Get Out of Crisis in a Few Days: Step-by-Step Technique

AVAlexander Volchek

Questions to ask yourself when you're lost and don't know what to do next. You wake up every morning without any real sense of the day. You feel weighed down. It's Groundhog Day: apathy, difficulty, anxiety. Often, you barely register the day in the morning. Only in the evening do you remember that another day has passed. Or at lunchtime, you suddenly become aware, with a strange feeling of anxiety, that the day has slipped by again. If these states feel familiar, stay with me here. A very important and highly effective step is to work through this and move out of that state through questions—your own questions. If you work through the whole situation in the sequence I'm going to describe, you'll be able to feel completely different as early as tomorrow. Incidentally, you'd really support the channel by liking this video in advance. That reminds me: my camera operator and I just had lunch here by the ocean in California. In America, there's a widespread system in restaurants and cafés where you walk up, order, and then they bring your food. You pay at the beginning and automatically have to pay the tip then too. Having to tip before you've even tasted the food is a little irritating.

You aren't going to come back later to leave a tip, but it really is irritating. A friend of mine who lives in San Francisco tells me, “I leave zero in those restaurants. It's nonsense. Why should I do that?” So give the video a like before you've watched it. At least that will support the channel. And if you have wonderful feelings and emotions, leaving any comment at the end will be a real tip. Now, what questions should you ask yourself? If you're lost in life and don't know your next steps, how can you resolve that through questions you ask yourself? One of our fundamental tasks in this life is to get to know ourselves, to truly know ourselves. If you're engaged in that process of discovering and understanding yourself, you generally won't stay in depression, a prolonged emotional crisis, or prolonged confusion. Those states can arise, but you won't fundamentally live in them. A system of asking yourself questions lets you get out of any difficult state very quickly.

I want to describe one problem with answering questions right away. Again, our goal is for you to immediately sense a path out of the state you're in—to sense it right away. One problem is that you will very often formulate answers you like or want to receive. That's how our system works: it automatically produces a certain kind of answer. I suggest setting yourself this task: the answer isn't what matters, and neither is the final solution that changes your morning dejection, routine, worthlessness, repetition in life, lack of money, lack of vividness, or lack of emotion. The step isn't to solve that problem. Pay close attention here when you receive the question to ask yourself: what matters is simply asking it. Your task isn't to look for an answer but to ask yourself the question. If you keep asking and make it your aim to study it, you'll get the right answers. If you make it your aim to get the right answers—and really to resolve the final situation itself—you'll very likely get a false answer.

That's the wrong cause-and-effect relationship. It's as though, when I was young, I'd told myself, “To drink coffee in California on a Friday at lunchtime, I need to take these five steps.” Imagine me at eighteen, deciding which five steps I need to take to be drinking coffee in California at forty-two. It's ridiculous—absolute bullshit and absurdity. The first question is: why does this state arise at all? Why does it arise? Why does a crisis arise? There are two aspects for you to observe here. This is a question you should keep asking: “Why does this state arise in me?” It doesn't arise because you have a lot of money or very little. Not because you have many friends or few. Not because you live in a good country or a bad one. Not because you were born poor or rich. Not because your parents were wonderful or were alcoholics. Not because you've worked at one job for twenty years, had fifteen jobs in twenty years, or never worked anywhere at all.

That isn't why this state arises. Again, the most important thing is to look for the cause and recognize that you don't know it. If you know the true cause of this persistent, everyday state I'm describing, then the state cannot exist. It's impossible. It's very important to recognize that clearly. Please hear this again. Ask yourself the question: “What is the cause?” Why should you ask yourself that question? Immediately tell yourself, “I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer.” What matters here is the question itself. That's the first question. Today I'm taking you through a series of questions. It's very important to follow them in sequence and stay with this, because our goal is for you to feel different tomorrow—for a single video to provide that impulse. I'm certainly not going to change your life. You won't be living in a different apartment tomorrow. You won't suddenly have a thousand times more money in your wallet. What matters most is the state you'll be in: how you'll feel. The number-one problem in resolving emotional stress, conflicts, arguments, or any discussion is the lack of calm in that moment.

Again, our task is to reach a state of calm through questions. So why am I in this crisis? Why am I in this state? I'm in this state because I took a certain set of actions. Or I'm in this state because I generated it myself, here and now. Or I'm in this state because the house I live in generates it. In most cases, you are the one generating the state. The problem is that, because you're generating it, you can want to get rid of it as much as you like, but you won't: you generated it yourself. You reached this point because you haven't been able to genuinely ask yourself different questions in life. Who am I? Why did certain events happen to me yesterday? Do I understand that a year from now, circumstances may arise beyond my plans and my awareness—and that they will? Do I understand that I don't control life and time? Do I understand that I'm a unique person, absolutely unique, unlike anyone else? There isn't a single person in the world like me. Do I understand that I'm also an ordinary person, just like anyone else—the richest, the smartest, the least intelligent, the sickest, the healthiest?

I'm an ordinary person who should be treated as a human being, and I should treat everyone else as a human being too. Do I understand that everyone can do what they think they need to do, even if they break the laws of the universe, even if they kill people, damage other people's lives, or deceive them? Do I live according to the laws of the universe? Do I follow what is genuinely true? Am I aware of it every day? When I woke up yesterday, did I think well of everyone? Did I wish bad things on people? Did I set out to deceive other people? Did I create an illusion of the day ahead: “Today will be wonderful. I'll carry out all my plans”? That was deception and a lie from the start. Am I honest with my mother, father, brothers, sisters, and children? Am I honest with my husband, wife, girlfriend, or boyfriend? Am I honest with them? Can I genuinely discuss at least half the questions I'm facing with them—at least half the questions I'm facing, not all of them, half?

Am I ready, throughout the day today, to pay attention to what I say in conversations and whether my words harm other people? When I listen to others, am I ready to really hear what they're saying, try to make sense of it, and understand them, instead of treating my own opinion as the important one? Am I ready to hear different points of view? Am I ready to recognize and accept that I've never lived by the principle of studying, analyzing, and wanting to know myself? You hear and know a certain small part of yourself. Put this enormous question to yourself: “Do I know more than one percent of myself?” When—

More than one percent. Asking this question every day, observing, will enable powerful steps forward—breakthrough steps. If you've watched this far, you may feel emptiness and pain arising inside as you hear these questions, with no idea what to do. At first there may have been interest, a question, a desire to understand: “What is this?” Now you may feel like giving up, powerless, afraid, apathetic. If you encounter that state while following this sequence—and there's a reason I told you to follow the video from beginning to end—it's actually a very good and appropriate state. It tells you you've come close to a point from which you can move toward recovery. If the questions I asked prompted ridicule or resistance, or your system kept trying to find an answer to each one and work it out: “Did I deceive someone here? Did I do something to someone? How did I feel? No, I think I felt pretty good. This part was fine. I communicate well with this person and badly with that one…”

All that noise in your head starts drawing you away: you want to yawn, go to sleep, switch the video off, escape, do something else, open your phone, check WhatsApp messages, or change the subject. That's what's really happening. Everyone wants short, fast videos with changing states, simple and easy to take in. But when you genuinely take on the role of a student, the question “How?” disappears, because I've just explained how: ask yourself this series of questions, however many there are. Write those questions down on a piece of paper. Write them down for yourself, stay with them, and keep asking yourself. If you can spend a whole week asking these questions throughout the day, regardless of the answers or the state you experience—if you can simply keep asking—you'll make very significant progress. That's how life works: we want to move forward very quickly, as quickly as possible, to make progress like never before. We want to go even faster than fast, to move forward as we never have. “Can I make so much progress in a week that I keep moving forward and forward?”

Draw a line—a timeline. Put forty years of life ahead of you on it. Do you want to keep accelerating and picking up speed every week, or just for one week and then be at peace? And what is peace? Is it peace? Does it mean nothing changes, or that everything develops? If everything develops, is that peace or movement? Please support the channel with a like if you forgot to do that. If you really enjoyed it and have a question formulated… If you really enjoyed it, subscribe to the channel. Share it with your friends. You can write your questions; I make sure to answer all of them.