Finding Motivation: Tackling Anxiety and Stagnation. Advice from Dr Julie Smith’s “Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?”

| April 16, 2025

I’m really slow with this. Can’t think of anything to write about, can’t focus. I just keep thinking about things that make me anxious. About my life savings disappearing, about my hair disappearing, about job insecurity. All those things add up to create a stressed, anxious guy who can’t let his mind roam free and create. I keep reading that a creative person should be like a receiver – receiving the art from the Cosmos, letting it speak through him. I am not receiving. The cosmos only seems to be sending me worries. 

I can’t even decide which self-development book I should read next to help me out of this stagnation. One about productivity? Creating good habits? Maybe something about writing? Or maybe about business, entrepreneurship, marketing? Maybe that’s what I should be focusing on, instead of chasing pipe dreams about writing? Just focus on running my small business, that sucks life out of me and doesn’t make me any money? Maybe if I only focused on that? I have so many questions keeping me from doing anything. Maybe I should fix my head first?

How do I get myself from this lethargic state that I’m in. Yep, there are self-help books for that! I should probably go to therapy instead, but… in this economy? That will have to wait. Now I can only afford the public library. “Why has nobody told me this before?” by dr Julie Smith. I get a feeling that is is addressed to young adults and not balding guys going through midlife crisis, but I guess the advice is pretty universal. So, doctor. Why am I feeling down? Why can’t I do anything? The things are getting worse and it doesn’t give me any motivation. It just makes me freeze. 

She writes that “feeling down is (…) likely to reflect unmet needs”. I have food and shelter – all my other needs are unmet. So it checks out. But what exactly triggers my low moods? Which of my many unmet needs is the one that gets me down like this? Dr Smith writes that I should identify what happens right before the low mood starts.

I’d like to be successful at my job. I’d like to achieve my goals. I’d like to be respected. Yes. But those things are the very top of Maslow’s pyramid. I think in my case it’s something a lot more basic, that gets me down. It’s the social needs. It’s being far from my family. Not having a support group around me. Not feeling part of the group, not belonging anywhere. Not having enough human interactions. They say lonely people die younger, and I can see why. Loneliness can cause depression, anxiety, stress. Especially if you pair it with a sense of insecurity and lack of control. Uff. That’s tough.

That’s it, dr Smith! That’s what keeps me in bed until noon. I’m unable to pursue my higher needs like the need of increasing my social status, or the need to express myself creatively, when the thought of losing my job is paralysing me, and I have no-one to talk to about it. I don’t feel like I have control over my life, and I don’t have the support system around me. Bummer.

And then that’s how it goes down in practice: I get a boost of energy, I decide that I will be more active on social media and promote the shit out of my restaurant. That I will come up with three new great dishes and take great photos of them for instagram. That I will learn more about hospitality and customer service, and train my staff better to give customers a better experience. And after that I will still have time and energy to read a bunch of classic literature, get inspired, start writing myself! 

But then – I get a shitty slow week at work with low sales. Self-doubt starts sneaking in. What’s the point? What was I thinking? That I’ll post a few reels and customers will start flooding in? I can’t compete with big chains. It doesn’t matter what I do. The market is shit anyway, people don’t have money to eat out anymore. etc. I feel the lack of agency. I have the feeling that things that happen to me are out of my control. I can only wait and see what happens. That’s why I have no motivation to get out of bed in the morning. I don’t feel like things depend on what I do. I don’t feel in control. I don’t feel like I write the script. I don’t know what will happen next and it stresses the shit out of me, tbh. And I’m facing it alone. How to write sonnets under those circumstances?

OK! Well, that’s something. At least I have identified something. Yes, that’s likely the trigger of my low moods. Loneliness, lack of security, lack of agency, helplessness. What now? What normally happens next is that I waste loads of time watching youtube, or scrolling. Dr Smith: “We numb and distract ourselves, and push the feelings away.” It can be scrolling, watching TV, eating, drinking, getting high. Whatever works for you. Those things of course make things worse in the long run, because they don’t solve anything, but they do add the feeling of guilt. So what’s the right thing to do?

Dr Smith advices to watch out for thought biases: the sort of tendencies to see things as much worse as they are. For example: focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive in your life. Or generalising: thinking that if one thing went wrong, then means everything in your life always goes wrong. Or interpreting your feelings as objective facts: you feel lazy, so you ARE a lazy person, etc. 

She recommends one very interesting thing that I will for sure start using in my journaling: put your thoughts and feelings on paper, but use a language that distances your self from the feelings. So: instead of “I’m useless” , write: “I’m noticing those negative feelings again, that I’m useless”- this way you don’t present those negative thoughts as facts. (Sort of in line with that book “The Power of Now”- you are not your thoughts etc. Basically the whole mindfulness relies on this notion: observe the thoughts and let them pass by.)

Oh yes, theres also one more thing she highly recommends: practice gratitude. Write down what you’re grateful for every day, to focus your mind on the positive things. Today I’m grateful that I wrote this. It’s nothing special and it’s unlikely that anyone will read it, but I got my 1000 words in today, which is more than I usually write. I could’ve been rotting in bed and scrolling for the last 2 hours, but instead I did this. 

What have I learned so far from “Why has nobody told me this before?”: My low moods are likely triggered by the lack of security and the feeling that my life is out of my control. It’s all amplified by not having enough human interaction. I use scrolling, youtube and TV as distractions form those feelings. I use them to numb myself. 

What I should do instead is identify those feelings, address them, realize that they are not objective facts about me (because I do have control over my life and I should stay active!) Be mindful, be grateful.

Where’s my money?!

| April 3, 2025

It’s funny how quickly things change. Not more than a few months ago I was considering if maybe I have enough money saved for a down payment on some tiny micro-apartment. And today I had to check my balance to see if I can afford a pack of eggs before the payday tomorrow (I haven’t bought them in the end). A lot has changed for me the last few months. We should all be able to learn from what happens to us. I am now learning, yet again, that this world is not a place for poor people. We’re chasing a carrot on a stick. We’re saving up money that’s worth less and less every day, we’re paying rent that grows faster than our salaries, we’re trying to save up for a down payment on some shitty little place, but someone who already owns 5 will always be faster. Well, I can only blame myself, right? I should’ve owned 6 apartments, so I could buy one more faster than the guy who only owns 5. How to get the 6, you ask? I don’t know, just have the first 5 first, you idiot. Should’ve worked harder, graduated from a better school, invest more wisely, spend less. Maybe I really am the one to blame. But it’s never too late to start over. I haven’t bought those expensive eggs today, so the first step towards entering the real estate market has been made!

As I’m pondering my own insignificance against the big world politics, I’m searching through my kitchen cupboards, to make sure that I’ve eaten everything that I stored there first, before I buy more food. I don’t want to be wasteful, I need to be more responsible with money in those difficult times. Sadly, many things have expired already – their expiry dates are like postcards from the better times, when I could buy food without looking at price labels. Carelessly bought food without thinking about consequences (that’s way I can’t afford an apartment!) Pad Thai noodles – best before June 2021. Japanese golden curry, best before 2020. Good old simpler times! Have I been doing so well during COVID? Cool, maybe this new upcoming recession won’t be so bad either? Then there’s also some very old protein powder. Brings back the vague memory of times when I wanted to build muscle mass. I was doing so well that I had the luxury of thinking about improving my physical shape. How carefree!

I’m looking around my tiny studio apartment in disbelief seeing all the unnecessary things I used to buy to make my life more enjoyable. 55” TV, American made guitar, whole pile of shoe boxes from buying too many sneakers. I used to shop impulsively, because there were always funds on the card. It was never declined, so I didn’t event think about it. If I ever have money to speed again, I’ll be more careful! But there are some things that I would have to buy. A new office chair. The one I’m sitting on right now is so old it falls apart, and it stinks from all the sweat it absorbed over the years. Not nice. 

So here I am, sitting on the old stinky chair, looking at piles of books I bought when I still had money and then never read. How to be an entrepreneur, how to fix your personal finances, what’s marketing, how to be creative. Where should I begin my education? It would be helpful to know all of those things. I wonder how many other suckers like me sit in their crummy shitty rat holes, thinking that their life will change after they read a self development book about motivation and grind. That they’ll become real hustlers, quit their 9 to 5, achieve financial freedom, preferably working from home or creating “content”. Maybe create a brilliant start up. I’m aware how unrealistic it all sounds and yet I too like to delude myself. Why? Maybe hope alone makes things better. So, against all logic, I tell myself: no, it’s not that self-help books don’t work. You don’t work! The books are good, but they won’t fix you without your help. They have their value, but you’re not using them right! Three is some truth to it. Enough of it for me to convince myself: self-development books will help me, I just have to start working on it and imply what I learn from them. OK, easy! Let’s do it!

As I watch the markets crash, as I watch my life savings disappear, as I watch my business run dry – I’ll try to improve my life in one way or another. I can still afford to pay my rent and bills, to buy food and bus ticket, I can afford gym membership and a couple of streaming services. That’s a start! Now, where do we go from here. Wake up earlier than everyone, to get ahead. That’s what I read in “The Miracle Morning” and never applied. Cut out social media and other distractions, focus on what you’re doing in long uninterrupted stretches of work, that’s “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. Sounds reasonable. Never done it. It all sounds so obvious and reasonable and yet, it’s so hard to apply it. Too easy to fall back into the old familiar tracks. 

I can’t get out of bed in the morning. When I sit down to work (writing or running my small business) I get distracted within minutes. Waking up at 8 seems nearly impossible to me (my day job is afternoon-evening). But it’s not fucking impossible, and I feel like a complete idiot when I fail to do it. I had that thought lately, that maybe it means that what I call “my goals” are not really as important to me as I tell myself they are. Maybe I only have them, so that I can lie to myself that I haven’t given up and settled down? If they mattered I would get my ass out of bed at 8. So, do they actually matter? Should we find out tomorrow at 8?

Dr Carol S. Dweck “Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential” (2006)

| September 12, 2024

Which statement do you believe to be true: that your personality, talents and abilities are something you’re born with, and they remain pretty much unchanged throughout your life; or that you can develop them, work on both your talents and weaknesses, and become better? Dr Dweck says that your answer to this question has a profound meaning for how you deal with obstacles and failure in your life! 

If you believe that you are the way you are, and that’s just the cards you were dealt – you have what dr Dweck calls Fixed Mindset. And that’s problematic, because you may have a tendency to always try to prove how smart you are, instead of identifying your shortcomings and working on them. You may hold a belief that if you have to work hard on something – that means you weren’t good at this to begin with. That if you don’t understand something – means you’re too stupid to understand it. That if you don’t succeed at something at first try – means it was just not for you.

If you, on the other hand, love a good challenge and enjoy constantly learning – also from your failures – you represent Growth Mindset. You recognise that you have to cultivate your talents, hone your skills, identify your weaknesses and work on them. And that can make a big difference, especially when you face setbacks and failures.

People with Fixed Mindset feel like they always have to prove themselves; like they’re always being measured and judged, and whatever the judgement is – that’s what they are (and likely always will be). And because of that they are very sensitive about making mistakes and failing at things. They would rather not attempt difficult tasks in fear that they will fail, and their shortcomings will be exposed. Their need to always succeed leads them to only doing things that come effortlessly to them.

For people with Growth Mindset it’s almost the opposite: they love a good challenge, because they know that when they perform a difficult task – that’s when they learn. They’re good at identifying their strengths and weaknesses. For them success is not about proving how smart you are and never failing, but rather about learning and improving. If they fail on a test – that’s a valuable feedback for them. It lets them know where they are on their path to mastering something – rather than a judgement of who they are.

A perfect example of the Fixed Mindset in action (and one that sounded too familiar to me) is what Dweck calls “Low-Effort Syndrome” in students transitioning to junior high school – the work gets a lot harder than it was before,  much more effort is required, suddenly it’s not so easy to be a straight-A student. For those with Fixed Mindset a very common response is… to stop trying. They fear that they might still fail, even if they put in a lot of effort, and that will expose them as not being smart enough. If they don’t put any effort – they think – they can’t be measured and judged.

Fixed Mindset can also be observed in the world of business. One way it can manifest itself is a “genius with a thousand helpers” model – leaders who don’t want a great team around them. Don’t want talented people around them, who could steal their spotlight, or who they would have to share the credit with. They want to feel better than the rest, so they have to surround themselves with mediocrity. They don’t allow dissent, they only want to hear praise. If they fail – they assign blame and look for excuses. They may have good intentions, but “at critical decision points, they opt for what would make them feel good and look good over what would serve the longer-term corporate goals”.

And it can get even worse! Since those people love to compare themselves with others who are worse off than they are, AND they are the ones in charge – they “have the power to make people worse off. And when they do, they feel better about themselves” – says dr Dweck. Doesn’t that sound familiar to many of us? The whole toxic bosses culture, workplaces where everyone feel miserable and no one is allowed their own opinion, dissent is punished etc. That may also be a result of insecurities stemming from the Fixed Minset.

Dr Dweck offers many great examples of both Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset in the world of business, but also many different areas of life: sports, parenting, school, relationships. You would be surprised how many of the mistakes we make in our lifes can somehow be linked to how you answer this very basic question: am I just the way I am and that’s final, or do I have the ability to develop? If you only believe in the former: you’re basically screwed. But there’s some good news: in reality most of us have a little bit of both of those mindsets, and we sometimes lean more towards one or the other. In other words: if you think you have the fixed mindset – that also isn’t fixed forever and you can (and should) work on it! It’s important to be aware of the pitfalls of Fixed Mindset and learn what triggers it.

The main idea of the book is: you can change your mindset. And as everything else in life: it will require a lot of work and effort. You can’t just flip the switch. You can just start the process, and maybe you will never even achieve a full success – but that’s not the point. Starting the process is the goal. Making a concrete plan to improve – and sticking to it! – is the goal. The learning, the development, the improvements – are the success.

The lesson from the book for me is: do difficult things. The things I hate doing, things I know I’m bad at, things that terrify me – I can continue avoiding them forever and never get better at anything, OR I can force myself to start, plow through the initial pain and awkwardness, and get better and better, a little bit at the time. Try things, identify what works and what doesn’t, try different approaches, seek advice from people who know better, don’t avoid people with more knowledge and talent.

Dr Carol Dweck is a Stanford University psychologist specialising in personality, social psychology and developmental psychology. Here’s her TED Talk about “Mindset”

Today I’m changing my “fixed mindset” to a much better “growth mindset” (to fulfil my potential)

| September 5, 2024

Does it ever happen to you, that you decide to change your life, so you go to youtube and watch a video about productivity, or investing money, or meditation, or boosting your creativity, or building muscle, or anything else like that, and you maybe even take notes, maybe even write down the titles of those “7 books that will change your life”, or you maybe even order the books, and make a little pile on your desk, and you maybe even start reading one of them and decide that you’re gonna have to wake up early in the morning to be ahead of everyone and seize those quiet morning hours to work on realising your dreams, but then you feel very tired, so you go to sleep? And when you wake up the next day, you have now turned 30, so you know that you have to speed up, or else you will never become a writer. So you order more books. When they arrive, you’ve now turned 35, and you’re still very sleepy, but you manage to watch another youtube video recommending you “Think and grow rich” by Napoleon Hill, so you promise yourself that you’ll read it, but at this point you already kind of know that it doesn’t matter, and you will not grow rich from reading it, I mean, come on. But you still have the urge to do it – does that ever happen to you?

Well, it happened to me, I feel that way very often. I refuse to accept that the life I have now is the best I can have, I have a dream of a much better, more fulfilling life, and a desire to make it a reality, but when it comes to acting – I just fake it. I fake action and delude myself. I watch youtube videos, read self-help books, listen to podcasts, I do all of it, but never take action. I never implement what they tell me to do. The watching, and the reading, and the listening – is as far as I ever go. Of course it doesn’t change anything, it’s just another form of procrastination – one which gives you an illusion of progress. After all – you could have been playing video games, but instead you’ve invested time in “self-development”.

Dr Carol Dweck in her book “Mindset” (a book from my pile!) helped me understand why I am like this. Apparently it’s quite common, so maybe you will recognise yourself in this description, too: kind of clever as a kid, receiving praise for being talented, then suddenly started to struggle in your teenage years, so you stopped trying. You loved being good at things, so when you stopped being good, you stopped participating. Dr Dweck describes it as “fear of trying and failing”, and I feel that it describes me perfectly. According to her, I have what she calls a “fixed mindset”: I don’t want to do challenging things, because I’m afraid that when I fail, I will be exposed as an idiot, whereas if I don’t try, I won’t be judged at all, and only I will know that I’m an idiot!

We always tend to gravitate towards things that give us pleasure, we often get addicted to them. I learned as a kid that it feels good when you get praised for your successes. And at the time those successes came to me without effort. So already as a kid I convinced myself, that I have a natural talent – I’m so bright that things come to me effortlessly, and everybody praises me for it, which feels great. Effort was for less talented kids. When in high school things got more difficult, I panicked and gave up. I stopped working and tried to hide behind a shitty attitude. I acted like I didn’t care, but in reality I just didn’t feel smart anymore. And that’s the “fixed mindset” – believing that your intelligence and skills are fixed, and that’s just the way you are. And I still have this mindset to this day.

I wanted to be a writer or a journalist, but that was difficult, so instead I packed my stuff, moved to another country, and got a job in a restaurant. That seemed a lot easier than actually sitting down and writing. That’s because sitting in front of your computer and staring at a blank page can really give you a headache. Washing dishes in a restaurant – you’ll get sweaty and tired, but no headaches! I felt comfortable again. So comfortable, that I got stuck for 15 years.

But I still have that urge to write. My restaurant job pays my bills, but doesn’t give me satisfaction. I never wanted to do it, never felt passionate about it. That’s just where I ended up. Dr Dweck says that you can change your mindset. Leave the shitty “fixed mindset” I had since childhood, and adapt the “growth mindset” – identify my weaknesses and focus on getting better! I now realise that I always thought about writing as of a way to prove how smart I am. And I failed, because I wasn’t that smart, and I couldn’t write. I should have thought about writing as a way to become better at writing!

So here I am. I don’t feel comfortable doing this, but I’m willing to try. “In the growth mindset it’s almost inconceivable to want something badly, to think you have a chance to achieve it, and then do nothing about it.” Yup, that sounds stupid, doesn’t it? So this is me with my new “growth mindset”. I will write a blog. I will be bad at this. No doubt. But I will keep writing. I’ll sit in front of my computer everyday, I’ll sit through the headache, I’ll have that shitty feeling of having a rock in my stomach (do you also have it? don’t google it, it will say you have gastric cancer, but you’re probably just anxious), but I will keep doing it. I will be tired after all day in the kitchen, but I will keep doing it. Sometimes it will be a pile of garbage, but I accept that. I’ll keep doing it, so that maybe a year from now I will be a little better than I am now. I will fail and learn from my failure, and then I’ll try again. Maybe someday someone will read it and think: “he stinks, I can do that too”! and be inspired?

You can call me Dave.