Three questions that will save you countless hours

We can see them standing together inside the kitchen. “It still hurts my stomach.” he said.

Well, he said something to that affect anyway. We were both drunk. He didn’t like seeing them together and was hoping for an empathetic response.

“It’s none of your business anymore, don’t let it affect you.”

Sorry. That’s the best I’ve got.

There will always be certain realities or aspects of your life that you aren’t happy about. It’s even worse when you spend so much of your time brooding and there is nothing you can do to change it.

Sometimes it isn’t important, sometimes it has little relevance to your life moving forward but you get stuck on it.

We have to be ruthless with our thoughts or they will take hold of us.

Don’t let thoughts that can’t help you, control you.

In the past I have spent an atrocious amount of time brooding over things I can’t change.

I started asking myself three questions whenever presented with something uncomfortable, so that I can either do something about it, or get rid of it.

Is this relevant?

Is this something that is actually relevant to your life and your future?

When asking yourself this question you may realize that most of your problems aren’t. Most of the time my answer is “I guess not, but it upsets me.”

Once you have labeled this situation as irrelevant you might find it easier to put it out of your mind. Just keep reminding yourself that in the end, it has no real relevance.

Is it important?

Sometimes the things that make us uncomfortable are relevant to our life. What do you do then?

Ask yourself, is it really that important? In the grand scheme of things is this something big, or small?

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. If it’s not important, push it out the door.

Those two are easy, now it’s time for the hard question.

Your situation might be relevant and it might be very important, but if you can’t do anything about it you will have to painfully remove it from your head.

Is it actionable?

The worst feelings come from this question. That feeling in my friends stomach, it was because it was relevant to him and it was important to him.

But he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

There was nothing he could do to turn the current situation into the one that he wanted. I truly did feel for him.

If you can’t do anything about a situation, you will eventually have to come to peace with that. You might as well try to speed up that process as much as you can so you can get back to enjoying life.

If you ask yourself these questions and the predicament you are in doesn’t meet all three criteria, it’s probably best to accept it and move on. You’ll thank yourself later.