How to Reconnect with Yourself: Four Key Ways to Reconnect With Yourself
Are you interested in how to reconnect with yourself? Then this guide is for you.
When you’re disconnected, you tend to feel aimless and less energetic.
You become more vulnerable to depression and anxiety, and it’s hard for you to experience contentment.
You sense that something is missing in your life, a physical and mental vitality.
If you need to reconnect with yourself, the following are four helpful strategies.
1) Cut down on screen time
One of the most common ways people disconnect from themselves is by keeping their eyes glued to a screen. It can be their TV, their phone, or their computer. Sometimes, it’s two or three screens simultaneously.
If this sounds familiar, make sure you’re taking a break from your devices. One good way to do this is to give yourself at least an hour of screen-free time before you go to sleep.
Other times, you may just want to turn off your TV and do something else, like go for a walk, play with your dog, or work on an art project.
Reducing screen time is especially important if you’re regularly using your devices to avoid thinking about your life.
For instance, maybe you’re scrolling through Instagram for hours to procrastinate on a difficult assignment or to avoid confronting unpleasant emotions.
A heavy amount of screen time can leave you feeling numb and detached. As a short-term solution, it may help you feel better when you’re in pain. But it becomes damaging as a long-term form of avoidance.
Much of controlling screen time comes down to building habits. For example, you can remove Twitter from your phone and check it only once a day on your computer.
On different devices, you can activate software that gives you reminders to take a break or temporarily blocks you from accessing certain applications.
2) Don’t relentlessly compare yourself to other people
It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing yourself only in relation to other people.
Especially when you’re bombarded by visual media, it’s difficult to stop making comparisons about looks, relationships, talents, careers, and financial status.
When you’re overly focused on other people and how you measure up to them, you lose sight of yourself.
You want to be like other people so much that you overlook important qualities in yourself and neglect what you already have.
In many cases, you may not even truly want to be like someone else. Instead of listening to yourself, you’re feeling the pressure of other people’s expectations.
For example, let’s say your parents keep telling you that you should become a doctor. They keep comparing you to a sibling or friend who went to medical school.
In response, you feel ashamed and resentful and believe that you don’t measure up to some all-important standard of success.
But maybe being a doctor is something you never really wanted anyway. There are other ways to have a good life.
Instead of focusing on comparisons, consider how you’re spending your time and what you can do to improve your life.
Even small changes, like getting an extra hour of sleep or reading more every day, can significantly impact you.
Take time to nurture yourself, develop your skills, and find activities that are meaningful and enjoyable to you.
If you need to make comparisons, evaluate your own progress. For instance, if you’re taking an art class, compare your drawings from the first day of class to what you’ve created in your final week.
Don’t get bogged down in thinking about the many talented artists out in the world and how you’ll never measure up to them. Focus on what you’re accomplishing.
Also, remember that you can’t always know what’s going on in other people’s lives.
Someone who seems happy and successful may be struggling with serious problems behind closed doors.
Another point to consider is that everybody has a unique trajectory in life. You entered the world under certain circumstances and with your own set of qualities.
You can aim to build a good life with whatever you have, but it doesn’t help to pretend that you can live someone else’s life.
3) Go exploring
One of the best ways to connect with yourself is to connect with the world in a fresh way. You don’t need to hop on a plane and travel thousands of miles.
Exploration can be as simple as meandering around your backyard or going for a walk through your neighborhood. If a local museum looks interesting, you can include it in your explorations.
The key is to minimize distractions. As you’re exploring, don’t keep looking at your phone. Don’t listen to a podcast or try to drown out your thoughts with music. Try being alone with your thoughts.
Don’t feel pressured to produce brilliant insights or ideas. As you explore an area and absorb its details through all of your senses, your mind may remain mostly silent.
Or it may slip from one thought to another without forming a coherent picture.
Make it a point to pay attention to what you’re experiencing. Maybe you’ll notice the reflection of a tree in a puddle or the way a dog barks from behind a fence.
Maybe you’ll pick up a interesting stone, or focus on various scents, ranging from car exhaust to baked goods to mown grass. Take deep, steady breaths, and let yourself settle into your body and what it’s feeling.
Sometimes, you’ll be surprised by a thought. Maybe it will be an insight into a problem or an idea for making progress on a creative project.
Even when you’re attentive to specific things in the world, your brain is working on all kinds of issues in the background. The results can be revelatory.
4) Change the stories you tell about yourself
People often get stuck with certain narratives about themselves. As a child, they get labeled as lazy and selfish, nerdy and introverted, or dull and timid.
Or they become known as people who like certain things, such as playing soccer or performing science experiments.
Without realizing it, you may be living out narratives that you don’t need to apply to yourself. These stories make your life more narrow.
They block you from noticing various possibilities or opportunities and fill you with inertia that prevents change.
Take time to revisit assumptions you’ve made about yourself. An excellent way to do this is to keep a journal.
Daily entries about your life are the standard purpose for journals, but you can use them in other ways. Lists, project planning, and records of your dreams are all possibilities.
You can also pose questions to yourself and examine your beliefs.
You can still use guided writing exercises even if you don’t regularly keep a journal. Some may explore your fears or what makes you joyful or hopeful.
You may want to write letters to people who have hurt you and have changed your life for the better. You don’t have to send these letters.
Visual art is another way to revisit the stories you tell about yourself. People make collages, paint, draw, and sculpt to explore ideas about life.
Through art, you can figure out what inspires you and discover something new about your values and priorities.
You can also turn to meditation and prayer. Just let go of the expectation that you’ll instantly find a way to resolve problems in your life. Instead, you may enjoy a broader perspective, greater calm, and a new strength for facing challenges.
Whatever you do, don’t resign yourself to narratives about your life that portray you as ineffectual or worthless. Instead, you can tell stories about yourself characterized by compassion, perseverance, and strength.