Experimenting with ego.

Most of us lead a stressed life these days – especially at work – and our egos are often invoked, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, every now and then. This is continuously leading to degradation in the quality-of-life for many of us.

We all know that more often than not, our egos lead us deeper into the unwanted situation which is more stressful. How do we avoid getting sucked into more stressful situation? I did a little experiment that might help you ease this problem.

The key – as I have experienced – lies in identifying the moment when your ego kicks in so that you can control it before it does any major damage. But even before that, you must acknowledge the presence of the ego which is driving you towards the negativity. Once you do that, you will have some focus on the source of negativity and you can try eliminating it.

Begin by treating your ego like an entity. Try communicating with it and ask questions (randomly at any time during the day). It does not matters what you ask or talk to your ego about, you just have to acknowledge it as an entity and that it exists.

Speak to your ego: “Hello, Dear Ego, how and where are you?”. Invoke it, bring it up if it is sleeping. You can speak aloud while asking the questions like you normally do in conversations or you can just mentally ask the questions in silence. Of course be careful to do this in isolation if you choose the former lest you be branded a mentally-challenged person.

When you start doing this randomly, you are acknowledging the source of your negativity (and ultimately, your problems). I term it as the source of problems because often more than the situation we are in, what adversely affects our position is the way we react to it, and this reaction of ours is directly affected by our egos.

I have often read that to relationships are important because we live in a give-and-take world. In such a state of the World, where it is important that you acknowledge the other person and treat them reasonably, make them feel good, so they willing help you, or give what they have which you seek (love, wealth, appreciation.. just about anything) we obviously choose to ignore an important source of strength (or weakness) : our ego.

When you do the experiment as above, you will probably feel more in control, and perhaps happier. It is also self enlightening in that you become more self conscious about how you are reacting to different situations which is very important because as I said, you can’t really control everything around you or every situation you find yourself in. But most definitely you can control your reaction to it. As such, this communication with your ego helps you understand the your ego’s perspective of the situation and why it is acting the way it does; basically, it helps you understand the negative aspect of the situation, analyse it, and arrive at an evaluation of a real loss versus the perceived one courtesy of your ego.

At times when you are happy and try to invoke your ego, it might not show up even on repeated attempts which probably indicates that our egos are mostly in action when there is stress and anxiety in our minds.

I haven’t been able to play much with my ego when I am happier, but my quest will continue. At the very least is that I the absence of ego genuinely makes me happy.

If you experience stress, ego is most likely a part of it. Try the above method and see how it improves your life, come back, let others how you did or simply share your thoughts.