8 Signs You’re Not Unhappy – You’ve Just Outgrown Your Current Life
People do not change until not changing is the least comfortable option. Yet, the space between “realizing something isn’t right” and “taking action to fix it” can be decades and lifetimes long. Luckily, we don’t have to suffer forever and wait for things to get so bad, our survival instincts give us the energy to plow through. Here, a few signs you’re not actually unhappy, you’re just waiting for the life you’ve outgrown to get uncomfortable enough before you change it.
1. When you hangout with friends, you always end up talking about gossip or something negative, only because that’s what you bond over. Your time spent with others breeds pettiness and negativity, only because you aren’t genuinely connected enough to share anything more than that.
2. You get lost in thought, and find yourself binge thinking to the point of creating problems just to have something to deal with. When this happens, it’s just a product of being bored with your life, or not having something to entertain your mind with. (When the brain isn’t positively stimulated, it reverts to what it knows: fear and survival).
3. You’re becoming increasingly jealous of other people’s successes, even if you have no desire to achieve what they do. When this happens, it’s not because we want what someone else has, it’s because we know we aren’t working hard enough toward what we want for ourselves.
4. You know what needs to change, you just don’t want to do it yourself. When this happens, it’s because we aren’t yet to the point of being so uncomfortable that we have no choice but to change. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) when you recognize what needs to shift, you will get to that point eventually (so better to take action now).
5. You are self-sabotaging by neglecting your responsibilities. Despite believing that they are important, you just don’t do them, or don’t do them on time. This is what happens when we don’t have a real desire to sustain the life we’re living – it’s a form of subconscious self-sabotage that pushes us to rebuild something new. (Luckily, we can do that rebuilding without the sabotage…)
6. You anxiety-scroll. You are at the peak of your social media addiction. You check random people’s pages with fervor, you feel as though if you were to neglect doing so at any point in time, you’d actually end up missing something extremely important, and you don’t want to be “surprised” by it. You think that this keeps you “safe” in a strange, delusional way. You enjoy posting photos of something more than you enjoy doing it. Validation of your online persona is beginning to supplement the lack validation you feel for who you actually are.
7. Your fear-thoughts motivate you. Imagining the worst possible outcome scares you into performing better, or getting more work done. When this is the case, it is almost always because you are doing something you should not be doing – or something you don’t actually want to be doing in the first place.
8. Your daily routine consists of things that satisfy your immediate desires, not your long-term goals. When you live jumping from whim-to-whim, it’s because you don’t have any bigger-picture goals to aspire to. You’re essentially just circling around yourself each day by constantly giving into what you want in the moment as opposed to what would be best for you in the long-term. You aren’t moving forward. 