Protect your passion.

Preface

This is an article for passionate people, people with enhanced emotional states, and people who struggle with psychological illnesses that affect their emotions.

My goal with this article is to make sure that you are aware of some of the things that your brain is doing and give some tips in how to handle such situations.

I am not trained in psychology, it is always better to get professional help rather than following tips that you read on a blog. If at any point during reading this you feel like you are struggling or that you identify that you have formed an unhealthy attachment I strongly urge you to seek help from a mental health professional like a counselor, GP, psychologist or life coach.

A person with passion is someone who pours there whole being into the things that they are passionate about, it means pouring your emotions, your time and energy into something until that thing is complete, and if you don't protect that passion from itself you might lose it.

Emotions aren't Free.

Emotional effort is defined as the energy, time or physical effort that it costs us to experience and manage our emotions, this means that experiencing life and pouring your emotions into the things you do isn't free.

Emotions have a cost and it means that your emotional state will affect how difficult it is to do something, you have probably experienced this when you feel down and everything seems like more work or when you feel happy and everything seems like less work.

This is why it's important that you need to make time during your day to replenish that energy by doing healthy things that makes you happy and doesn't cause you emotional distress, for me its things like making something with my hands, going for a walk, or sometimes expressing myself through art.

Emotions are like Velcro.

It has been proven that emotional effort leads to attachment, and that this attachment can be with a relationship, job, object or an activity, in effect emotional effort works like Velcro and it makes us get stuck to things.
This is can be a very useful tool for humanity when raising children but you are also at greater risk of getting emotionally attached to something that isn't healthy for you, like finding yourself feeling attached to your unreliable car or even a dead-end job that's exploiting you.

Knowing that your mind is doing this means you can make a healthier conscious decision to let go of an attachment.

Velcro can stick to the wrong thing.

Manipulative people will see this as an opportunity to use your passion to create an emotional attachment by convincing you to give more of yourself than they are willing to compensate you for, they do this by using your nature of pouring your emotions into the things you do to force an emotional attachment to grow.

The way to protect against this is to make sure that you place your own health and wellbeing first, and be aware of people's intentions and try to keep your emotions out of anything until you are sure that your wellbeing is being looked after.

Sometimes we short circuit.

It sometimes happens that your emotional effort will not be reciprocated, but an attachment will still form, and that leads to you pouring more emotional effort into what your doing and it's not long before you find that are stuck in a dangerous spiral.

You might realize at this point that your decisions are being lead by emotional attachment and not love, logic or the satisfaction you once got out of doing things, and if your lucky you will realize this before it is too late, if you're not lucky then it can lead to all kinds of nasty things including burn out and feeling like you've lost your passion.

To prevent this make sure to stay cognizant of your emotions, level of exhaustion and the decisions that drive you, make sure that you are the one making decisions in your life and not being driven by emotional attachments, take regular (weekly) breaks and ask yourself is this thing still making me happy?

To Summarize

Do things that re-energize you.

Make sure to make time for yourself so that you can do the things that re-energize you.

Stay aware of your emotional state.

Be aware that your passion can lead to attachments.

Ensure that you're not being exploited.

Ensure that you're still being driven by the things that you love and not just emotional attachment