Quantity or Quality?

Most of us don’t take enough time to sort out what people, activities, and engagements actually enhance our lives and which either just occupy space or actually detract from our “quality of life.” We tend to equate busy with productive and occupied with positive.

But is that actually the case?

If you have spent years drinking with the same “friends” as your social and recreational outlet, has that really enhanced your life? Or has it just filled time, albeit enjoyably in many cases, while allowing you to avoid actual engagement in life?

Bored? Lonely? Discontent?

The problem with being smart, capable, and sensitive is that we find life unsatisfactory when we aren’t using our brains, skills, and perceptions in some meaningful manner. Merely going through the “same old, same old” time killing routines gets boring pretty fast.

So does anesthetizing our abilities with alcohol. That works upon occasion, but the next day you still wake up with the same “vast reservoirs of untapped potential.”

We drink for a lot of different reasons but the usual suspects are a lack of engagement in our lives, unbalanced personal relationships, and an unwillingness to say no to people and activities we really don’t want to be involved with or in.

Most of us are “people pleasers,” wishing to be “nice,” and easily taken advantage of until we have exceeded our carrying capacity and lost track of our own needs, wishes, priorities, and goals. We keep putting ourselves second, third, fourth, or even further down the line when it comes to investing our time and energy.

And so we go through life, losing one day after another.

Isn’t it time to begin to actually manage your life instead of allowing the demands of others, and our own lack of priorities, to dictate how we live?

The Help We Offer Extends Across Your Life!

We hear it all the time, “Wow, what I’ve learned applies to about every aspect of my life!”

It’s true.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a process you internalize, not something you do with a therapist once a week, which teaches you to manage your emotions rather than having your emotions manage you.

Likewise Assertiveness Training is about all of you relationships, not just your closest ones. Eliminate passivity, passive-aggression, and aggression across the board and imagine the stress reduction?

Diet and exercise’s generalized benefits are equally obvious.

And don’t forget achieving balance!

Or having your thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors actually match!

Or creating mutually satisfactory relationships and associations.

Or jettisoning the exploitative and abusive relationships and situations.

And the guilt dissolving.

And…….

Review this list – how many of these factors and people are what you’re drinking to avoid?

How about no drinking, no need, PLUS the addition of real friendships, real engagement, real relationships, and?????

Seems like an easy set of choices to us, a short period of modest discomfort leading to a vastly more rewarding, integrated, and relaxed life.

And for 2017 you choose?