Name: 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
Uploaded: 2025-07-26T17:56:46.000Z
Duration: 7 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Our minds are some of the busiest places in the known universe.

Adverbs of manner

It's estimated that under a deceptively calm exterior, some 70,000 separate thoughts hurry through consciousness from the moment we wake up to the time we slip into sleep.

What many of these thoughts have in common is that we seldom do them any kind of justice.

The result is a kind of sensory overload and an immense difficulty processing what we've actually been through.

We don't have time to feel the anger we're beset by.

We don't have the wherewithal to give room to the sadness that nags at us.

We can't, on too many occasions, properly think our own thoughts or feel our own feelings.

But these thoughts and feelings do need to be understood and will protest more or less actively when they're not.

Anger that hasn't been given its due will emerge as irritability.

Grief that hasn't been honoured will metastasise into aimlessness and despair.

What we call mental illnesses are usually the outcome of periods of our lives that we haven't had the strength or opportunity to understand or mourn.

What can help our troubles is self-exploration.

And that's why we've produced five questions that we suggest can be rehearsed every evening on a regular basis and will help to appease the sources of our troubles.

This question recognises something rather unusual about how we operate.

We frequently don't stop to ask ourselves what we're truly worried about.

Surely, if we're worried, we would be expected to pause rather quickly and explore why.

But our minds seem not to work in this supremely logical sounding way.

They feel anxious long before they're ever motivated to ask themselves why they might be so.

They can carry on for months, even years, under the fog of diffuse concern before setting themselves the challenge of zeroing in on what is really at stake.

So the question bids us to stop running and to turn around and look at what might actually be ailing us.

We often use one worry to shield us from another.

We worry about an upcoming interview to protect us from worrying about the state of our relationship.

We worry about money in order not to worry about death.

So it can be helpful to keep a supplementary enquiry in mind.

What worry might lie behind the worry that is currently obsessing me?

We go around being far braver than is good for us.

Because we need to get on with the practicalities of the day, we frequently push to the side all the slights, hurts, disappointments and griefs that flow through our river of consciousness.

We choose not to notice how vulnerable we are for fear that we cannot afford our own sensitivity.

But stoicism and strength carry their own dangers.

With the help of this question, we should give time to noticing that despite our competent and strong exteriors, lots of smaller and larger things have managed to hurt us today, like every day.

Perhaps someone didn't laugh when we told a joke, our partner has been a little distant of late, a friend didn't call, a senior figure at work was less than completely impressed.

In fact, there is no clearer evidence of our maturity than our capacity to explore the ways in which we, like everyone else on the planet, are as sensitive and easily bruised as a child. 3.

We are attached to the norms of civilisation.

Nevertheless, here too, we need to have the courage of our actual sensitivity.

No day goes by without someone annoying us in some rather fundamental way, usually without them in any way meaning to.

Our spirits will be lighter if we can bring ourselves to spell out the injury.

What might we tell ourselves to re-find equilibrium?

If we were lucky, we used to do this sort of thing with a kindly parent when we returned home from school.

Now, as careful guardians to ourselves, we can internalise the process and use our inner adult to soothe the always easily flustered but also easily calmed inner child. 4.

Much of what we feel but don't process has a habit of ending up in our bodies.

That's why we develop backache, tense shoulders, knotted stomachs and fluttery hearts.

In order to live more easily around our bodies, we should regularly drain them of the emotions that they have unfairly been burdened with.

We should mentally scan our bodies from top to toe and ask ourselves what each organ might require.

What is surprising is that we're likely to have some very concrete answers just waiting for us when we ask. 5.

Despite so much that's difficult, every day brings us up against a range of things that still delight and enchant us.

The light on the kitchen wall in the morning, a child holding its parent's hand at the bus stop, a fig we had at lunchtime.

These might not sound like things we should bother to register.

But, summoned up in their full richness and held in our attention for a few moments, they can help to fortify us against the voices of despair.

We tend to assume that if something is lovely, it will strike our minds as being so, with full force, without us needing to do anything supplementary.

We need to make a conscious effort to squeeze joy out of beneficial elements that might otherwise be forgotten without notice.

Our lives have some lovely aspects to them.

But we may, surprisingly, regularly and rather clumsily, have to make a list of them in order to realise that they exist.

When Socrates, apparently the wisest man of antiquity, was asked to define our highest purpose as human beings, he offered a still legendary answer.

We should aspire to be people who never cease to try to make sense of themselves at the close of every day.

We should devote ourselves constantly to trying to shrink the scale of the darkness within us, bringing what was once in shadow closer to the light of interpretation, so that we stand a chance of becoming slightly less frantic and rather more joyful, creative and calm creatures.