to be true about the person I
was felt impossible to feel. I also had moved cities
at the time and was trying to make new friends,
and I just felt so detached from my spirit. I
couldn't hold a conversation, I couldn't really engage with people
on a deep level. It seems like this detachment is
(03:01):
the best word. This detachment from our sense of self
is a fairly common experience for a lot of us
in our twenties. I think. Actually it occurs in quite
a cyclical manner. We go through periods of feeling very confident,
feeling very alive, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, we
just don't feel like ourselves anymore. And it kind of
(03:21):
serves as a reminder of when we need to reconnect
with the deeper parts of ourselves, when we need to
re identify what we care about. But it's also kind
of a really scary and uncomfortable feeling. So today I
want to dissect and kind of break down that feeling.
I want to give you as well a bit of
a guide as to how we can feel like ourselves again,
(03:43):
or how we can perhaps connect with a newer version
of ourselves that's emerging when we are feeling kind of
like a stranger in our own life and a stranger
in our own body. We are also not just going
to talk about things that are run of the mill. Journaling, meditation,
spending time doing your hobbies are or fabulous, fabulous ways
(04:05):
to combat not feeling like yourself, but I feel like
we all kind of know them. I want to just
go a little bit deeper and a little bit broader
and give you some tips and advice that you probably
haven't heard before, some research that you probably haven't heard before,
so that this episode is as practical, informative, and as
original and as it can be, so that it is
(04:25):
as helpful as it can be as well. We're also
going to talk about why you may be experiencing this
at this chapter or point in your life, but also
why it's maybe not a bad thing to feel a
little bit lost within yourself sometimes. So, without further ado,
we have so much to cover, so let's get into
(04:45):
my guide to how to feel like yourself again. Before
we get into the seven plus strategies I have for
you today, let me just say the best thing you
can do before you implement any new habits, before you
try any thirty day recent, any seventy five hard program,
(05:08):
anything like that. Basically, before you add anything to your
already busy life. It's just to understand why this disconnect
may be occurring. There is no growth without self knowledge.
And the thing is, this feeling probably isn't an accident.
It is stemming from somewhere something in your life that
(05:30):
is creating dissatisfaction or disconnect. The most likely explanations are
as follows. Firstly, you may be feeling unlike yourself because
you've just become a little bit stuck. You are in
a period of stagnation where nothing feels new, nothing feels different.
Your days are the same, your routines are the same,
(05:51):
and as a result, your sense of self, your soul,
whatever you want to label it, this core part of
who you are is not being given the opportunity to expand.
The thing is, our sense of self is not a
static thing. It demands constant evolution from us, your sense
of self. And it's gonna sound so silly, like the
(06:14):
way I like to describe it. It's kind of like
a dolphin. It's kind of like a shark. You know,
the moment a dolphin or a shark stops swimming or
stop swimming forward. You might know this, but they die,
and it's kind of similar for your soul. The moment
your soul feels like it's not moving forward, it's not
experiencing new things, it's not being allowed to grow, it
(06:35):
also kind of experiences a similar kind of death. Psychologically,
we thrive when we have a sense of forward motion.
This is what the psychologist Abraham Maslow you might know him,
called self actualization. So maso, I don't want to say created, maso.
(06:58):
He founded, even the worst word to use. Basically, he's
most famous for his hierarchy of needs and this idea
that the very top need that we want to achieve
is a state of knowing ourselves in a state of
challenging ourselves. That is self actualization. But he was not
the first person to understand this or recognize this. In fact,
(07:19):
this core part of human psychology has been understood and
practiced by indigenous cultures long before Western psychologists gave it
a name. Particularly, Maslow really identified self actualization as a
core priority of this self when he was living with
members of the Blackfoot nation in Canada and in America
during the nineteen thirties, and he saw that this community
(07:43):
really kind of understood that if a human was to
thrive and was to flourish, they needed a sense of movement,
of purpose, They needed to be doing things. I think
it's really important to talk about where these concepts in
Western and modern psychology come from, way back when and
at their roots, because that is a part of history
(08:05):
that has often missed, and it's a part of history
that I actually didn't know when it comes to self
exialization and the hierarchy of needs until one of the
listeners told me, so very interesting that this idea of
forward movement is one that cultures and societies have had
longer than we as a modern society could put a
name to it. So back to what we're talking about.
(08:25):
If you have found yourself stuck in a routine doing
very monotonous things, finding that you've outgrown your environment without
realizing it, this may be contributing to a deeper detachment
from core parts of you. It could also be that
you've kind of been stuck in survival mode for longer
than you realize. You may be so focused on prioritizing
(08:48):
the bit busy and and urgent parts of your life,
that there hasn't been much room to slow down and
to observe and to learn. If this is the case,
you know now, do you feel disconnected? It's almost impossible
for your brain and your body and your mind to
pursue growth and expansion when your nervous system has been
(09:10):
hijacked by stress, by burnout, by anxiety, maybe even by trauma. Additionally,
you know, another very valid explanation is that you're just
straight up overwhelmed by the state of the world and
the state of the news and the tragedy of life
at the moment, and because of that that doesn't feel
like there's much worth in prioritizing yourself or your well
(09:33):
being when everything else is falling apart and millions of
other people are suffering. It's a very difficult line to cross.
You want to be empathetic, but I also beg you
not to fall into this trap. As awful as the
world feels, of not taking care of yourself. It's not
selfish to take care of yourself and to feel a
(09:53):
connection to the deeper parts of you. It's actually incredibly crucial.
Just as a little side note to mention that secondly,
our second explanation for why we may be feeling a
little bit lost from ourselves is that we're just bored.
Not only are we stuck, we're bored, and so therefore
we're not very interested in the world, and we're not
(10:15):
very interested in our own development. Now, this boredom and
this apathy can sometimes take years to take a hold,
and you don't really realize how just simply uninterested in
life you are until you have a moment, perhaps like
the one you're having right now, where you realize, like, Hey,
I don't even know what it means to feel like
(10:36):
myself anymore. I don't even know who I am. If
someone asked me, I wouldn't know how to answer. This also,
of course, has a bit of a clinical name. We
know it as depression. Feeling like you don't know yourself,
feeling uninterested in life, feeling unmotivated is a large sign
(10:57):
symptom criteria for a diagnosis with either a minor or
a major depressive episode. If that's the case, yes, you
will still get something out of this podcast, but you'll
probably get more out of seeing a therapist who can
really get to the core of your own individual issues.
(11:17):
So I would encourage you to see that out as well.
The final explanation has to do with you are not
living a life in line with your values, and that
is why you don't feel like yourself. This matters so
much more than we think our values. Although we probably
I don't know about you, I don't think about them
(11:38):
day to day, they are still there and they are
my compass. And if we throw out the compass, if
we ignore the compass, we're obviously going to get very,
very lost. If you really value creativity and curiosity and
yet you're doing something in your life that is very
(11:58):
systems based, or you're working a job that doesn't really
allow you to express yourself and you don't have an
outlet elsewhere, you're not going to feel like yourself, are you?
If you value the outdoors and you value adventure and
you know it's been a while since you've hit the road.
Same thing. How I explain this is like taking an
(12:21):
animal out of their natural habitat and expecting them to thrive,
taking a human away from their values and expecting them
to feel like themselves. It never works. And when you
take yourself out of environments or situations that reflect your values,
when you don't have opportunities to live your values. You
are not going to feel amazing psychologically or mentally, emotionally,
(12:46):
even physically. So these are the three major explanations for
this feeling. Regardless of which one you relate to more
maybe relate to all of them. The path back to
your self really involves a simple process of a remembering
what you care about, b remembering what you like about
(13:10):
yourself and what you like about being alive, and see
finding ways to practice that as much as you possibly
can so that the gap between you and your truest, purest,
higher self gets smaller and smaller. Let's talk about how
(13:30):
to do that exactly. I will say some of these
strategies may sound a little bit woo woo, a little
bit you know, enlightened, but I promise you they work.
I promise you there is science behind that. And also,
what do you have to lose? You know, if you're
feeling very lost, I don't think it can get worse
than that. And here's a hard truth. You know, if
(13:53):
you're at a point of wanting to change, well, that's
not just going to happen by thinking about it. To
try things that you haven't tried before, and you have
to try things that maybe you don't think that will
work and be surprised. So we're going to start with
this first exercise. If you want to feel like yourself again,
(14:14):
you have got to identify, even just loosely, what you
mean when you say yourself, who are you? What does
that look like? What does that feel like? What does
that version of you behave? Behave like? You have to
perform a bit of an identity reevaluation. There's actually heaps
of ways to do this. You're in luck and it's
(14:36):
not as hard as it sounds. But the best exercise
that I've found to do this is something that I
call the identity inventory, and it basically just asks you
to really just put a spotlight on yourself for a
second in a way that you're not used to, sit
down and ride out ten phrases, ten words that reflect
(14:57):
different parts of your identity. Do an These can be
formal roles, so you could say, of my ten words,
I am a teacher, I am a student, I am
a mother, whatever personal traits, I'm an optimist, i am
an introvert, passions, I love nature, I am a writer.
Or it could be relational roles. I am a friend,
(15:18):
I am a good daughter. Think of it as like
listing the different hats that you wear on your everyday life,
the parts of you that are going to show up
in different situations, in different relationships, and moves that all
kind of come together to create your sense of self.
Some of these things can also be aspirational things that
you haven't quite achieved yet but which you know will
(15:40):
be in your future, and that which you know you
really want to have happened and that you're working towards. So,
for example, I actually did my identity inventory the other
day when I was writing this episode, and my list
includes things like podcaster, It includes things like rider, extrovert, explore, EmPATH, sister.
(16:03):
And when I write these words down, yes, they might
just be words, but all together they create kind of
a unique a unique vision, a unique kind of I
don't know, a unique bored, a unique mood board I guess,
splattering of who I am that makes it easier to
live that truth. You know. For example, sometimes I feel
(16:25):
kind of distanced from the creative side of me, but
I know when I'm not doing something creative, I feel
less like myself, and so having that word on this
list forces me to basically acknowledge like, hey, if this
is how I see myself, I also have to actively
express this and I have to actively work on this
(16:46):
side of me. Your identity is not just made of words,
although there are words on this list. It's made of actions,
it's made of doing, It's made of behaviors. At your center,
how do you see your Who are you? What parts
of your identity feel valuable to you? What are you neglecting?
How can you act in a way that aligns the
(17:09):
part of you that feel important more towards yourself and
that distances you from the behaviors that perhaps aren't reflecting
this core inventory of pillars, or I guess, the core
foundation of how you see yourself. Secondly, as important as
it is to of course identify what areas you need
(17:30):
to love more or need to prioritize more, it's also
important to identify the things that you are doing just
because you feel like you have to do them. These
small choices chip away at our sense of self day
after day. If we're not careful, it is so easy
to say, Okay, well, I'll say yes to this thing
at work because no one else will, or I'll do
(17:53):
this kind of exercise because it's apparently good for me,
or you know, I'll hang out with this person even
though I really don't enjoy that company because I feel
a sense of loyalty and I should. I'll post on
LinkedIn or social media because that's what I should be doing.
Doing things purely out of obligation rather than out of
(18:13):
an actual sense of choice and a desire to do
them is a subtle form of self abandonment that over
time accumulates and means that you feel more and more
disconnected from that compass that should be at the center.
When we repeatedly act out of shoulds rather than genuine
desire or personal values, our sense of autonomy is very
(18:38):
quickly eroded. This disconnect between what we do and what
we want to do and who we are. I guess
it's what psychologists call inconcuruence. It's a mismatch between the
self we project and our true self. Kyle Rogers suggested
he's a very famous psychologist you probably heard me mentioning before.
(19:02):
He was the one who suggested that this incongruence is
what creates a great deal of psychological distress in the
modern day human There was a twenty sixteen study in
the general motivation and emotion, and it found that when
participants were given the opportunity to do something they wanted
to the way they wanted to do it, versus doing
(19:24):
something out of pressure or guilt. Of course, naturally they
reported being overall more happy at the end of the
experiment when they had the choice to guide their own
behavior versus those who were made to do something out
of obligation. It wasn't just that they were less satisfied
with their experience in the experiment. They were less satisfied
(19:46):
about their life in general. A lot of them gave
much more pessimistic outlooks about their life, the life that
existed beyond the lab having done that experiment. So those choices,
although they might feel quite I don't know, innocent, over time,
(20:07):
when you continuously do things that no longer serve you,
you do risk becoming a bit of a stranger to yourself.
I think it's also the right time to point out
another central point here. Sometimes getting back to yourself isn't
about adding more to your plate. It isn't about adding
more to your life, but thinking about what you can subtract.
(20:32):
Imagine how much time we would have for ourselves if
we were a bit more selfish and just said no more,
and we said yes only when we really wanted to.
It's a wild thought for some of us, especially if
you're a people pleaser, especially if you have a really
ingrained sense of obligation to family or to friends, especially
(20:52):
if you think that saying yes will make you more
successful and saying no, we'll make you a pill to
work with. But who benefits from you continuously saying yes
when you don't want to. Who is getting something out
of that? Because it's not you, it's someone else, it's
other people, it's society at large, whatever you want to
call it. But you are not being served by that decision.
(21:16):
My third tip for us today is more of a
daily exercise, and it's one that I personally do. I
have spoken about it on the podcast before. In your
journey back to yourself, it is so valuable to set
intentions for your day, every single day that relate to
what you want to get out of that next twenty
(21:36):
four hours. Let me explain the premise behind this. So
recently you may have seen a TikTok of a girl
who basically said that every day, the moment she wakes up,
she asks the universe, show me how good it can get,
show me how good it can be. And when she
does that, she reports almost every day. At the end
(21:56):
of the day, she reflects back and she's had like
the most amazing twenty four hours. The reason why is
that your thoughts about your situation and your life shape
how you view opportunities, how you view good days, how
you view bad days. They shape how you behave, which
in turn shapes your reality. We can do this same exercise,
(22:20):
this same thing to reconnect with ourselves by setting self
directed intentions, like today, I'm going to go only where
I feel I can find joy. Today, I'm going to
really listen to myself. Today, I'm going to say no
more than I say yes. Today, I'm going to let
the universe show me where I need to be. I
(22:44):
know I'm going to have a great day. I'm going
to be excited by life. Today is going to be excellent.
I'm going to feel amazing. Those are just some examples
of those affirmations or intentions that you can set. Psychologically.
This also taps into a concept called priming. This is
the idea that what we focus on, especially when our
(23:07):
mood is really malleable like at the start of the day,
that can shape how we interpret the world around us.
Two people can be experiencing the exact same situations, but
if one of them has an intention that they're going
to only engage with things that align with them, and
the other person doesn't have an intention like that, how
they finish the day is going to be very different.
(23:31):
So basically, setting a daily intention shifts your cognitive filters.
You don't see everything that sucks. You focus on the
areas where you can expand you focus on the areas
that you want to and the areas that make you
feel good and that make you feel more like yourself.
So the world does start to reflect what you want
(23:51):
to see. And because you're being more intentional, you also
get to be more in touch with what you actually want,
because that's the only way that you can actually express
or set an intention is if you have a desire
for a certain outcome in the first place, which as
a consequence means you have to feel you have to
have better communication and be better able to listen to
your internal desires. This is our starting point, and I
(24:17):
know all of these tips have been very I guess
like thought based, thought based exercises, thought based activities. Enough
of that, we're done. We're done with that. We're done
with the thinking component. We're gonna move on to the
doing component. We're going to move on to the fun
side of this episode. So if you want some practical
things that you can do right now, right at this moment,
(24:39):
in the next twenty four hours, in the next seven days,
that aren't gonna feel like a chore, stay with us.
We're going to talk about all of that and so
much more after this shortbreak. So there is this common saying,
perhaps you've heard of it, how you spend your days
(24:59):
is how you will spend your life. How you spend
your days will also determine how you feel about yourself.
Spend your days, I don't know, glued to your phone
or you know, your weekend's kind of doing the same thing.
You're going to feel very one dimensional because all you're
doing is passively consuming or passively kind of following a
(25:21):
routine that was laid out for you. If you spend
that same time making things, exploring, pursuing goals, looking up
at the world, I guess therefore, you as a part
of the world is going to feel more expansive and well,
I guess just rich rich in experience. It's not just
(25:43):
thinking exercises that are going to get you back to yourself.
Experiences are going to do the same for you as well.
Starting with your weekends, here is how I think a
typical weekend goes for many of us. You know, Saturday,
you sleep in, maybe you see a friend. Then maybe
you like go out drinking or like, you do something
(26:04):
in the evening. And then Sunday, you know, you're so
tired from the week before understandably and also maybe from
the night before that you don't really do anything. Maybe
you like do some chores. Then the Sunday scary is
hit and like that's it, it's Monday again. Typically, it
is the same stuff every weekend and then it's over.
No wonder we feel so disconnected because you have nothing
(26:27):
to actually connect to, nothing to look forward to in
your free time. So here is how you are going
to reprogram your weekend. Firstly, you are going to choose
one day of your weekend and it's going to be
a should free day. No, I should do my chores,
I should go to the gym, I should see this person,
(26:50):
none of that. This day is for you. You are
going to go where your feet want to go, where
your heart wants to go. You're only should for that
whole day is to get out of the house and
do something that you normally wouldn't. That's it, leave the house,
experience something other than your day to day. That is
your only should. The reason this is so important is
(27:13):
because new and novel experiences that we feel intrinsically motivated
to perform stimulate the brain's reward centers and promote a
sense of expansion, but also openness to new experiences. I
think as well, you just give yourself the space to
breathe and to be present in the moment that is
(27:33):
perhaps not available to you when you're working, when you're
stuck in like the monotony of the day to day.
When you actually have an open perspective and an open
mind towards your weekends and you want them to be
expansive days for you, you have more opportunities for happiness and
to feel joy and to feel like, hey, this is
(27:54):
a good life and this is a good feeling. And
when you feel that way, when you feel relaxed and
open to new experiences, that also signals your nervous system
that it's safe, all is calm. You relax for a second,
and that's when you can really here, like the call
of your true self better, when you're no longer in
survival mode, when you're no longer kind of crowded out
(28:15):
by urgency and busyness. Alongside this, I want you to
create a bucket list. And yes, we have talked about
this before, and you know why it's come up in
a few episodes is because it is so down important
as an adult to have things to look forward to
and to have ambitions that have absolutely no purpose other
(28:36):
than that they make you happy. You know, remember when
we were a kid and we would like make our
summer bucket list and it would be like have a sleepover,
like make s'mores, go to the amusement park, lemonade stand
like we need to bring those back as people in
our twenties and thirties and beyond, we need to bring
back adventure. Also, it means that when you have one
(28:57):
of those days of being like, ugh, I don't know
what to do. I don't like I feel bored, but
I want to do something instead of just like wasting
your time thinking about which fun thing to pick or
trying to search up and find or seek out inspiration.
Like you have your list, you have your bucket list.
You don't have to waste any time you go out
and you make new memories and in those moments, you
(29:20):
get to see yourself in different spaces, different environments, different situations,
learning kind of who you are on the job. I
guess one thing on my bucket list right now that
I think I'm going to do when I'm in Chicago
later this week is the twelve hour Walk challenge side
quest here. I recently read this book. It is called
(29:43):
actually very aptly, the twelve Hour Walk, and in it,
the author he is a professional endurance athlete. He talks
about this personal experiment that he thinks we should all do,
where when we are feeling disconnected from ourselves, when we
are feeling a bit lost, you need to commit to
walking for twelve hours straight, alone and in silence, with
(30:07):
nothing about your thoughts, through your city or through a
city wherever you are. And during this twelve hour period,
you can stop as much as you want, you can
take breaks, you can sit down. You could literally walk
for an hour and then like sit in a park
for the rest of the eleven hours. But you can't
be on your phone, you can't listen to music. You
(30:29):
have to just be with your thoughts. And obviously, yes,
you can sit for eleven hours. The idea is that
you don't typically do that. He wants you to keep
walking and keep moving forward, and he argues that this
is a really easy way to reset, I guess your
spirit because you have to face so many internal fears
and doubts and be alone with your thoughts and notice
(30:49):
more about the world that we are kind of unable
to do on our day to day and in our
day to day life. It's also just again an adventure.
So people are aparently like, finish this walk feeling like
an immense sense of purpose, an immense sense of direction.
It's apparently very profound. So I'm gonna try it and
(31:13):
I will report back. I think you should also try
it if you're feeling that that's an inspiring idea to you.
If you have any sense that that seems like something
fun that you should do, you should do it. Obviously,
the twelve hour walk is something that you have to
do alone, but there are probably a lot of things
on your bucket list that would be better with other people.
(31:34):
And yes, whilst spending time alone is vital for reconnecting
with yourself. If you feel disconnected, please don't allow that
to make you withdraw from your friends anymore or self isolate.
I get it. When we feel bored, when we feel
stuck in our lives, when our self esteem is deflated.
(31:55):
Sometimes the last thing you want to do is is
like have to can seal that actively from your friends.
The last thing you want to do is be social.
Social withdrawal is a very common coping mechanism when we're
dealing with a sense of identity disruption or when we're
not feeling like ourselves, often because it takes a lot
of effort to be socially present, but also because we
(32:18):
think more time alone automatically means more time to find ourselves,
it's actually quite the opposite. It often results in a
further exaggeration of depressive symptoms, a further exaggeration of loneliness,
a further exaggeration of dissatisfaction. It's this weird behavior that
(32:39):
does make us feel a little bit okay at the moment,
but actually often ends up worsening our situation. Whilst I'm
very aware that this urge can be very hard to fight,
especially if it's connected with a mental health disorder. When
you feel yourself slipping into this self isolation social withdrawal pattern,
I want you to remember the findings of this particular study.
(33:01):
The study is from twenty fourteen and it's titled Mistakenly
Seeking Solitude, and in it, these researchers looked at the
experiences of over a thousand individuals who, when they were
given the opportunity to engage with another person, were either
encouraged to lean into the situation or they were told
that they could do whatever they wanted to so they
could engage, or they could not engage. It was up
(33:24):
to them, basically. In the second situation, what they found
was that those who were encouraged to talk to someone,
who were encouraged to sit with them to engage with them,
they reported much higher levels of connection, positive mood, and
they left feeling happier despite the fact that initially a
(33:46):
lot of them thought it was going to be a hassle.
A lot of them didn't actually want to engage with
this other person in front of them. They thought it
was going to make their mood worse. The opposite was
the case interacting with others even if it feels like
it's going to be Agitating often ends up making us
feel better. So if you want to feel more aligned,
it is time to start seeing your friends again. It
(34:08):
is time to start planning fun outings. It is time
to know your neighbors. And if you really want to
go one step further, if you have time, it's time
to start volunteering you really like. If you feel disconnected
to yourself, volunteering is a very easy way to get
back to that version of you who you respect and
who you enjoy. This might sound controversial, but thinking about
(34:32):
yourself all the time is probably making you like yourself
a lot less. It's this thing called the self absorption paradox.
Higher levels of self focus and self awareness can actually
increase levels of psychological distress. The more you try to
connect with yourself, the more you try to investigate your behavior,
(34:53):
the more you time you spend with your thoughts and
your thoughts alone, the less happy you're actually going to be.
This is a such suation that I found myself in
last year. I spent so much time being like, all right,
I'm just going to sit at home and I'm just
going to think about my situation and I'm just going
to examine my behavior, and if I think about it enough,
I will come up with a reasonable explanation that will
make this all go away. The moment that I decided
(35:16):
to just instead direct that attention that I was putting
on myself towards something and someone who needed me and
that was bigger than me, the better I felt for me.
That was volunteering with animals. I started fostering dogs. I
started doing rescue runs for local animal shelters, where you
basically fill your car full of dogs that dogs that
(35:39):
are from kill shelters and you drive them across state
lines or to other areas that aren't kill shelters. And
in those moments, I felt more like myself than I
had felt in a while, because the focus wasn't on me,
it was on someone who needed that attention more than
I definitely did. Doing something for it's so important and
(36:02):
it's so valuable, and I think as a society it's
something that we often neglect, especially when we are, you know,
told to be very individualistic and told to be very
self focused. But I know this is going to sound ironic.
For this final tip, I am actually going to redirect
the attention back onto ourselves once more. Despite that whole
speech about you know, doing more for others, I know
(36:24):
it's ironic, but I do think that this final tip
is equally important and bears mentioning. If you want to
feel more like yourself again, you need to set a
big goal for yourself that has nothing to do with
your professional identity, nothing to do with external validation, nothing
to do with getting ahead or anything like that. What
I mean to say is that it is important that
(36:46):
each of us has some kind of a goal. Yes,
we may have a broader goal that is very visible,
but it's also important that we have a private goal
that we want to accomplish, that we want to meaningfully
work towards silently, day in and day out. Setting a
deeply personal, non performative goal, one that is detached from
social or professional approval, can really restore a fragmented sense
(37:10):
of self because it engages you with your intrinsic self.
When we pursue something for the sheer joy of mastery
or expression, or the joy of the behavior. When we
do that, we re establish autonomy over our time, over
our identity, over our actions. This is a form of
autotelic behavior, which is basically a kind of behavior that
(37:33):
engages with the flow of the behavior for its own sake.
It's something that really nourishes our own internal compass. It's
something that really allows us to understand what we want,
what we care about, and it fosters something called self integration. Basically,
self integration means that day by day, our behaviors align
more with who we want to be, until we feel
(37:55):
like we are a more enlightened, higher version of ourselfs
I think also the ultimate goal of this is that
it builds trust in yourself as well. Often, when we
feel detached from who we are and we don't know
who we are, we don't trust ourselves to get back there,
and we don't trust ourselves in general. We don't think
(38:15):
that we are capable of achieving what we want to achieve.
We don't think we're capable of getting back to ourselves.
We don't trust that we can take care of this problem,
or any problem for that matter. But when you set
a goal and you work for it, just invisibly, just
in your own life, just for your own sake, you
silently say to yourself, hey, we are able to go
(38:36):
after things that we care about. We are able to
achieve things that we care about. You can trust yourself,
You can trust that you are going to be true
to your word. Here are some examples, because I know
sometimes they hard. To think of writing a novel that
no one knows, you're working on, training for a solo
hiking trip, growing like a balcony garden just from scratch,
(39:00):
just because you kind of want to. Creating art that
you're never going to post anywhere, you're never going to sell,
you're never going to put online is another amazing one.
These activities, you know, really connect us with ourselves and
they bring our idea of ourself, the one that we
have in our mind in line with how we're acting
and how we're behaving. I think we could all benefit
(39:22):
from a challenge as well. You know, when was the
last time you challenge yourself? This right here, this moment
where you're questioning a lot about who you are, is
a great opportunity. Again, what do you have to lose?
There's so much more that you can gain, and these
new experiences are just a really amazing way to kind
of find the path back to yourself, even if you
(39:44):
are kind of blind for the first part of the journey.
Just doing things putting yourself in spaces where there is
the opportunity for self discovery, even if you feel a
bit unsure, is really the only way to get through this.
So as we wrap up this episode, I just want
to say, yes, all these tips are important. I'm sure
that they will be helpful. I hope they will be helpful.
(40:05):
But just have some grace with yourself. There are a
lot of people in this with you. There are a
lot of people in this world who feel very similar
and don't know who they are because I think modern
society and modern culture has made it very hard to
spend time with ourselves and to spend time on our
wants and our needs and not our shoulds. I think
(40:28):
that's where this disconnect really comes from. We can't really
hear the internal voice that's within all of us that
is able to communicate with us and tell us what
we want, and we feel that emotionally, and we're feeling
that mentally and psychologically. So any kind of activity that
just takes you out of what you think is expected
from you, or takes you out of your routine or
(40:51):
a stagnant mindset and just into a new space of
novelty like that is particularly luminous and it's particularly incredible,
and I really do think it will help you out.
So I'm sending you a lot of love and a
lot of empathy. I know how difficult it can be
to not know who you are right now, but there
is definitely a way back. Send this episode to someone
else who you think might benefit from it. If you
(41:13):
yourself benefited from it, make sure that you are following
us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast, and leave the
podcast a five star review wherever you are listening, particularly
on Apple if you want to leave. If you are
listening on Apple and you want to leave a little review,
those really really benefit us and help the show grow
(41:33):
and reach new people, especially if you feel like there
was value in this episode or any others. Yeah, I
very kindly asked that you consider it. Also, my book
is still available and I will leave a link in
the description. Make sure you check that out as well.
But until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle
with yourself, and we will talk very very soon.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Y
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here
back for another episode as we of course break down
the Psychology of our twenties, I want to firstly, just
before we get into it, thank you all for the
(00:45):
love that you have been showing my book recently. If
you didn't know, I released a book earlier this year.
It's called Person in Progress, and in the last month
I have just been receiving some of the kindest reviews,
kindest comments, kindest messages from you all out of nowhere.
So I just wanted to give you a formal thank
(01:05):
you for just being so kind about this thing that
I put out into the world. If you are yet
to get your hands on a copy, the book is
basically well like the Ultimate and Extended Guide to the
Psychology of Your Twenties. So if you like the podcast,
I think I can make a fairly certain assumption that
you will like the book as well. I will leave
(01:27):
a link in the description, but again, you have all
of my gratitude. Thank you so much to you all.
So for today, I can't speak for you guys, but
recently I have been going through, I would say a
few periods of feeling very alien, very unlike myself. It's
been this strange experience where the best way I can
(01:51):
summarize it is that people will ask me, you know,
describe yourself, or they'll ask me what I'm interested in,
or oh, who I am beyond work or beyond my
immediate relationships, And I'm kind of in this situation of
grasping at straws at the moment, interests, values, hobbies like
I know I have them, but there's this strange wall
(02:14):
between between me and the things that make me me.
That means that I feel kind of strange and unoriginal
and a little bit bland and very detached from myself.
I remember this period right after my last boyfriend and
I broke up, where I felt very similar. You know,
that relationship rocked my confidence so much that for like
(02:37):
six months afterwards, I just felt like I was living
outside of my body in a way, and all the
things I knew to be true about the person I
was felt impossible to feel. I also had moved cities
at the time and was trying to make new friends,
and I just felt so detached from my spirit. I
couldn't hold a conversation, I couldn't really engage with people
on a deep level. It seems like this detachment is
(03:01):
the best word. This detachment from our sense of self
is a fairly common experience for a lot of us
in our twenties. I think. Actually it occurs in quite
a cyclical manner. We go through periods of feeling very confident,
feeling very alive, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, we
just don't feel like ourselves anymore. And it kind of
(03:21):
serves as a reminder of when we need to reconnect
with the deeper parts of ourselves, when we need to
re identify what we care about. But it's also kind
of a really scary and uncomfortable feeling. So today I
want to dissect and kind of break down that feeling.
I want to give you as well a bit of
a guide as to how we can feel like ourselves again,
(03:43):
or how we can perhaps connect with a newer version
of ourselves that's emerging when we are feeling kind of
like a stranger in our own life and a stranger
in our own body. We are also not just going
to talk about things that are run of the mill. Journaling, meditation,
spending time doing your hobbies are or fabulous, fabulous ways
(04:05):
to combat not feeling like yourself, but I feel like
we all kind of know them. I want to just
go a little bit deeper and a little bit broader
and give you some tips and advice that you probably
haven't heard before, some research that you probably haven't heard before,
so that this episode is as practical, informative, and as
original and as it can be, so that it is
(04:25):
as helpful as it can be as well. We're also
going to talk about why you may be experiencing this
at this chapter or point in your life, but also
why it's maybe not a bad thing to feel a
little bit lost within yourself sometimes. So, without further ado,
we have so much to cover, so let's get into
(04:45):
my guide to how to feel like yourself again. Before
we get into the seven plus strategies I have for
you today, let me just say the best thing you
can do before you implement any new habits, before you
try any thirty day recent, any seventy five hard program,
(05:08):
anything like that. Basically, before you add anything to your
already busy life. It's just to understand why this disconnect
may be occurring. There is no growth without self knowledge.
And the thing is, this feeling probably isn't an accident.
It is stemming from somewhere something in your life that
(05:30):
is creating dissatisfaction or disconnect. The most likely explanations are
as follows. Firstly, you may be feeling unlike yourself because
you've just become a little bit stuck. You are in
a period of stagnation where nothing feels new, nothing feels different.
Your days are the same, your routines are the same,
(05:51):
and as a result, your sense of self, your soul,
whatever you want to label it, this core part of
who you are is not being given the opportunity to expand.
The thing is, our sense of self is not a
static thing. It demands constant evolution from us, your sense
of self. And it's gonna sound so silly, like the
(06:14):
way I like to describe it. It's kind of like
a dolphin. It's kind of like a shark. You know,
the moment a dolphin or a shark stops swimming or
stop swimming forward. You might know this, but they die,
and it's kind of similar for your soul. The moment
your soul feels like it's not moving forward, it's not
experiencing new things, it's not being allowed to grow, it
(06:35):
also kind of experiences a similar kind of death. Psychologically,
we thrive when we have a sense of forward motion.
This is what the psychologist Abraham Maslow you might know him,
called self actualization. So maso, I don't want to say created, maso.
(06:58):
He founded, even the worst word to use. Basically, he's
most famous for his hierarchy of needs and this idea
that the very top need that we want to achieve
is a state of knowing ourselves in a state of
challenging ourselves. That is self actualization. But he was not
the first person to understand this or recognize this. In fact,
(07:19):
this core part of human psychology has been understood and
practiced by indigenous cultures long before Western psychologists gave it
a name. Particularly, Maslow really identified self actualization as a
core priority of this self when he was living with
members of the Blackfoot nation in Canada and in America
during the nineteen thirties, and he saw that this community
(07:43):
really kind of understood that if a human was to
thrive and was to flourish, they needed a sense of movement,
of purpose, They needed to be doing things. I think
it's really important to talk about where these concepts in
Western and modern psychology come from, way back when and
at their roots, because that is a part of history
(08:05):
that has often missed, and it's a part of history
that I actually didn't know when it comes to self
exialization and the hierarchy of needs until one of the
listeners told me, so very interesting that this idea of
forward movement is one that cultures and societies have had
longer than we as a modern society could put a
name to it. So back to what we're talking about.
(08:25):
If you have found yourself stuck in a routine doing
very monotonous things, finding that you've outgrown your environment without
realizing it, this may be contributing to a deeper detachment
from core parts of you. It could also be that
you've kind of been stuck in survival mode for longer
than you realize. You may be so focused on prioritizing
(08:48):
the bit busy and and urgent parts of your life,
that there hasn't been much room to slow down and
to observe and to learn. If this is the case,
you know now, do you feel disconnected? It's almost impossible
for your brain and your body and your mind to
pursue growth and expansion when your nervous system has been
(09:10):
hijacked by stress, by burnout, by anxiety, maybe even by trauma. Additionally,
you know, another very valid explanation is that you're just
straight up overwhelmed by the state of the world and
the state of the news and the tragedy of life
at the moment, and because of that that doesn't feel
like there's much worth in prioritizing yourself or your well
(09:33):
being when everything else is falling apart and millions of
other people are suffering. It's a very difficult line to cross.
You want to be empathetic, but I also beg you
not to fall into this trap. As awful as the
world feels, of not taking care of yourself. It's not
selfish to take care of yourself and to feel a
(09:53):
connection to the deeper parts of you. It's actually incredibly crucial.
Just as a little side note to mention that secondly,
our second explanation for why we may be feeling a
little bit lost from ourselves is that we're just bored.
Not only are we stuck, we're bored, and so therefore
we're not very interested in the world, and we're not
(10:15):
very interested in our own development. Now, this boredom and
this apathy can sometimes take years to take a hold,
and you don't really realize how just simply uninterested in
life you are until you have a moment, perhaps like
the one you're having right now, where you realize, like, Hey,
I don't even know what it means to feel like
(10:36):
myself anymore. I don't even know who I am. If
someone asked me, I wouldn't know how to answer. This also,
of course, has a bit of a clinical name. We
know it as depression. Feeling like you don't know yourself,
feeling uninterested in life, feeling unmotivated is a large sign
(10:57):
symptom criteria for a diagnosis with either a minor or
a major depressive episode. If that's the case, yes, you
will still get something out of this podcast, but you'll
probably get more out of seeing a therapist who can
really get to the core of your own individual issues.
(11:17):
So I would encourage you to see that out as well.
The final explanation has to do with you are not
living a life in line with your values, and that
is why you don't feel like yourself. This matters so
much more than we think our values. Although we probably
I don't know about you, I don't think about them
(11:38):
day to day, they are still there and they are
my compass. And if we throw out the compass, if
we ignore the compass, we're obviously going to get very,
very lost. If you really value creativity and curiosity and
yet you're doing something in your life that is very
(11:58):
systems based, or you're working a job that doesn't really
allow you to express yourself and you don't have an
outlet elsewhere, you're not going to feel like yourself, are you?
If you value the outdoors and you value adventure and
you know it's been a while since you've hit the road.
Same thing. How I explain this is like taking an
(12:21):
animal out of their natural habitat and expecting them to thrive,
taking a human away from their values and expecting them
to feel like themselves. It never works. And when you
take yourself out of environments or situations that reflect your values,
when you don't have opportunities to live your values. You
are not going to feel amazing psychologically or mentally, emotionally,
(12:46):
even physically. So these are the three major explanations for
this feeling. Regardless of which one you relate to more
maybe relate to all of them. The path back to
your self really involves a simple process of a remembering
what you care about, b remembering what you like about
(13:10):
yourself and what you like about being alive, and see
finding ways to practice that as much as you possibly
can so that the gap between you and your truest, purest,
higher self gets smaller and smaller. Let's talk about how
(13:30):
to do that exactly. I will say some of these
strategies may sound a little bit woo woo, a little
bit you know, enlightened, but I promise you they work.
I promise you there is science behind that. And also,
what do you have to lose? You know, if you're
feeling very lost, I don't think it can get worse
than that. And here's a hard truth. You know, if
(13:53):
you're at a point of wanting to change, well, that's
not just going to happen by thinking about it. To
try things that you haven't tried before, and you have
to try things that maybe you don't think that will
work and be surprised. So we're going to start with
this first exercise. If you want to feel like yourself again,
(14:14):
you have got to identify, even just loosely, what you
mean when you say yourself, who are you? What does
that look like? What does that feel like? What does
that version of you behave? Behave like? You have to
perform a bit of an identity reevaluation. There's actually heaps
of ways to do this. You're in luck and it's
(14:36):
not as hard as it sounds. But the best exercise
that I've found to do this is something that I
call the identity inventory, and it basically just asks you
to really just put a spotlight on yourself for a
second in a way that you're not used to, sit
down and ride out ten phrases, ten words that reflect
(14:57):
different parts of your identity. Do an These can be
formal roles, so you could say, of my ten words,
I am a teacher, I am a student, I am
a mother, whatever personal traits, I'm an optimist, i am
an introvert, passions, I love nature, I am a writer.
Or it could be relational roles. I am a friend,
(15:18):
I am a good daughter. Think of it as like
listing the different hats that you wear on your everyday life,
the parts of you that are going to show up
in different situations, in different relationships, and moves that all
kind of come together to create your sense of self.
Some of these things can also be aspirational things that
you haven't quite achieved yet but which you know will
(15:40):
be in your future, and that which you know you
really want to have happened and that you're working towards. So,
for example, I actually did my identity inventory the other
day when I was writing this episode, and my list
includes things like podcaster, It includes things like rider, extrovert, explore, EmPATH, sister.
(16:03):
And when I write these words down, yes, they might
just be words, but all together they create kind of
a unique a unique vision, a unique kind of I
don't know, a unique bored, a unique mood board I guess,
splattering of who I am that makes it easier to
live that truth. You know. For example, sometimes I feel
(16:25):
kind of distanced from the creative side of me, but
I know when I'm not doing something creative, I feel
less like myself, and so having that word on this
list forces me to basically acknowledge like, hey, if this
is how I see myself, I also have to actively
express this and I have to actively work on this
(16:46):
side of me. Your identity is not just made of words,
although there are words on this list. It's made of actions,
it's made of doing, It's made of behaviors. At your center,
how do you see your Who are you? What parts
of your identity feel valuable to you? What are you neglecting?
How can you act in a way that aligns the
(17:09):
part of you that feel important more towards yourself and
that distances you from the behaviors that perhaps aren't reflecting
this core inventory of pillars, or I guess, the core
foundation of how you see yourself. Secondly, as important as
it is to of course identify what areas you need
(17:30):
to love more or need to prioritize more, it's also
important to identify the things that you are doing just
because you feel like you have to do them. These
small choices chip away at our sense of self day
after day. If we're not careful, it is so easy
to say, Okay, well, I'll say yes to this thing
at work because no one else will, or I'll do
(17:53):
this kind of exercise because it's apparently good for me,
or you know, I'll hang out with this person even
though I really don't enjoy that company because I feel
a sense of loyalty and I should. I'll post on
LinkedIn or social media because that's what I should be doing.
Doing things purely out of obligation rather than out of
(18:13):
an actual sense of choice and a desire to do
them is a subtle form of self abandonment that over
time accumulates and means that you feel more and more
disconnected from that compass that should be at the center.
When we repeatedly act out of shoulds rather than genuine
desire or personal values, our sense of autonomy is very
(18:38):
quickly eroded. This disconnect between what we do and what
we want to do and who we are. I guess
it's what psychologists call inconcuruence. It's a mismatch between the
self we project and our true self. Kyle Rogers suggested
he's a very famous psychologist you probably heard me mentioning before.
(19:02):
He was the one who suggested that this incongruence is
what creates a great deal of psychological distress in the
modern day human There was a twenty sixteen study in
the general motivation and emotion, and it found that when
participants were given the opportunity to do something they wanted
to the way they wanted to do it, versus doing
(19:24):
something out of pressure or guilt. Of course, naturally they
reported being overall more happy at the end of the
experiment when they had the choice to guide their own
behavior versus those who were made to do something out
of obligation. It wasn't just that they were less satisfied
with their experience in the experiment. They were less satisfied
(19:46):
about their life in general. A lot of them gave
much more pessimistic outlooks about their life, the life that
existed beyond the lab having done that experiment. So those choices,
although they might feel quite I don't know, innocent, over time,
(20:07):
when you continuously do things that no longer serve you,
you do risk becoming a bit of a stranger to yourself.
I think it's also the right time to point out
another central point here. Sometimes getting back to yourself isn't
about adding more to your plate. It isn't about adding
more to your life, but thinking about what you can subtract.
(20:32):
Imagine how much time we would have for ourselves if
we were a bit more selfish and just said no more,
and we said yes only when we really wanted to.
It's a wild thought for some of us, especially if
you're a people pleaser, especially if you have a really
ingrained sense of obligation to family or to friends, especially
(20:52):
if you think that saying yes will make you more
successful and saying no, we'll make you a pill to
work with. But who benefits from you continuously saying yes
when you don't want to. Who is getting something out
of that? Because it's not you, it's someone else, it's
other people, it's society at large, whatever you want to
call it. But you are not being served by that decision.
(21:16):
My third tip for us today is more of a
daily exercise, and it's one that I personally do. I
have spoken about it on the podcast before. In your
journey back to yourself, it is so valuable to set
intentions for your day, every single day that relate to
what you want to get out of that next twenty
(21:36):
four hours. Let me explain the premise behind this. So
recently you may have seen a TikTok of a girl
who basically said that every day, the moment she wakes up,
she asks the universe, show me how good it can get,
show me how good it can be. And when she
does that, she reports almost every day. At the end
(21:56):
of the day, she reflects back and she's had like
the most amazing twenty four hours. The reason why is
that your thoughts about your situation and your life shape
how you view opportunities, how you view good days, how
you view bad days. They shape how you behave, which
in turn shapes your reality. We can do this same exercise,
(22:20):
this same thing to reconnect with ourselves by setting self
directed intentions, like today, I'm going to go only where
I feel I can find joy. Today, I'm going to
really listen to myself. Today, I'm going to say no
more than I say yes. Today, I'm going to let
the universe show me where I need to be. I
(22:44):
know I'm going to have a great day. I'm going
to be excited by life. Today is going to be excellent.
I'm going to feel amazing. Those are just some examples
of those affirmations or intentions that you can set. Psychologically.
This also taps into a concept called priming. This is
the idea that what we focus on, especially when our
(23:07):
mood is really malleable like at the start of the day,
that can shape how we interpret the world around us.
Two people can be experiencing the exact same situations, but
if one of them has an intention that they're going
to only engage with things that align with them, and
the other person doesn't have an intention like that, how
they finish the day is going to be very different.
(23:31):
So basically, setting a daily intention shifts your cognitive filters.
You don't see everything that sucks. You focus on the
areas where you can expand you focus on the areas
that you want to and the areas that make you
feel good and that make you feel more like yourself.
So the world does start to reflect what you want
(23:51):
to see. And because you're being more intentional, you also
get to be more in touch with what you actually want,
because that's the only way that you can actually express
or set an intention is if you have a desire
for a certain outcome in the first place, which as
a consequence means you have to feel you have to
have better communication and be better able to listen to
your internal desires. This is our starting point, and I
(24:17):
know all of these tips have been very I guess
like thought based, thought based exercises, thought based activities. Enough
of that, we're done. We're done with that. We're done
with the thinking component. We're gonna move on to the
doing component. We're going to move on to the fun
side of this episode. So if you want some practical
things that you can do right now, right at this moment,
(24:39):
in the next twenty four hours, in the next seven days,
that aren't gonna feel like a chore, stay with us.
We're going to talk about all of that and so
much more after this shortbreak. So there is this common saying,
perhaps you've heard of it, how you spend your days
(24:59):
is how you will spend your life. How you spend
your days will also determine how you feel about yourself.
Spend your days, I don't know, glued to your phone
or you know, your weekend's kind of doing the same thing.
You're going to feel very one dimensional because all you're
doing is passively consuming or passively kind of following a
(25:21):
routine that was laid out for you. If you spend
that same time making things, exploring, pursuing goals, looking up
at the world, I guess therefore, you as a part
of the world is going to feel more expansive and well,
I guess just rich rich in experience. It's not just
(25:43):
thinking exercises that are going to get you back to yourself.
Experiences are going to do the same for you as well.
Starting with your weekends, here is how I think a
typical weekend goes for many of us. You know, Saturday,
you sleep in, maybe you see a friend. Then maybe
you like go out drinking or like, you do something
(26:04):
in the evening. And then Sunday, you know, you're so
tired from the week before understandably and also maybe from
the night before that you don't really do anything. Maybe
you like do some chores. Then the Sunday scary is
hit and like that's it, it's Monday again. Typically, it
is the same stuff every weekend and then it's over.
No wonder we feel so disconnected because you have nothing
(26:27):
to actually connect to, nothing to look forward to in
your free time. So here is how you are going
to reprogram your weekend. Firstly, you are going to choose
one day of your weekend and it's going to be
a should free day. No, I should do my chores,
I should go to the gym, I should see this person,
(26:50):
none of that. This day is for you. You are
going to go where your feet want to go, where
your heart wants to go. You're only should for that
whole day is to get out of the house and
do something that you normally wouldn't. That's it, leave the house,
experience something other than your day to day. That is
your only should. The reason this is so important is
(27:13):
because new and novel experiences that we feel intrinsically motivated
to perform stimulate the brain's reward centers and promote a
sense of expansion, but also openness to new experiences. I
think as well, you just give yourself the space to
breathe and to be present in the moment that is
(27:33):
perhaps not available to you when you're working, when you're
stuck in like the monotony of the day to day.
When you actually have an open perspective and an open
mind towards your weekends and you want them to be
expansive days for you, you have more opportunities for happiness and
to feel joy and to feel like, hey, this is
(27:54):
a good life and this is a good feeling. And
when you feel that way, when you feel relaxed and
open to new experiences, that also signals your nervous system
that it's safe, all is calm. You relax for a second,
and that's when you can really here, like the call
of your true self better, when you're no longer in
survival mode, when you're no longer kind of crowded out
(28:15):
by urgency and busyness. Alongside this, I want you to
create a bucket list. And yes, we have talked about
this before, and you know why it's come up in
a few episodes is because it is so down important
as an adult to have things to look forward to
and to have ambitions that have absolutely no purpose other
(28:36):
than that they make you happy. You know, remember when
we were a kid and we would like make our
summer bucket list and it would be like have a sleepover,
like make s'mores, go to the amusement park, lemonade stand
like we need to bring those back as people in
our twenties and thirties and beyond, we need to bring
back adventure. Also, it means that when you have one
(28:57):
of those days of being like, ugh, I don't know
what to do. I don't like I feel bored, but
I want to do something instead of just like wasting
your time thinking about which fun thing to pick or
trying to search up and find or seek out inspiration.
Like you have your list, you have your bucket list.
You don't have to waste any time you go out
and you make new memories and in those moments, you
(29:20):
get to see yourself in different spaces, different environments, different situations,
learning kind of who you are on the job. I
guess one thing on my bucket list right now that
I think I'm going to do when I'm in Chicago
later this week is the twelve hour Walk challenge side
quest here. I recently read this book. It is called
(29:43):
actually very aptly, the twelve Hour Walk, and in it,
the author he is a professional endurance athlete. He talks
about this personal experiment that he thinks we should all do,
where when we are feeling disconnected from ourselves, when we
are feeling a bit lost, you need to commit to
walking for twelve hours straight, alone and in silence, with
(30:07):
nothing about your thoughts, through your city or through a
city wherever you are. And during this twelve hour period,
you can stop as much as you want, you can
take breaks, you can sit down. You could literally walk
for an hour and then like sit in a park
for the rest of the eleven hours. But you can't
be on your phone, you can't listen to music. You
(30:29):
have to just be with your thoughts. And obviously, yes,
you can sit for eleven hours. The idea is that
you don't typically do that. He wants you to keep
walking and keep moving forward, and he argues that this
is a really easy way to reset, I guess your
spirit because you have to face so many internal fears
and doubts and be alone with your thoughts and notice
(30:49):
more about the world that we are kind of unable
to do on our day to day and in our
day to day life. It's also just again an adventure.
So people are aparently like, finish this walk feeling like
an immense sense of purpose, an immense sense of direction.
It's apparently very profound. So I'm gonna try it and
(31:13):
I will report back. I think you should also try
it if you're feeling that that's an inspiring idea to you.
If you have any sense that that seems like something
fun that you should do, you should do it. Obviously,
the twelve hour walk is something that you have to
do alone, but there are probably a lot of things
on your bucket list that would be better with other people.
(31:34):
And yes, whilst spending time alone is vital for reconnecting
with yourself. If you feel disconnected, please don't allow that
to make you withdraw from your friends anymore or self isolate.
I get it. When we feel bored, when we feel
stuck in our lives, when our self esteem is deflated.
(31:55):
Sometimes the last thing you want to do is is
like have to can seal that actively from your friends.
The last thing you want to do is be social.
Social withdrawal is a very common coping mechanism when we're
dealing with a sense of identity disruption or when we're
not feeling like ourselves, often because it takes a lot
of effort to be socially present, but also because we
(32:18):
think more time alone automatically means more time to find ourselves,
it's actually quite the opposite. It often results in a
further exaggeration of depressive symptoms, a further exaggeration of loneliness,
a further exaggeration of dissatisfaction. It's this weird behavior that
(32:39):
does make us feel a little bit okay at the moment,
but actually often ends up worsening our situation. Whilst I'm
very aware that this urge can be very hard to fight,
especially if it's connected with a mental health disorder. When
you feel yourself slipping into this self isolation social withdrawal pattern,
I want you to remember the findings of this particular study.
(33:01):
The study is from twenty fourteen and it's titled Mistakenly
Seeking Solitude, and in it, these researchers looked at the
experiences of over a thousand individuals who, when they were
given the opportunity to engage with another person, were either
encouraged to lean into the situation or they were told
that they could do whatever they wanted to so they
could engage, or they could not engage. It was up
(33:24):
to them, basically. In the second situation, what they found
was that those who were encouraged to talk to someone,
who were encouraged to sit with them to engage with them,
they reported much higher levels of connection, positive mood, and
they left feeling happier despite the fact that initially a
(33:46):
lot of them thought it was going to be a hassle.
A lot of them didn't actually want to engage with
this other person in front of them. They thought it
was going to make their mood worse. The opposite was
the case interacting with others even if it feels like
it's going to be Agitating often ends up making us
feel better. So if you want to feel more aligned,
it is time to start seeing your friends again. It
(34:08):
is time to start planning fun outings. It is time
to know your neighbors. And if you really want to
go one step further, if you have time, it's time
to start volunteering you really like. If you feel disconnected
to yourself, volunteering is a very easy way to get
back to that version of you who you respect and
who you enjoy. This might sound controversial, but thinking about
(34:32):
yourself all the time is probably making you like yourself
a lot less. It's this thing called the self absorption paradox.
Higher levels of self focus and self awareness can actually
increase levels of psychological distress. The more you try to
connect with yourself, the more you try to investigate your behavior,
(34:53):
the more you time you spend with your thoughts and
your thoughts alone, the less happy you're actually going to be.
This is a such suation that I found myself in
last year. I spent so much time being like, all right,
I'm just going to sit at home and I'm just
going to think about my situation and I'm just going
to examine my behavior, and if I think about it enough,
I will come up with a reasonable explanation that will
make this all go away. The moment that I decided
(35:16):
to just instead direct that attention that I was putting
on myself towards something and someone who needed me and
that was bigger than me, the better I felt for me.
That was volunteering with animals. I started fostering dogs. I
started doing rescue runs for local animal shelters, where you
basically fill your car full of dogs that dogs that
(35:39):
are from kill shelters and you drive them across state
lines or to other areas that aren't kill shelters. And
in those moments, I felt more like myself than I
had felt in a while, because the focus wasn't on me,
it was on someone who needed that attention more than
I definitely did. Doing something for it's so important and
(36:02):
it's so valuable, and I think as a society it's
something that we often neglect, especially when we are, you know,
told to be very individualistic and told to be very
self focused. But I know this is going to sound ironic.
For this final tip, I am actually going to redirect
the attention back onto ourselves once more. Despite that whole
speech about you know, doing more for others, I know
(36:24):
it's ironic, but I do think that this final tip
is equally important and bears mentioning. If you want to
feel more like yourself again, you need to set a
big goal for yourself that has nothing to do with
your professional identity, nothing to do with external validation, nothing
to do with getting ahead or anything like that. What
I mean to say is that it is important that
(36:46):
each of us has some kind of a goal. Yes,
we may have a broader goal that is very visible,
but it's also important that we have a private goal
that we want to accomplish, that we want to meaningfully
work towards silently, day in and day out. Setting a
deeply personal, non performative goal, one that is detached from
social or professional approval, can really restore a fragmented sense
(37:10):
of self because it engages you with your intrinsic self.
When we pursue something for the sheer joy of mastery
or expression, or the joy of the behavior. When we
do that, we re establish autonomy over our time, over
our identity, over our actions. This is a form of
autotelic behavior, which is basically a kind of behavior that
(37:33):
engages with the flow of the behavior for its own sake.
It's something that really nourishes our own internal compass. It's
something that really allows us to understand what we want,
what we care about, and it fosters something called self integration. Basically,
self integration means that day by day, our behaviors align
more with who we want to be, until we feel
(37:55):
like we are a more enlightened, higher version of ourselfs
I think also the ultimate goal of this is that
it builds trust in yourself as well. Often, when we
feel detached from who we are and we don't know
who we are, we don't trust ourselves to get back there,
and we don't trust ourselves in general. We don't think
(38:15):
that we are capable of achieving what we want to achieve.
We don't think we're capable of getting back to ourselves.
We don't trust that we can take care of this problem,
or any problem for that matter. But when you set
a goal and you work for it, just invisibly, just
in your own life, just for your own sake, you
silently say to yourself, hey, we are able to go
(38:36):
after things that we care about. We are able to
achieve things that we care about. You can trust yourself,
You can trust that you are going to be true
to your word. Here are some examples, because I know
sometimes they hard. To think of writing a novel that
no one knows, you're working on, training for a solo
hiking trip, growing like a balcony garden just from scratch,
(39:00):
just because you kind of want to. Creating art that
you're never going to post anywhere, you're never going to sell,
you're never going to put online is another amazing one.
These activities, you know, really connect us with ourselves and
they bring our idea of ourself, the one that we
have in our mind in line with how we're acting
and how we're behaving. I think we could all benefit
(39:22):
from a challenge as well. You know, when was the
last time you challenge yourself? This right here, this moment
where you're questioning a lot about who you are, is
a great opportunity. Again, what do you have to lose?
There's so much more that you can gain, and these
new experiences are just a really amazing way to kind
of find the path back to yourself, even if you
(39:44):
are kind of blind for the first part of the journey.
Just doing things putting yourself in spaces where there is
the opportunity for self discovery, even if you feel a
bit unsure, is really the only way to get through this.
So as we wrap up this episode, I just want
to say, yes, all these tips are important. I'm sure
that they will be helpful. I hope they will be helpful.
(40:05):
But just have some grace with yourself. There are a
lot of people in this with you. There are a
lot of people in this world who feel very similar
and don't know who they are because I think modern
society and modern culture has made it very hard to
spend time with ourselves and to spend time on our
wants and our needs and not our shoulds. I think
(40:28):
that's where this disconnect really comes from. We can't really
hear the internal voice that's within all of us that
is able to communicate with us and tell us what
we want, and we feel that emotionally, and we're feeling
that mentally and psychologically. So any kind of activity that
just takes you out of what you think is expected
from you, or takes you out of your routine or
(40:51):
a stagnant mindset and just into a new space of
novelty like that is particularly luminous and it's particularly incredible,
and I really do think it will help you out.
So I'm sending you a lot of love and a
lot of empathy. I know how difficult it can be
to not know who you are right now, but there
is definitely a way back. Send this episode to someone
else who you think might benefit from it. If you
(41:13):
yourself benefited from it, make sure that you are following
us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast, and leave the
podcast a five star review wherever you are listening, particularly
on Apple if you want to leave. If you are
listening on Apple and you want to leave a little review,
those really really benefit us and help the show grow
(41:33):
and reach new people, especially if you feel like there
was value in this episode or any others. Yeah, I
very kindly asked that you consider it. Also, my book
is still available and I will leave a link in
the description. Make sure you check that out as well.
But until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle
with yourself, and we will talk very very soon.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Y
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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