This month the Secret Dentist discusses how to protect your sanity from daily pressure and the key to a happy life.
Is the glass half full or half empty?
Doom and gloom?
Exciting and positive?
We live in an age of information overload. Overloaded 24/7, 365 days of the year.
We all have good and bad influences, we all have peer influence, we all have family influence, we all have friend influence, we all have work influence.
Every individual has their very own personal choices of how to deal with all the above.
Protect your sanity
Personally, I’ve turned off Facebook. I don’t tweet and I don’t do Instagram or any social media. I removed Youtube from my phone just last week.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t know what is going on because all the standard news feeds keep me up to date. But it does mean I’m not overloaded and have time and space for other things and, just as importantly, to think my own thoughts.
My phone isn’t attached to my hand and looked at ad nauseam for 18 hours of the day – I can put it down in a restaurant and not look at it for the entirety of my meal.
I can pick it up first thing in the morning to check the time, but I don’t have to check it for anything else and I can ignore it until I am truly ready to look at it. I can put it down an hour before bedtime and not look at it again until the morning.
Your own personal long-term choices will fundamentally affect your health, wealth and sanity.
They key to a happy life
You are allowed to make mistakes and some wrong choices. We will all do it, possibly numerous times, throughout our lives.
It will be having the courage to accept you have made a wrong choice and change it which may be one of the keys to a successful and happy life.
One thing you should get right is making a fundamental decision over what drives you. Thus, if you do make a mistake or a poor choice you will have the ability to press pause and reset.
We are all human beings and thus are all allowed to make our own choices on what drives us, but I would plead with you to make a wise choice which has been considered and thought about for a period.
Write it down and put it to one side. Think about it and revisit it. Challenge it, change it, but eventually settle on it.
Do you want to live your own life or one driven by somebody else?
Catch up on the Secret Dentist’s previous columns
- Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?
- We are unique, you are unique
- The damaging NHS contract and ‘detached’ GDC
- A country in chaos
- The Queen’s legacy and an opportunity for reflection.
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