When something does not matter to you, you would eventually try to justify and tolerate the results. If we do not detest it and hate something enough, we tend to live with it and even attach lame reasons to various excuses for not doing what we are supposed to do in life.
When you are so addicted to the simple, easy, breezy, comfortable, trivial things in life, you would not magnify the negative after effects to feel the pain. So you will tolerate the bitter truth even though you are suffering. You justify and become comfortable with the meaningless suffering.
This also means that we bring in only those possibilities into our lives that we allow and tolerate. If we can accept and live with the fact that we are not doing enough with our health and fitness, we also create that self-limiting belief that “it is common to get into health problems every now and then and believe that it is just fine to suffer” – which we could have prevented in the first place.
When we are in health trouble, we try to throw blame on all possible factors except us. We justify our bad situation, we justify the excuses for not doing the right thing, we blame, we complain and we do not take any responsibility for the situation we are in. Most of us are not willing to participate in our own rescue.
We can stop making these mistakes and can make better choices only when we decide not to tolerate our weaknesses. You would get out of this rut only when you decide not to accept this laidback attitude anymore.
So it all boils down to what you are willing to allow in life , with accepting all uncomfortable facts which are not serving you right now. When we are courageous enough to say that I am unhealthy, I am unfit, I am not eating proper diet, I do not sleep well, I do not have discipline, when we accept the fact that unhealthy habits and instantly gratifying choices have long term ill effects – Then we start to take some action. Because now you hate it and no more willing allow it in your life.
Part of this tolerance comes from avoidance of pain and discomfort that we ought to experience in the process of self-development. What you allow in your life is exactly what you welcome in your life. Sometimes avoidance of pain and difficulty in future can be a great motivator to take tough yet fruitful decisions currently. For example, if you do not allow yourself to smoke , then there must be a strong reason you believe in. Your reasons behind this decision could be health related, family reputation related, care on your dependents, religion related. Here you believe that smoking will have bad repercussions on your wellbeing. Here you are avoiding the pain of health issues but not giving into the instant high you get from smoking.
Now relate it to eating unhealthy sugary or junk food. We allow ourselves to indulge in these kind of foods because we don’t care and tend to tolerate our bad choices. We try to enjoy the instant pleasure by ignoring the future pain. We tolerate it, allow it and hence it happens again and again. Our belief of the avoidance of the pain in future is not strong here because we are quite content with this behavior of ours.
For example, even though you know that you are not in good shape or fitness level, you may reason it with talking to yourself that you have no health issues and you are able to be functional in your daily life. Though in fact when asked by somebody, you would be open to accept that you do not exercise and you hope one day that you could work out and improve your fitness level. Here you are willing to tolerate the fact that you are quite fine with accepting yourself to be unfit . You can tolerate this because you do not value it to an extent of believing that it would have huge impact on your quality of life. You do not strongly believe the scientific fact that being physically fit will improve brain function. It is a proven scientifically in many researches that any kind of physical activities like aerobic exercises, strength training, yoga, martial arts will improve our physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.
Similarly following a healthy diet and having clean food as much as possible in ones daily life is necessary. If we don’t feel strongly about having nutritious food, it is very easy to brush aside the benefits. We can talk to somebody and try to explain that irregular eating habits, snacking processed and sugary food/drinks in between the meals will have a bad impact on our body. We can tolerate having unhealthy food despite being aware of the negative effects because we give importance to instant gratification instead of long term happiness and independence.
We tend to walk past these minor inconveniences in life and after a while we don’t feel the inconvenience and pain. We become numb to the pain and it becomes our normal experience. We do not feel this pain of compliancy and mediocrity as it becomes part of daily life, though it is very much there when we look within. We do not take note of telling signs of irritation, anxiety, low energy, laziness, disinterest and comfortably choose to put blame on some external factors for our internal state. But most of us do not acknowledge the numbing pain with in or willfully ignore it justifying that it is part of life and doing just fine.
For many of us when the pain of comfort becomes more than the pain of self-improvement, when we are in do or die situation, we tend to take action to make some changes in life. But think again, Do we need such extreme events to happen for us to do what is right and take right decisions that are tough yet in our best interests? Do we need a crisis to take care of ourselves?
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