Carpe Diem: Unselfconsciousness

Today I read an article in a magazine called Psychology Today (yep, I'm officially a geek) about living in the moment. It articulated a lot of things I've been thinking about recently - about how lame it is to let life pass you by and the importance of learning to savor every moment.

I think we are all guilty of going about our daily lives by being physically present, but mentally in the past or future or somewhere in between. Then we look back and get frustrated that we let ourselves miss out on embracing that moment of life because our minds were elsewhere. This reflection on the past leads to missing out on even more of the present ...and the cycle continues on and on.

I'm sure you experience this issue at every stage of life, but I feel like it's especially prevelant among young adults and college students. The future holds so many uncertainties (should I change my major? when do I graduate? will I get married? what should I do after graduation? where will I work? where will I live? ...I could go on...), and there is a constant pressure to set goals and have a vision about where you want to be in a year or 5 years or 25 years.

It gets a little overwhelming, and it's not surprising that I spend most of my day trying to visualize what the future holds for me. I'm not saying that goals are bad - I'm just saying sometimes they distract me from simply enjoying the 'here and now', and instead cause me to constantly worry about the uncertainties of the future.

The same goes for dwelling in the past. I do ridiculous things all the time, and I spend ridiculous amounts of time analyzing them. I think it's a disease I have: overanalyzeiousis. I regret things like crazy and spend hundreds of hours trying to visualize how outcomes of situations would change had I said or done something differently.

At the beginning of this semester, I told myself that I would try to do better at savoring life and living in the 'here and now.' I still suck at it...but I'm trying.

So, in my oh-so-noble effort to quit dwelling in the past and worrying about the future, I thought I'd do a series of Carpe Diem posts and share some of my thoughts about the tips presented in the article on how to avoid letting life pass you by. If you would please just do me a favor and look past the fact that these posts are most likely a) super cheesy and b) super nerdy, that would be greatly appreciated.

Without any furture ado, here's tip #1:

Unselfconsciousness

Thinking too hard about what you're doing makes you do worse. Instead of being super self conscious in every situation (i.e. feeling like everyone is judging your dance skills - or lack thereof - at a dance), focus on things outside yourself and view yourself as part of what is happening around you.

Don't analyze what's going on in your mind - think more about what is going in your surroundings. Don't attach your immediate experience to your self esteem. Just go with the flow, and things like social rejection will be much less threatening. When you're not constantly analyzing yourself, you have fewer inhibitions and you're more free to express yourself without worrying about how others might judge you.

Because you aren't focusing on how dumb you must look or how terrible you think you are at something, you're setting yourself up to succeed. Your performance increases significantly when you stop thinking about it.