Not instant enough?
These days, we want everything right now. Fast food, next day delivery, drive-through, even pain killers that dissolve on our tongues so that we don’t have to wait for a pill to hit our stomachs. Everything is right now. Everything must be instant.
One thing I find with my work is that people will become desperate for help with their sleep, but they aren’t keen to put work in. In our culture we seem to have grown into this habit of wanting everything fixed immediately; we want a pill, something chemical to solve our problem right now. Immediate relief.
When we realise we have to put the work in for ourselves, some of us can get a bit down-hearted; we’re used to quick fixes. When you’re exhausted from lack of sleep, and just dragging yourself through the day seems like a full-time job in itself, the idea of doing yet more work in order to improve the situation seems unthinkable. Many of us will opt to just pop a pill, get an instant result and worry about the long-term consequences later. It can be so tempting, when we are so desperate for a little relief, to reach for whatever we think might offer it in the moment – and who can blame us?
The problem with these quick fixes is that they are just that. There is no long term benefit in dosing up on pills to relax and get to sleep; in fact, as we all know, there are long term risks. There’s only so long we can use these short-term quick fixes to squash our symptoms down; they will keep popping up, as bad as ever, and eventually we will build up a tolerance and the quick fix stops working.
Let me be clear here: natural healing is not a quick-fix, instant relief. Long-term, natural healing doesn’t stop working, because it’s not a sticking plaster solution; the aim is to resolve the underlying issue. It is a longer process than simply healing external symptoms with drugs. The long-term benefits will always outweigh anything that comes in pill form though.
In this age of fast-moving, stress-heading running around, constant busyness, the suggestion that we need to put in time and effort in order to resolve a situation is not often welcome. We become so stressed and busy we don’t take the space to breathe… literally! Our breathing becomes shallow, our system becomes stressed and on we go into a vicious circle: we feel rubbish, we take a pill, it wears off and we feel more rubbish, so we take another pill, and on it goes.
If we can take a deep breath and commit to working on the longer term end goal, we will reap the rewards! I promise!
Love
