Ayisha Qureshi

In my personal experience most of the emotional and mental trauma that we subject ourselves to arises from taking ourselves too seriously. Seriously!! I mean it.

Let me give you an example. You are sitting in a restaurant and ask the waiter to take your order. He is in the middle of an errand and gestures asking for a minute’s delay. How dare he?!!! Not only are you embarrassed in front of your family or friends or both but at another level your ego is bruised… a mere waiter asked you to wait. You fret and fume (internally, of course), comment on the poor service of the restaurant and when the waiter finally comes to take the order, you are crisp and blunt to the point of being rude.

Now consider the alternative scenario: you wave to the waiter, he gestures and you resume your conversation, making it a point to remind the same waiter a few minutes later or another one, whoever is available. While taking the order you sympathize about the workload. The waiter has been humanized and your ego slumbers on. You have a great evening. Excellent!!

Every time you take yourself too seriously, you are encouraging your ego, making it stronger, and feeding it- and remember whatever you feed grows. And so the ego grows… and similar incidents grow more frequent because you have started taking yourself more and more seriously. Your self-talk now is made mostly of phrases like ‘how dare he’, ‘because I said so’ and ‘they don’t know who they are messing with’, just to give a few examples.

Monitor yourself and the language that you use while talking to yourself. If it involves a lot of Me, Myself and I, be wary and STOP. Relax. Tell yourself to chill. Learn to first smile at yourself and then laugh. Open those ego driven knots in your psyche one at a time and see life embrace you. Learn to pick and choose your battles (if you must battle!) and DON’T make every battle a war. You will deplete your reserves of resilience, patience and pleasantness and will be left with a shell of bitterness, cynicism and sadness.

Spare yourself this pain. The time that you should take a stand will be clear when it comes (we will talk about it in another post). Rest of the times, relax and let go of small things- Keep the bigger picture in mind.