Check out these 10 ways to tell if it’s time to wake up.
I went off the rails for a few years, as a teenager: partying too much, drinking too much. I have biker blood running through my veins, after all.
But then, between the ages of 17 and 20, I lost three of the most important men in my life. That changed everything.
My grandfather died when he was just 54 years old, and I was 17. As a child, I spent summers on his farm in West Virginia. During the day, I worked with him on the farm, and at night he told me the most beautiful stories as I fell asleep. There was an innocence and timelessness to the days I spent with him. As the only man who was ever really a loving, nurturing father figure to me, losing him was like losing a father.
Soon after my grandfather’s death, my older brother Christopher died of a brain tumor. Just a year older than me and my half-brother on my father’s side, when I visited my father Christopher often spent the weekend, too. It was the first time I lost somebody my own age.
Christopher’s death destroyed my father. He became homeless and lost in addiction, calling me if he needed money or, sometimes, a ride somewhere. The last time I saw my father, he asked me to pick him up from the hospital. He’d crashed his motorcycle into a brick wall on a bet and asked if I could take him to check out a rehab center.
I had other plans that day and so, mad at my dad for making me late, the moment he stepped out of the car at the rehab center I rolled down the window, threw out his bag, and took off.
That was the last time I saw him.
A month later he died of a drug overdose, on what would have been my brother’s twenty-first birthday. He was 43 years old.
That was it: I stopped partying, stopped using drugs, even stopped smoking, certain it was all going to kill me. I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t what other people did with their time, or how they coped with their lives, but I knew I needed a new plan.
I needed to get real with myself.
How do we get real with ourselves? It starts by waking up—by looking at the things we do and understanding why we do them.
Here are 10 ways to tell if it’s time for YOU to wake up:
- Your efforts (of time, energy, resources, etc.) constantly exceed your returns.
If this sounds familiar, you probably don’t have a clear vision for your life. Plan your life like you’d plan your dream vacation. If you do not have a clear sense of who you are and a vision for where you want to go, you’re like a hamster on a wheel: Using up all your energy to go nowhere.
- You spend all your time working, yet none of it on your health.
If your life feels unbalanced, filled with unhealthy patterns, and stifled by the weight of your suffering, chances are you not spending nearly enough time (or any time at all!) on your health and well-being. Rather than going through the motions of work and life like a cog in a wheel, take a holistic, wellness-centered approach to your life—physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually, and financially.
- You’re winging it, rather than living in an intentional way that promotes your health and well-being.
In my own mindfulness practice, I sit for twenty minutes, twice a day. That is my system. I have a set intention, and that intention keeps me vibrant, healthy, and well. Everyone needs a system that is unique to them. If you don’t have a system, you’re living your life in a state of reactivity instead of proactivity—and that state is a mindless one.
- You resist being held accountable.
Statistics show that most people find changing a health behavior more difficult than changing their religion. You’re going to need some accountability—and, ideally, someone to hold you to it. As human beings, we love to talk ourselves into and out of anything, but when the going gets tough, the tough get accountable.
- You resist holding yourself and others accountable.
Sometimes, the only thing harder than being held accountable is holding others accountable—and that includes yourself. But if the point of mindfulness is to get you out of your lower-level consciousness, where problems live, and move you into a higher level of consciousness, where freedom lives, you’ve got to hold yourself and those around you accountable to the solutions that will improve your health and change your life.
- You want to change your health, but you’re not willing to change your habits.
Newsflash: to change your health, you must change yourself. It doesn’t get more straightforward than that. Your health, generally speaking, is a direct consequence of your choices. Your health will not change until you do.
- You’re stuck in a mindset of shame, blame, and powerlessness.
Listen up: A victim mindset doesn’t serve you. It is up to you to take the events of your life and the quality of your health, be they whatever they are, and transform them into something powerful and liberating. Nobody can do that for you—you have got to do it for yourself. If you want to see a change in your life, begin by looking deep within yourself and start making change there: Inside.
- You ‘go with the flow’ instead of responding with intention.
Hey, sometimes we all have to just go with the flow. There’s beauty and joy in surrendering to what is. But the habit of just doing whatever comes up won’t cut it if you want to build a successful health behavior. Surrendering doesn’t mean you give up and going with the flow doesn’t mean you get to phone in. What ‘surrender’ really means is that you become radically present to your life: You accept what is, as it is, in this very moment, so you can respond with intention rather than react with emotion.
- You overwork as an excuse to avoid dealing with what you don’t want to see about yourself.
This one is a classic. The stuff that keeps you busy, distracted, and feeling competent—overworking, over-exercising, even over-cleaning—is the very same stuff that keeps you from seeing what you don’t want to see about yourself. We’ve all cleaned out the refrigerator instead of making that uncomfortable phone call or booking that appointment with the doctor. It’s human nature. We do the things we’re good at in order to feel good about ourselves, rather than leaning into the suffering that will make us feel free.
- You don’t believe you can actually change your life.
This one is all ego. This insecurity hides in all the parts of ourselves where we safe harbor our wounds. But this very need is a limiting belief—the ultimate limiting belief, in fact. And limiting beliefs hold you back.
The truth is that most of us are creating and co-creating the very things we don’t want in our lives, every single day. But, if we can create and co-create the things we don’t want, that means we are just as powerful to manifest the things we DO want. This should be no surprise by now, but that starts by shutting up and sitting.
To learn more about the Shut Up & Sit movement, and to dive even deeper into these ten ways to tell if its time to wake up—and so much more—check out my book, Shut Up and Sit: Finding Silence and All the Life-Changing Magic that Comes with It.
