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Many ask me questions related to performance and focus. I know that many of you like myself have these specific periods where you feel drained, blocked and lost. Where your performance predominantly mental is low, and you feel overwhelmed, emotional, incomplete. You can’t explain this to yourself simply because you have no clue what could be causing this. What is strange is that you work out daily, you eat healthily and that you do all that is in your power to stay fit and healthy, so you find it hard to understand why you find yourself in this state. This state eventually starts effecting your performance and concentration on other fronts, and you worry that this will be more of a long-lasting situation than a temporary one.

The point is that you are looking in the wrong place for a solution. We point our fingers at physical issues, and we take so many precautions to take care of our bodies. To make sure we don’t get sick. When we do get sick, we take medicine to return to an optimal state (some might argue medicine makes things worse but entertain my frame of mind for now). Let me give you an example here, imagine you had a car, you wash it you take care of it but only service half of it. At one point in time, the vehicle will fail, and probably the reason for this will be the lack of maintenance. You will argue “I serviced half of it and always kept it clean and garaged” why has this happened to me. Point is you are still having issues with it and what you didn’t do rather than what you did is causing the problem.

Now shift back to the real scenario; this is precisely what we do with our body. We take care of our body; we eat healthy foods, we do physical exercise, we do our utmost to harden our immune so that we don’t get sick, but what about our mind? What about our emotional immune system? Isn’t our mind an integral part of what we are. A mentor of mine always used to state, “Inner world controls the outer world.”, he was right on so many fronts that I could write two books about this and still have material to write about.

In this society during this day and age, the emotional baggage we carry with us is enormous. It brings with it stress at levels never seen before. We daily hit by a dose of negativity from the news, daily life problems and other people’s luggage, and like a slow crawling disease it moves unnoticed under our defences, and when least we know it, it starts eating at us from the inside out.

You might ask, “What can we do about this, it’s what life has become today?” But there is a lot we can do about this. We are servicing only half of our car. It might seem shiny and clean on the outside, might work most of the time, but when it stops working, we are lost.

Boost Your emotional immune system:

Our emotions contribute to our internal energy. Our internal energy, when in sync with our physical energy, contributes to our well being. In our society, unfortunately, more and more people suffer from an imbalance of these energies. We focus a lot on the physical and leave our emotional being alone suffering in a corner. Long term imbalance of these energies means that our emotional (soul) energies weaken and that is when the emotional distress starts affecting our physical condition. The initial precursors to more severe problems are our brain and our focus. This is usually the first signal we get, but there are others. Feelings of weakness, apathy, debilitation soon follow. An inability to function at our usual level creeps in.

What can we do to fix this?

Here are some tips to help you start rebuilding your inner balance and your emotional immune system;

• Take some time for yourself in peace away from everyone.
• Try meditation (it is not easy at first, I must warn you) but with time it helps you centre yourself back to balance.
• “Think happy thoughts” as Peter Pan used to say and it’s indeed the most important truth in that book. Happy thoughts help you soar! Think about situations in your life. Times when you were sincerely happy, with your family, with your friends or on your own. Feelings of success and accomplishment. It did not matter when these situations happened in your life; your aim here is to bring back that emotional strength and apply it to your emotional state today, a patch up of sorts. Think about it as daily vitamin shots for your soul.
• Avoid negativity. If you have negative people in your life, avoid them as much as you can. If possible, sever ties, if not stay away from them.
• Surround yourself with a supportive peer group. Like-minded positive people strengthen your energy because this sort of energy is not the energy we keep for ourselves. Positivity as negativity is contagious so find more positive better people than yourself to hang around with.
• Embrace the bad but look for the good in every situation. It might seem hard, but training in this frame of mind brings a total shift in your attitude and with time, it brings peace. Imagine yourself going down a river with a small canoe, what is the easiest thing to do, change the direction of the river or change the course of the boat to flow down the river in balance with the water flow? (So stop trying to change the direction of the river)
• Live in the moment. Enjoy your present, let go of the past and don’t live in the future. Build as many positive memories as you can because positive memories build your soul up.
• Be grateful, find peace in gratitude. Gratitude brings with it joy and positivity. Be thankful to be alive. Be thankful for all the little things that bring joy to your life, no matter how miserable you might feel there are always things that make life worth living. Start looking for these things in everything you do and be grateful for it. The trick is to spend at least 5 minutes being grateful for a couple of things every single day.

Always remember, the Inner world controls the outer world, not the other way around.

The amount of effort you need to fix your emotional immune system will vary depending on yourself and how much you neglected your inner self. Still, with a little bit of patience, you will always manage to improve the situation. If you manage to get some of the above hints into your daily routine of habits, I can assure you that results will come. Not only will your inner balance be achieved, but you will also learn how to move to a state of flow which is the total opposite of what we discuss in this article.

I will discuss and describe states of flow more in detail in another article but if you want more information you might want to read The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler. You might also want to read my other article. Reach your full potential and become Super Human.

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