Stop Filling Your Life with Emptiness

By Mark Ackerman, PA

At the beginning of every sports season, there is a day that practice starts. And that day is when coaches typically go through an overview of expectations for the season.  When I was coaching there is one expectation that I always had; and that was an expectation about criticism. As we all know, there are two basic types of criticism; constructive and destructive.  And so, I would always tell my players that while I will always try to be constructive in my criticism there are going to be times that I will fail, slip and forget.  But I always told them this too, that their ability to handle destructive criticism will make them more successful; not because destructive criticism is better for people but because we need to be open to criticism in general and the world in general gives us more destructive than constructive criticism.

Criticism, I think, is the thing that allows us to see the proverbial “blind spots” in our attitudes towards ourselves and others.  As an analogy, when we drive a car we always have to look over our shoulder and into the blind spot before we change lanes. Being good at taking criticism does the same thing for us. It allows us to see something that we couldn’t see before.  And for this reason, criticism is a good thing; it allows us to see the obstacle in the next lane that we are just about to hit, when we change lanes.

So what does this all have to do with emptiness? Well May is Mental Health Month and I think all this relates to our mental health.  If want better mental health, one of the first things we need to do is get rid of some obstacles to our mental health getting better.  I think that taking criticism poorly is one of the obstacles we encounter to our success. To some degree we all have a bit of a mental health problem in that we either over exaggerate or under exaggerate the criticism we receive, but there can be other obstacles to our ability to overcome mental health problems as well.

Now I am not claiming to be a counselor, a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but there are some obstacles for improvement that I think we need to be aware of. The first one is compliance. People with mental health problems tend to be non-compliant in their seeking help.  This lack of compliance can take several forms including: missing multiple appointments, jumping from one provider to another too quickly or being impatient with medication, stopping medication too soon, or adding medications too quickly.

Another obstacle that I see is not understanding who, even if they criticize you, is really in your corner.  I think we all have the responsibility to identify the people who are trying to help us. As a way to do that, I offer patients this advice; to look at who is making sacrifices for you. The people who make sacrifices for us are the ones really in our corners. It may be our parents, our children, our teachers, our employers etc. but usually the patient who is trying to carry some of our work load really wants to see us succeed.

And finally, the biggest obstacle I see is that in this world, is that we continually fill our lives with emptiness. I realize this is a bit of an oxymoron, but people can fill their lives with nothingness. I think the typical way this happens is when the constant desires that we have, don’t become realized.  What we often desire is to have more… more money, more friends, more fame, more validation, more praise, etc. But when we don’t get these things, we feel empty.  Instead, what researchers have shown is that people who give these things to others are the really happy people. By giving away more praise, more money, more compliments, more gratitude, etc. we actually fill ourselves up with more; that is more of a sense of validation, and that makes us happier.

In closing, we all have some mental health issues to work through. I think a lot of this is getting rid of some of the obstacles we encounter that lead to emptiness in our lives. We need to learn to be patient, We all need to learn to be see who is making sacrifices for us, learn to give more to others and finally, learn to see our own blind spots by taking criticism well. If we only focus on the negative things, we will only be focusing on failure.