Too MuchThe goal of self-mastery is a noble one. Yet every day people’s efforts are thwarted because they fall victim to the enemies of self-mastery: Too Little and Too Much. As you work towards mastering your mind, mastering your body, mastering your money and mastering your relationships, nearly all failures can be traced back to the problem of too little and too much.

What do I mean by that? Let me explain by using some examples.

Mastering Your Body

First let’s talk about mastering your body. When you think about the struggles that people have with their health and with their physical body, most of them have to do with too little and too much.

Of course the obvious one is too much food. There is no arguing the fact that America is suffering from an obesity problem. We eat too much. We tend to overindulge and eat far too much than we need. When you go to a restaurant and order a dinner they generally bring out enough food for two people. The portions are huge and we feel that, in order to get our money’s worth, we need to eat the whole thing. A number of times my wife and I have ordered one meal and split it between the both of us and we have left the restaurant full. There have been a number of other times when we wish we would have done that because we ended up with far too much food and left the restaurant feeling stuffed and sick to our stomachs.

It was an interesting phenomenon when I took my family to visit China for a couple of weeks. We noticed there were no obese people. We just didn’t see any fat people in China. The people weren’t starving. There wasn’t poverty. These were regular people and they were healthy. They were thin because they ate mostly vegetables and rice and they walked or rode bikes wherever they went. So you just didn’t see overweight people. It was quite shocking to come back to America and see how many overweight people there were. When you are around it all the time you don’t notice it so much but when you’ve been gone for a while and then come back - wow! There are a lot of grossly overweight people in America. We eat too much!

Let’s talk about “Too Little” with regards to our body. The problem is too little exercise. We don’t get up and move around. If I didn’t consciously make an effort every morning to get up and go hiking I wouldn’t get any exercise at all. I spend most of my days sitting at a computer, not moving much at all. I think of how many other people are in that same situation where they live a sedentary lifestyle. We walk a short distance to our car and drive everywhere we go. We would drive to the bathroom if the car would fit! We come home and sit in front of the TV or computer or Xbox. We just don’t do a lot. So we exercise too little!

Another area, as far as mastering our body goes, is in the area of sleep. I’ve noticed that this is an area that teenagers struggle with. I am familiar with a lot of youth in my neighborhood and work closely with them in a number of ways. I’m very familiar with their lifestyles. What I observe is that rarely are these youth on any kind of normal sleep schedule. It’s usually staying up way too late and existing on very little sleep and then binging on the weekends by oversleeping. They try to make up for the lost sleep during the week where they stay up until two or three or four in the morning playing video games and watching movies. Too little and too much.

Mastering Your Mind

As far as mastering our minds, what are the areas of too much and too little? I would say we have too much mental stimulation of worthless and useless things. We are bombarded with audio and visual stimulation through every imaginable means. It’s hard to find a young person now that doesn’t have a cell phone in one hand and an iPod in the other, with ear buds in their ears while watching a movie on their 120″ flat screen TV. Add to this the internet and video games and it equals too much mental stimulation. It’s like drinking a Rock Star energy drink - lots of stimulation but very little nourishment.

The too little part is too little time spent in actual thought. Too little time spent allowing our mind to be creative, allowing our mind to come up with our own ideas and thinking on our own. There is too little pondering, contemplating and studying worthwhile, thought-provoking and important information.

Mastering Your Money

What about mastering your money? I see a great imbalance in many people’s lives. They indulge too much on luxuries, toys, trinkets and time-wasters. Many feel they have to have the best of certain things whether they can afford it or not. They plunge themselves into too much debt which produces too much financial strain, tension and worry.

In the area of too little, these same people tend to put too little into savings. Too little is spent on investing. Too little of their money is contributed to society to help other people. They spend too little in supporting and caring for their family. Too little is spent on educating their minds.

Mastering Your Relationships

How about mastering relationships? I would say too much criticism goes on - too much correcting, nagging, forcing and pushing of other people. The normal result is the resistance of the person being pushed and the damaging of the relationship. The end result is usually the exact opposite of what their desired outcome was in the first place.

As far as relationships go, there is too little patience and too little love. There is too little of sitting down with the other person and just asking how their day was, of asking about their interests and what is going on in their life. There is too little of being interested in the other person, of caring about them and focusing attention on them. Too little of finding out what is going on in their head and trying to understand them.

Achieving Balance

I could go on and about too little and too much. The world is full of too little and too much. The goal is to be aware of the areas in your own life that are experiencing too little or too much and to work toward achieving balance. Balance means being steady and stable. It means not being too excessive or too restrictive but achieving true symmetry and stability in your life.

Thank you.

Master Yourself, Master Your Life

Copyright © 2008 Garold N. Larson

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