From the author: How to find a balance between “I want” and “I need” and free up energy for self-realization - find out in the article. We all like to receive praise and look good in the eyes of others. When Close people rejoice at our successes, are proud of us, we experience double pleasure from our own achievements and from the fact that our family supports us. We all need a feeling of personal fulfillment and success. But it happens that the need to be good forces us to do something to the detriment of our desires. For example, trying to be a good wife, every day we fight the desire to take a walk in the park in order to have time to clean up and cook dinner. We do homework with the child, although we don’t like it, in order to look like a good mother in our own eyes. To earn the praise of our superiors, we stay late at work, although we would like to be at home or with friends. We suffer every day in a job we don’t like because we are valued at it. When sacrificing ourselves becomes too frequent, and we are forced to regularly suppress our desires, we gradually lose the ability to enjoy life. There is another side. A constant bias towards “I only do what I want”, life on the wave of my momentary desires. In this case, a person does only what he wants, but deprives himself of prospects, the opportunity to go towards more serious and larger goals, to be realized in life. He is infantile, and it is difficult for him to achieve some more significant desires and plans. How to find the fine line between infantility and adulthood? Where to follow your desires, and where to hold them back? Sometimes everyone has to do something that they don’t like. But this is justified if we are consciously moving towards some goal that is important to us. Such a sacrifice is understandable if it makes sense to us, when we know that thanks to our patience we have moved closer to something important and intended. This means that we, as adults, are guided by the reality principle. Sigmund Freud wrote about the reality principle. A very young child is guided by the principle of pleasure; he strives to do only what he wants at the moment. Gradually growing up, the child understands that in order to get something, sometimes you have to be patient or make an effort, and then the principle of reality appears in his life. The search for direct and immediate satisfaction stops, workarounds are sought, and the achievement of results may be delayed depending on external conditions. The most important thing here is to maintain a reasonable balance. If you are used to putting off or suppressing desires all the time, they do not disappear anywhere, but move into the unconscious and begin to influence our psyche from the inside. Tension gradually accumulates, and if it does not find an adequate outlet, it can lead to negative consequences. Life will lose its colors, everything will begin to irritate, depression may begin. If you feel forced to do something you don't like, explain to yourself why you are doing it in the first place. If you come to the conclusion that the task is truly necessary, be sure to reward yourself. Don’t put off rewards for too long, allow yourself something pleasant for the unpleasant. If you feel that in the hustle and bustle you don’t have time to think about your desires, stop right now, take a deep breath, listen to your bodily sensations. If you don’t listen to your desires for a long time, over time it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between them. Everything that gives pleasant bodily sensations helps to restore connection with feelings and the body: for some it is water, for others warming up in a bathhouse, massage, dancing, etc. The habit of not following your desires, doing as you should, not as you want , comes from childhood, from relationships with parents. When parents demand obedience from a child, when they praise only for behavior that they like. Without taking into account the desires and aspirations of the child himself, they are praised only for those successes that correspond to the goals set by the parents themselves. For failures, they scold and punish, instead of proper support. Here at.