To many of us, thoughts arise at night, just before we sleep, thoughts about your future plans, setting expectations, a person you met at a coffee shop or even a friend you secretly admire. As we wake up in the morning, these thoughts are gone, you get out of bed and you just eventually get back into your daily routine. With the investment of taking two hours of your sleeping time and having to wake up with such heavy eyes, we think, is it really worth it? We all dream to become great, the feeling is exciting, but as we wake up in the morning, reality confines our thoughts, and it’s just another day at work.
The rise of millennials are pushed to create new business ideas, establish their own “meaningful” careers, and grow their own way to success. This is not a new trait for millenials. We become dynamic beings trying to compete against one another. Again, nothing new. Innovation becomes the path of survival, which is a plus for tech startups while private corporations are perceived as a body functioning in a conventional way and moving stagnantly. However, both can only move with the support from their resources, mainly the people within, making “the people” as main tools of survival. Little did we know, our current day-to-day are slowly taking over our behaviour and the way we perceive the meaning of life.
At times, mostly after work, we rethink our state in whichever we do, we think again whether our current state can realise our dreams to become a scientist, a social entrepreneur, a doctor, or even an astrologist. These thoughts come and go, but remain the longest at night or during our loneliest times.
The midnight hours are critical to those who are night owls, those mostly have stronger focus on creativity, those mostly facing struggles to control their thought processes. According to psychology research, we should normally process positive thoughts twice as much as negative thoughts, but that only depends on how well we can respond to our realities, how well we can reflect and learn from the information we take in or perceive. If ever these thoughts get out of balance, we are prone to fall into a state of our exaggerated self, that can come out as neurotic behavior or severe depression. The main root of its imbalance is the lack of adequacy to understand mental self thus feeling a sense of having a very low self-worth. To indulge in negative thoughts is a manifestation of the idea of depression itself, for most people, it starts at midnight.
So what becomes the key to mitigate this imbalance? If our brain is not kept sufficiently busy, then it will turn idle, causing anxieties to kick in. According to psychologists, our brain is made up of an accelerator and a brake and its balance is temporarily disrupted at night making us vulnerable to physical disorders and the state of our heart reflects to which extent these anxieties can kick in.
Although we are kept busy at work throughout the day, the information we take in and reflect on will play a significant role in the way we end our day. Taking in negative information and switching it for growth will help us realise our self worth. Considering the rapid dynamics of our modern society, it is very much difficult to find our self-worth, the way we utilize the information provided on social media does not capture the information we need to process in our brains (considering the critical role of online platforms nowadays and the increasing number of people invested into it). We succumb to what we see on the screens that the stimulation only comes through our eyes, little did we know, our brains are the ones trying to fix the wires on the things it processes from our eyes. Take a time off for a while and realise the potential we can make by understanding ourselves more through self-reflection. Represented in Maslow’s theory in hierarchy of needs, to achieve closer to self-actualization and grow as a person, the need for inner respect and esteem from others must be met. Respecting our inner selves can be done through practicing healthy habits, feeding your mind with knowledge, having self-control and tuning in to the good (lower any negative biases), we can eventually put them to practice then realise our self-worth. And soon, we can achieve a congruence between respecting inner selves and achieving esteem from others.
With these practices, we are able to reflect better at night, during our “lonely” times, but we can also realise that spending time alone is blissful and realise, hey this is great enough? As much as we cannot fight the accelerators and brakes of our brains that occur at midnight, we have all the capacity to control ourselves and it is our responsibility to know ourselves better. Just remember, as you wake up the next morning, your daily routine will be your next motivation, not just another day at work.