Chapter 15 maintain balance

Self-discipline is hard and complicated work, and you need to have enough courage and judgment.You have made it your mission to pursue honesty, but you also need to retain some facts and truths.You have to accept responsibility, but also to refuse responsibility that should not be taken.In order to make life standardized, efficient, and pragmatic, we must learn to postpone satisfaction and take a long-term view.We must also try our best to live the current life well, and through appropriate efforts, we must make life more joyful than painful. In other words, self-discipline itself still requires special "constraints", which I call "maintaining balance", which is also the fourth principle of self-discipline.

Maintaining a balance means establishing a flexible restraint mechanism.Take anger as an example.We feel angry when we are violated psychologically or physically, or when someone or something makes us sad and disappointed.Getting angry is an essential way to fight back for normal survival.People who never get angry are destined to be bullied and suppressed all their lives until they are destroyed and eliminated.Necessary to be angry, can make us survive better.When we are violated, it is not necessarily because the aggressor is hostile to us.Sometimes, even if they really do it on purpose, we have to properly restrain our emotions, and confrontation will only make the situation worse.The high-level center of the brain—judgment must restrain the low-level center—emotion, and remind the latter to stay calm.In this complex and ever-changing world, in order to make life smooth, we must not only have the ability to be angry, but also have the ability to restrain the explosion even when we are angry.We also need to be good at expressing anger appropriately in different ways: sometimes we need to be tactful, sometimes we need to be direct; sometimes we need to be calm, and sometimes we might as well get angry.Express anger, but also pay attention to timing and occasion.We must establish a set of flexible emotional systems to improve our "emotional intelligence".It is not surprising that so many people do not learn how to get angry until they are young or middle-aged.There must be a large number of people who don't know how to be angry all their lives.

Many people, to varying degrees, lack a flexible emotional feedback system. Psychotherapy can help patients continue to practice and make the emotional feedback system more flexible.Often, the greater the patient's anxiety, guilt, and insecurities, the tougher the job, often starting from the ground up.I worked with a 30-year-old woman with schizophrenia.After treatment, she got one of the biggest revelations: Among all the men she associates with, some can never enter her house; some can enter her living room, but not her bedroom; some can enter her bedroom.The old feedback system where she had to let all men into her bedroom.When the system didn't seem to be working, she stopped letting any men into her home, and as a result, she could only live in pain and depression.She's constantly trying to find a balance between nasty promiscuity and extreme isolation, to no avail.It was the same female patient—she even needed several sessions to solve the problem of how to write a thank you letter.All the while, she felt obligated to write a long, carefully worded thank you note for every gift, or invitation, and to do it herself.Of course she couldn't bear such a burden, and in the end, she either didn't write a single thank you note, or declined all gifts and invitations.After the same treatment, she was surprised to find that for some gifts, she didn't need to write a thank you letter, and if she needed it, a short thank you letter would suffice.

Mental maturity requires a delicate balance of conflicting needs, goals, and responsibilities. This requires us to take advantage of opportunities and constantly adjust ourselves.The highest principle of maintaining balance is "giving up".I will never forget an important lesson I learned at the age of nine.That summer, I just learned to ride a bicycle, and I rode and played happily all day long.There is a steep slope near my house with a sharp turn on the way down.That morning, I rode my bicycle and rushed down the slope like flying. The feeling of flying like lightning brought me great pleasure.At that moment, if I use the automatic brake of the bicycle to slow down, this pleasure will definitely be greatly reduced. For my happiness, it is undoubtedly a self-punishment, so I plan like this: I will never slow down when I get to the next turn, and the result is like this As soon as I thought about it, tragedy happened--a few seconds later, I was thrown a few feet away.I lay sprawled in the bushes, with multiple wounds on my body, blood stains on my clothes, my brand new bicycle crashed into a tree, and the front wheel was deformed——I just lost my balance.

To give up something in life is bound to bring pain to the soul.At the age of nine, I was obsessed with driving fast, and I was unwilling to give up the momentary pleasure in exchange for balance when turning. In the end, I realized that losing balance is far more painful than giving up.I think no matter who it is, after a sharp turn in the journey of life, they must give up some happiness and a part of themselves.There is only one way to avoid giving up, and that is to stay in place forever and not let your feet set foot on the journey. Quite a few people don't choose to give up, they don't want to suffer the pain of giving up.True, giving up can be painful.The parts that need to be given up come in different sizes and shapes.So far, I've been talking about giving up on a small scale -- giving up speed, giving up getting angry, giving up writing speech-style thank-you notes, and such giving up doesn't cause too much pain.One can imagine the pain of giving up one's inherent personality, deeply ingrained behavior patterns or ideologies, or even the entire philosophy of life.If a person wants to make a difference and continue to move forward on the journey of life, sooner or later, he must experience a major moment of giving up.

One night not long ago, I wanted to spend some time with my ten-year-old daughter.For the last few weeks she had been asking me to play chess with her, so when I suggested a game of chess with her, she happily agreed.She is young, but she is good at chess, and our level is about the same.She had to go to school the next day, so when it was nine o'clock, she told me to speed up, because she was going to bed, and she had been in the habit of going to bed on time since she was a child. However, I think she needs to make some sacrifices. I said to her: "Why are you in such a hurry? Go to bed later, it's no big deal." Besides, aren't we having a good time?" We persisted for another quarter of an hour, and she became more and more uneasy.Finally, she said in a begging tone: "Please, Dad, you'd better play quickly." I said: "No, playing chess is a serious matter. If you want to play chess well, you can't be too anxious. If you don't want to play chess well, then Let's stop now!" She pouted sadly.We played for another ten minutes when she burst into tears, said she was willing to throw in the towel, and ran upstairs.

At that moment, I remembered the situation when I was nine years old and fell in the bushes with scars all over my body.I made another mistake - forgetting to slow down when turning downhill.I originally wanted to make my daughter happy, but after an hour and a half, she was so angry and anxious that she even burst into tears and didn't want to talk to me for several days.Where the problem was, the answer was obvious, but I refused to face it.Two hours after my daughter left, I paced the room in frustration and finally admitted the fact that my desire to win every chess game was so strong that it overwhelmed my desire to make her happy and turned weekend nights into a nightmare. It's a mess.Why am I off balance again?Why do I have such a strong desire to win and always keep my fighting spirit high?I realized that sometimes the desire to win has to be given up.This is obviously against my nature, I am eager to be a winner, this mentality has won me many, many.I also only aim to win in chess.Not only that, but I want to give my best in everything I do, so that I can feel at ease.I have to change this mentality!Being too competitive will only alienate the child from me.If I can't adjust in time, my daughter will still shed tears and develop resentment towards me, and my mood will get worse and worse.

I made a change, and the frustration and annoyance disappeared.I gave up the desire to win at chess.In terms of playing chess, the old me is gone and dead—that guy must die!I ended his life with my own hands, and my weapon is the desire to be a good father.The desire to win helped me a lot as a child and adolescence, but now as a father, that desire has even become a barrier to my progress and I have to get rid of it.Times changed, and I had to make adjustments to my old self.I thought I'd be haunted by my past self, but that's not the case at all.