10 ways Most People kill their spirits and don't realize it

1. Giving up
2. Negative thinking
3. Being Irresponsible
4. stagnating
5. trapping yourself in a job you hate
6. being a dreamer but not a dream chaser
7. refusing change
8. Not educating yourself every day
9. Letting others dictate who you are
10. not taking personal responsibility for your life

Did you like the catchy title of this hub? I have to assume you clicked in for one of two reasons. You were curious just what I meant by that or you wanted to find new ways to off yourself. I'm guessing most of you wanted the first.

The irony is that most of us kill ourselves every day by breaking all life's rules. Let's start with the first thing on the list.

When people think of killing themselves or think of others killing themselves they think first about "giving up". Why is this the first thing associated with suicide and yet when people give up all day on their dreams, their aspirations, and even leaving a job they absolutely hate that they know is killing them slowly do they not associate this with a slow painful death?

Truth is alot of people die because they never really lived. They live a long life but most of the time they felt the pain of life and never really tried to dive into the glory and energy that life's potential offers us. Giving up is the easy way out. Anyone can give up, but why do people choose this option when theirs a better bigger and more lucrative option, with an equal amount of pain inflicted that gives them access to the life energy they desire?

To tackle your dreams all you have to do is try, be brave.. Bravery is being afraid, not seeing how something is possible, and still going for it anyway. I think most people will find that it's actually harder to give up then it is to try, to tackle their dreams, to just go for it. When you give up you find yourself without ambition, without stimulation, you settle and end up stagnating, and what's more painful than that?

Were like these amazing lamps and all we have to do is plug ourselves into the electricity, but alot of people are afraid to do it. I'd personally rather try and fail than not try and have no idea what could have been. At least when you try and fail you have the story of your failure to share with others. Depending on how hard you tried and how miserably you failed the story could be pretty funny.

What is more destructive, and simple to accomplish than negative thinking? When we don't get our way. When we go job hunting all day and nobody hires us. When we end up hating our job. When the world doesn't acknowledge us for our contribution..

The list could go on but the truth is negative thinking is the most destructive thing in existence. It can take down entire economies, turn groups of people against one another, and its the biggest killer of dreams, ambitions, and success.

The irony is that its an indulgence that is like a virus. It just takes indulging in one teeny tiny negative thought to breed a crop of bad filters, and like a negative snowball effect you start to lose ground.

Did you know negative thinking is actually felt physically as your brain releases chemicals into your body with every thought? Every single thought in your head triggers a corresponding chemical cocktail formulation that's dumped into your body. If the same cocktail is released over and over again the body actually becomes so addicted to it that your mind builds filters for no other reason than to facilitate your environment to reflect things that cause you to trigger those same thoughts again and again so your body gets its "fix".

I think of this as a water fall that changes colors. Every thought formulation and perceptions of those thoughts meanings are the colors and what we do is to manage our world and feelings we choose thought forms, thought patterns and often actually, fall into thought patterns and these cocktails are formulated and released. The body reflects these chemical baths through emotions and energy levels, feelings and so on.

You ever sit somewhere bored out of your scull and someone you haven't seen in years shows up to surprise you and all of a sudden you're the happiest person on earth? This is the power of thoughts and those physical chemicals released. They release incredibly fast on the freeway of your blood stream too, almost instantaneously.

A sharp shift in thinking causes sharp shifts in moods and emotions. Fear is another good example.. Your walking along a dark road, or walking through a park at night alone and hear a sound and jump.. Or your totally focused on something and someone surprises you.. BAM chemicals release. What about when your driving your car and hit that hill at 70 and feel the freefall feeling.. Although that is physically triggered it stimulates your mind as your brain interprets the feelings.

It's as easy as BELIEVING something to change the feelings your having, the emotions your in and so forth.

Positive thoughts have more euphoric cocktails and yes you also get addicted to those. So why would you choose to indulge in these destructive thoughts when you could be thinking such happy ones?

Many choose to blame things in their life, environment and everything but themselves and this is the culprit to their problems. NOT the environment, or anything else but how they choose to take responsibility (or lack there of).

Did you know that to even get mad at someone you have to give them permission to upset you? It doesn't matter what they do, what they say, how they say it, even if they irritate you all day. It is your final say how you react to them. It is your choice to be in the environment where they can affect you sure, but I'm talking about if you allow them to "get to you" then you are not prepared to control your own mind and thoughts.

The logic here is that most people indulge in their first reaction to someone not realizing that its how they see what they say that causes how they feel about it. Most people think well they were irritating me all day and that makes it their fault. The truth is sure its their fault for their part but its your fault for indulging in the negative reaction you got at some point, instead of just defusing the emotion when it came.

When you start to feel bad about anything you just have to turn it around, never allow yourself to feel the bad feelings. You can do this by holding a positive thought in your head for 17 seconds then the positive thought will change how the neurons in your head react to associated thoughts (which in the end are electronic signals in your brain to put it simply).

This is not an excuse you can use either. If you learn discipline over your own thoughts you can control your rage, emotions, feelings everything involved in your irritation.

Thoughts carry the power to control the mind, control your thoughts and perceptions, how you build your filters and you control your world. This was a hard one for me to learn, and this is always a continuing journey but tolerance is the very concept here that results from this exercise. When you can get to the point where you don't react to others in any way unless you choose to then you will have learned strength.

The Videos following, will break this down for you very visually in a very entertaining and enlightening way so you will realize how your thoughts work and cause these reactions

The following videos are from the powerful film "What the bleep do we know" the whole movie is phenomenal, but these clips in particular (20 minutes total) will really give you insight into everything I just said above about thinking and how thoughts cause chemicals to release into the blood stream controlling how you feel. Remember any thought is your choice to indulge in, once you indulge you make a choice to accept the consequences of that thought. You can feel a thought's powerful negative feelings and stop yourself from allowing it the second time (the they've been irritating me all dayitis).

The first time you usually will let it go, then you start to indulge in irritation, this starts a chain of chemical releases (the same ones) that cause you to escalate and feel more and more angry. This is a result of not one negative thought but many in a row. If you check yourself (when they irritate you don't indulge in thinking about how wrong they are or how they are being mean, change your thought stream to something more compassionate like, they must be having a bad day, its not personally directed towards me, its about something else (and most often it is!).

Negative thinking leads to irresponsible lifestyles, lack of ambition and giving up. Alot of people want to be responsible but get into a negative stream of thinking and build what I call reaction triggers/filters. They do more reacting than acting. More acting than pro-action. You have to own your thoughts, your reactions and take responsibility first for every thing that happens to you. Responsibility is not just an outward thing whereby you take responsibility for what you do or how things happen to others directly relating to you.

Responsibility is first and foremost about how you own your life; how you realize that everything you feel, experience and do is based on how much responsibility for your own actions and thoughts you have. If you constantly blame others for your problems (regardless of whose fault it is it is always you're for allowing yourself to indulge in negative emotions which start from negative thoughts) then you'll never be free. True freedom begins when you realize that your at the helm of every emotion, thought, and reaction you have/make/do.

When you take personal responsibility you realize at some point that nothing is outside your grasp. If you hurt someone else because they perceived how you did something was wrong even if it wasn't intended to be wrong, it doesn't matter. Taking responsibility defuses their anger at you, and begins a compromise for them admitting their part.

Check this hub out to get more on tolerance of mean people:

The art of tolerance

You also have to be responsible in your dealings with others. Don't cheat people, when someone trusts you don't betray it.

This hub will give you the complete break down of how the emotional bank account works:

Decoding the emotional Bank account

It goes into personal responsibility and how it affects others. I don't think I could put it here better than I did there so check it out, you'll be glad you did!

One of the worse least productive things you can do is allow yourself to get too comfortable and stagnate. You have to remember that change is the only real Constance, and you have to always practice changing things so you are not hit by surprises. When you stagnate (because you're way too comfortable in a routine or network of routines) change is painful, it will happen and it will be your constant thorn in your side.

When you get too comfortable in your job changing to something your worthy of becomes the hardest thing you have to do. Your security becomes rooted in a job you hate and it feels more scary to go looking for a new job than to keep dealing with the bs of your workplace.

Change is not something that's hard to grasp even if you're stagnating. You can do little things then build up to bigger ones. For example you can do the following:

• Take a different route to and from work or anywhere you go when you leave home or anywhere else. Change ways you go. You learn more about where you are and alternate routes in traffic this way and you constantly do something different. If you take the same routes to work and other places you go every day, you become too comfortable in that route and won't take another route as your afraid of being wrong and getting lost and being late.
• You can stimulate the mind by changing every day what time your alarm goes off, I set my clocks ahead 30 minutes, then I change it once a week to an hour ahead, then 20 minutes ahead and so on. This is enough time to get used to the new time but when you change it your confused as to how ahead the clock really is, this makes you think when you wake up.
• Constantly change things you do, do them slightly different, just to get used to change. You'll find when something comes from left field you wont be so unprepared to handle the change!
• When people label you as "Unpredictable" you know your strong, being predictable is not a good thing, it gives others too much power over you and shows you that you are trapped in routines. When your unpredictable people don't know how to trick you! If they see you changing all the time (no static routines of behavior etc..) they respect you and wonder how you do it.

We pretty much covered the allowing yourself to be stuck in a dead end job, but essentially if a job doesn't give you room for growth, and it's affecting your entire life, pay isn't worth your time (meaning your barely scraping by), then you need to seek a new place to work. Many as I stated above allow themselves to become trapped in a job based on fear of losing security.

That security doesn't really exist, you could be fired any day, and the more your bosses realize you're scared to better yourself the more they will instill fear in you and keep you there. You can avoid this by keeping change a constant part of your routines, as I stated above.

The next way people kill themselves is by dreaming but not acting. Dreams are only as good as your ability to act on them. You break them down into manageable goals then taking baby steps you will get them. If not you will often find a new dream in the same path that will capture your heart!

It goes back to the saying how do you eat an elephant? Once bite at a time.

Dream big then try to accomplish it, you will always get at least half of the dream, so dream twice as big as you want.. You may be amazed at how much you can accomplish just by taking the first step! You will miss all the shots you don't take. Don't be afraid of failure, true failure is not trying.

Don't invest in rigid outcomes. Don't start a get rich quick scheme to get rich quick, start it to learn something new, do something different and possibly get rich. Don't meet someone wanting to fall in love, just let that happen, outcomes are responsible for most people killing their spirits. Make goals but don't create outcomes. With no outcome your just doing something and however it turns out it turns out.

A goal is a liquid outcome; it's an outcome that you realize could go many ways, some you haven't even thought of. If you expect a certain goal specifically, painted a certain way you will be disappointed if it doesn't turn out exactly that way (EVEN if you learned alot, gained alot or were highly successful none the less) because your mind tends to see failure where the ridged goals aren't met!

I practice making several goals for the same thing, then I go for one and if it doesn't pan out I go for another. I like to live in the moment and enjoy the currency of experience. If I start a business and my goal is to make money I always see more than money, I think money would be nice but if that doesn't happen I know I'll learn alot of things on the path. Success is a journey not a destination. Chasing wealth can be very rewarding if you don't base your success solely on the money. Keep that aspect liquid, you may or may not make it but your going to have alot of fun trying to make it.

Often on your path you'll meet new people and new ideas and goals will be made, although wealth was the liquid goal success was the major goal and success happens in real time not at some point, but the whole trip! be flexible in your goals, always make new goals to compliment the current ones, if something seems unattainable just make a bunch of smaller goals to reach it, realizing if you don't reach it you will most likely find another value to enjoy and your goal setting skills will meet with success regardless of how it turns out.

True wealth is happiness, the money is rarely the real reason you want it, usually its so you can buy security, happiness, freedom, so if you accomplish all those things on the way to it realize if you don't get the money you may still accomplish the real wealth goal for example.

The world is evolving at an alarming rate. Learning new things every day not only keeps the mind working at high efficiency, it is exciting to learn. If your not learning new things every day your going to stagnate and become powerless everntually. You will fall behind and your mind will become lazy. Learning is ambition, ambition leads to action action leads to dream manifestation.

The easiest way to learn change is to continue to learn new things. Just pick things your interrested in and Google them. I go to a site called www.howstuffworks.com and every day they have a new entry (and thousands of them already there!).

you could spend all day on that site every day and learn amazing things about things you never knew. How soap works, how black lights make things glow, why conditioner is different from shampoo and why soap works well on skin but not in your hair. Learning keeps the mind active and change is a result as well.. its killing several birds with one stone so to speak. When you don't try to learn all the time your mind becomes lazy and you stagnate because learning feels like work.. as you learn you get motivated to think more about things and solutions to problems become simple.

If theirs one thing that's real it's that you are unlike anyone else. Although people seem to dress alike we all have different perceptions of how we look and how others look. What one person may like another may not. Never pretend to be something your not, that's the fastest way to suffocate yourself. If you find yourself over occupied with how others think of you, I suggest reading a bunch of my hubs on things like tolerance and other emotions I've decoded.

Dr. Phil wrote two amazing books: Self Matters and Life strategies. I was once lost then found those books and to this day read them if I find myself falling off my path of being my authentic self. Self matters really hits home showing you through examples of human psychology how we give away our power and suffocate ourselves, life strategies is like the 10 life laws or commandments that if you break these life spins out of control. It's an amazing read. They come on CD too and I suggest you take a look.. It will change your life.

I didn't dive too deeply into these topics as I've covered them in much more detail in other hubs (I used catchy titles to help you find them) if you want to read more you can find them in my other hubs.