Axel Papma's website

Five years ago I didn’t have too much perspective in my life. If there is one person with whom I could share these thoughts it would be him. I want to tell him that things will be alright and that he should go to the gym. I have gathered knowledge and insights that could help him in making a positive impact on his own life and on the lives of people around him. I do not have the capacity to share my thoughts with him. But I am able to share my thoughts with the rest of the world. I am noticing that I am overthinking what I want to write down, but it is time to overcome my fear and express myself. Five years ago I would have never believed I could live the life I live now. I was quite ego-driven back then. I lacked vision and perspective. I lacked self-confidence. Not to be too critical of myself back then, there was nothing wrong with me. But the situation was that I wasn’t taking responsibility for my own life. I blamed external factors for the problems I had. I wasn’t taking action. I lacked vision and dealt with pain and insecurities the same way I had done my whole life. The coping mechanism I developed from an early age on was to play videogames to deal with negative emotion. When I was younger, my parents restricted my time on the laptop to 1-2 hours per day. They did their very best to provide the structure I already longed for back then. But five years ago, I was at an age at which it was not appropriate and possible for them to limit my time on the computer. They could not protect me from falling into the coping mechanism any longer. The time had come for me to face it myself. Because I wasn’t really restricted in my time on the computer, I spent a lot of time playing video games, which after three hours doesn’t make you feel very good. I watched netflix and youtube. Some series I watched more than nine times. I watched too much porn, which really messes with the head of young men, drains energy and interferes with developing self confidence a lot. Looking back on it, I am very happy that I developed the discipline to stop these habits. Slowly but surely I made it out, although it definitely wasn’t easy. I am now at a point where I don’t have the urge anymore to fall into the habits mentioned. My life lacked perspective and the aforementioned bad habits did not make me happy. I had not yet learned to put the pursuit of meaningful goals in the first place. And my wants of the moment in second place. Things really started to change in a good way when I started taking responsibility of my life. I changed my habits. It took me three years to get control over how many youtube videos I watch. What really changed everything was that I started noticing I had potential from an intellectual perspective. This dawned on me when I got back the results from my first German test. Because I followed a different route than other students, I hadn’t had German and I was three years behind the other students. In the summer I studied very hard for the test and I got the highest grade of the class. That was the first time I deeply felt that I could alter my reality and set goals and achieve these. I started to believe in myself on a fundamental level. And it felt amazing. I made the goal to graduate with honors, which I did. There were still challenges in my life and my desire to succeed was also partly rooted in the ego but my life became a lot better. I had something to do instead of playing video games, studying. I started to realize how much I loved studying. I was very driven to get good results. I started waking up at 6 am every day to study before going to class. My confidence increased. There was a goal in my life. Relatively speaking I have been a very disagreeable person since when I was a child. I wasn’t very eager to listen to teachers and parents telling me what to do. And so I was never motivated to study and only discover this when I was a lot older. I feel this is a phenomenon that quite some boys face growing up. Another major improvement that happened in my life was that I started going to the gym. I have played soccer my whole life but after an injury, I couldn’t play for almost half a year. My diet was terrible. I looked into the mirror after that half year one day and realized that I did not look very good. I had become this pale looking kid with a bad posture. I walked with hanging shoulders, showing the outside world I had no believe in myself. I then decided to get a six pack (surely I would get a girlfriend then, I figured). So I worked out my abs for an hour nearly every day for three months. I was too scared to go to the gym yet though but after those three months I finally got the courage to do so. And I went almost every day, and got a proper workout schedule. It didn’t take me very long to become very muscular. One year after my injury happened I was in the  best shape of my life and I worked out consistently. Also, for the first time in my life, I watched my diet. This was mainly focused on eating a lot of protein but it was already a huge improvement. Since then working out has become very important to me. And since then a lot of good health related habits have been added, which makes me feel great. Just like the goal of graduating with honors, my fitness journey had a very profound and positive impact on my life. I now had two goals to focus on. I became happier as well because of watching my diet and working out a lot. Seeing my body change and noticing again I had the possibility to change my life for the better gave me confidence and a desire to look for new challenges. Being so disagreeable and ego-driven, making friends wasn’t always easy for me. But because my self-image changed for the better I became able to positively influence my relations with the people around me. I started making friends and participating in social activities. My increased confidence and my newly developed discipline also led me to alter the habits which didn’t have a positive influence on me. It took some time but with goal-calendars, insightful moments and very hard work I managed to quit playing video games and I stopped watching netflix and porn. The massive amount of time that was left I started filling up with reading books, social activities, working more, writing, meditating and cooking. Looking back on it, I am very proud of how I managed to change my life for the better. And it makes me excited about the future. Of course there are still challenges in my life. Challenges in my life now are to live in the present moment and not to live out of my ego. To live out of love and not out of fear. I wanted to write about how to come from where I was to where I am now. How to not be run by your emotions but to let discipline run you. To live as a stoic. To do what has to be done even when you don’t feel like it. That’s how you make the world a better place and how self belief is developed. Anyone who needs help in this journey should feel free to contact me.