Why You Keep Undervaluing Yourself and How to Stop

I'm a physiotherapy student and earlier this year I was on a clinical placement. So I was going to hospitals and clinics to gain experience for my role as a future physio. So I was paired up with one of my friends and a lot of the times the things we do in the healthcare field can mean life or death for your patients. It can be quite risky. So my friend was like, Anne, how do you seem so chill? How are you not phased by anything? Until that point I hadn't really realized that I was a calm person although it was literally on my New Year's resolutions for the past five years. I'm not even kidding. And that's when I realized, oh, there's actually a story behind it. I used to be someone who was anxious as well until five years ago when I discovered an ancient practice that killed my stress forever. Flashback to the COVID pandemic times. There were lockdowns all over the world. People were dying. People were ill. And everyone was terrified of the coronavirus. At this time, I was a mere 17 year old who was thrown into a job I had no clue about. And I spent wintry nights in the emergency department doing rat tests on people presenting to the emergency department of the hospital. I still remember my first shift. There was a person I had to do a rat test on. She was covered in blood all over her head because apparently her ex had hit her head with a hammer because he thought she was cheating. And there was another person who literally vomited on me while I was doing the freaking rat test on my first ever shift. And yet, through that bitter cold, as I looked at the clock to see every minute pass and desperately wanted to go home and just take a shower to feel clean, I stayed calm. At that time, about a week earlier, was when I read my first ever Stoic philosophy book. And I'd come across an ancient practice that Stoic philosophers like Epictetus Diogenes and Marcus Aurelius who was the emperor of Rome ruling from 161 to 180 AD had used in times of adversity and challenge to stay calm in stressful situations. The good news is that it only takes 10 seconds to do. Marcus Aurelius talks about this in his book called Meditations. He says that most people try to escape their own lives in the face of adversity or stress by going off to holidays or vacations, to the beaches, to the forests, or to other countries as a means to distract themselves. He says you shouldn't have to escape your life like that when instead you can just retreat back into your own soul, look within your soul to find that sense of calm again and come back to face your life. In the book, he doesn't directly mention exactly what he did when he stated this. And I was there thinking like, oh Marcus, did you do like a one-minute meditation? Was it five minutes? Did you breathe in and out? I want to know. But I was actually left to just find out the answer on my own, one that worked for myself. After digging around and reading back and forth through the pages, I came to find out that, well, Marcus does say that when you're faced with stress, try to think about how insignificant your life is in the grand scheme of things, about how soon death will come, about how small we are in this big entire universe. And that just makes our problems seem so small and tiny. And while briefly I thought I shouldn't be validating my feelings or the pain that I was going through, I came to see it in a more positive light. It was more so that you should value your peace of mind, your energy and your time so much that you shouldn't even have to care about these small stresses in your life because it's just not worth it considering how short of a life we have left to live. So you may as well be unfazed by it. Okay, so how exactly do you do that? Well, Marcus Aurelius quotes, choose not to be harmed and you will not feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been. And my way of retreating to my own soul or whatever in that time, in that cold emergency department, was to say that line, to tell myself, you know what, if I choose not to be harmed right now, I am not. And while maybe physically I was vomited on, if physically I was cold, sure. Like I validate that to myself. But in my mind, I tell myself I'm okay, that I don't have to be affected by it. And ever since then, for the last couple years, I've tried to implement that ancient stoic practice of retreating to my own soul to regain that sense of calm, to then go and face whatever challenge that I need to face. And with every challenge that you persevere through, because of his mindset, it becomes what David Coggins calls your cookie jar. You have a cookie jar racked with your challenges that you've pushed through, which then is your accomplishment. So when you have another challenge to face, you can be like, oh, well, in the past, I was in the ED at the hospital on those cold winter nights. You can reflect on that. So in that way, it literally becomes a testament to your determination. But it's not always easy to do the hard actions, especially when you're all alone. That's why you need a guide. And I created a notion system that organizes my entire life in one calm space. And honestly, my life feels like a video game because I've got systems that logs my habits, the activity I do and gets me closer towards my goals. If you're interested in that, go check out the link in the description. There's also a free version. That's all for me today. Take care and bye.