𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬?

The first thing I used to do when I got home from work was to have a cigarette with a glass of wine. I did this almost every evening. 

Although it was a small glass and I didn’t drink much on other occasions,  my “cigarette and wine” after-work routine became a habit for quite some time. 

It didn’t even cross my mind that it could be an addiction, because I didn’t feel the urge to drink that small glass of wine on my days off from the office. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a glass of wine. In my native language Hungarian, we even say  “a glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away” 😉

What made that glass of wine unhealthy was that it was my coping mechanism for stress.

I didn’t know how to deal with stress at work and with the emotions that stress created inside of my body.

I didn’t know there was a healthier way to deal with my emotions because nobody taught me how. 

My friends and family didn’t talk about it. We saw stress as being “normal” and part of working and living in a city.

It’s interesting how working to earn a living is a daily stressor myself and many others went through, yet we never talked about how to process the emotions resulting from it? 

I’m one of the lucky ones because I never became overly dependent on substances such as alcohol, drugs or cigarettes. I could quit that daily glass of wine and cigarette from one day to the next. 

I was also lucky that I refused to accept that life is all about being busy and stressed, even though this was the common belief in my environment. 

And most importantly, I was lucky enough to be able to give up my life as I knew it and move to Asia. I started to practice yoga, meditation and different healing modalities. This taught me how to deal with stress in a healthier way. 

I know that not everyone is in the position to quit their jobs and move away to find a solution to their problems. 

However, everyone is able to question their current lifestyles, evaluate how happy they are, and if they realise things could be better, make choices to improve their lives. 

Do you believe in the power of choice? Do you use that power to make decisions that are good for you?

I’d love to hear your answers in the comments below.