My Personal Growth Lessons from 2025 that Will Help You Get Through 2026
Every year teaches us something, but some years really kick you down and force you to rebuild. 2025 was one of those years for me. It brought another round of depression, anxiety, and deep emotional reckoning that forced me to completely restructure how I live, think, and care for my energy.
This blog post is a reflection on what that year revealed: why energy comes before mindset, how the mind actually heals through new input and not just time, why suppressed emotions always return, and why happiness is never really gone.
It’s that time of year again, when I like to sit down, relax, look back to the past year and reflect on the lessons I’ve learned.
In the context of the physical world, which we call life, it makes sense to call our biggest learnings “lessons”. After all, they do resemble lessons that we learn in order to make the most of our lives.
Yet, spiritually speaking, there are no lessons. Everything already exists. Everything has already been experienced. We are perfect and complete. Therefore, there’s nothing to learn — only to remember.
So each year, the veil in front of our hidden, subconscious mind lifts just a bit, and more and more of the true nature of our lives is revealed. This “revealing” is really remembering how things are. What life is, who you really are, how it all works perfectly.
But whether we call what we come to know “remembering” or “learning lessons” is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is, what we do with the given information.
We can choose to either:
- Ignore what we learned and repeat the same lessons over and over again
- Take what we learned into heart and apply that knowledge to our lives
The first is ignorance. The latter is wisdom.
That said, it’s been an eventful year for me.
I’ve struggled again with depression and anxiety. I’ve had to restructure most of my life. I’ve had to face my fears and my deepest emotions, which, funny enough, have not been “negative” at all. Does it seem logical to fear love, happiness, and peace of mind?
Yet, these have been things that I’ve struggled with. And let me tell you, it’s been a wild ride.
Fortunately, thanks to what I’ve learned about anxiety and depression over the past 15 years, I’m now able to start 2026 as a healed, happy, whole human being. I’ve reinvented myself and learned some valuable lessons along the way.
That’s a long way of saying here are the best personal growth lessons I’ve learned in 2025. I hope they will make your 2026 easier.
Key Takeaways
1. Energy comes before mindset
When energy is depleted, positive thinking, motivation, and action are impossible. Healing starts by stopping energy leaks(such as unprocessed emotions, negative beliefs, and stress) so your system can recover first.
2. Your mind learns through input, not time
The nervous system and the mind don’t heal just by waiting. They heal through new experiences—real or imagined. Using your imagination can train your mind to make health, safety, and happiness familiar again.
3. Suppressed emotions always return with interest
Emotions don’t magically disappear when ignored. They build pressure until something breaks. Allowing yourself to express your emotions is not weakness, but it’s natural and it’s how emotions help clarity, relief, and joy return.
1. Energy Is Everything
Energy is the real currency in life. Without energy to do the things you want or need to do, it doesn’t matter how much time you have on your hands. All the side hustles and efforts to build your dream life become irrelevant if you simply do not have the energy to work on them.
So this occurred to me during the worst days of depression: It’s really a state of low energy. And I’m not just talking about physical energy needed to operate the body and mind. I’m also talking about “life energy” itself; the “will” or the “motivator” behind all your thoughts, words, and actions.
When depressed, energy leaks all over the place. You become a barrel full of holes trying to hold water. You know it’s not going to happen. Energy, or water in this metaphor, goes everywhere else except inside the barrel (that is, your body/mind/spirit complex).
When energy is low, insight, logic, emotional regulation, and “good mindset” become impossible.
That’s why most self-help regimes fail to help. Positive thinking, gratitude journaling, not to mention going to the gym or just outside for a walk, may be literally impossible feats because you simply do not have the energy for them.
So while most approaches say: “Change your thoughts → feel better → act differently.”
My lived experience says: Restore energy first → the mind becomes capable of change at all.
Healing Begins By Plugging the Holes
It doesn’t matter how much energy you try to pour into your system by taking supplements, working out, or overdosing on caffeine if it just keeps leaking away.
You need to find and plug the holes first, then you can start holding more and more energy. This is a process that may take some time and it starts with awareness. You have to find the leaks to be able to patch them.
Filling the holes (which are often negative thoughts, emotions or beliefs) is then done with acceptance, which involves accepting what has happened, why it happened, and who was involved. Then, forgiving everyone involved, including, first and foremost, yourself.
I describe this process in more detail in my AAA framework if you’re interested.
Reclaiming your energy is a key step in healing, and it starts with finding and fixing the energy leaks that leave you stressed, anxious, and/or depressed.
It may very well start with changing your thoughts. But the goal should not be to “act differently”, but to “plug the holes” and restore energy, then replace the burnt-out wiring that is your central nervous system. It takes both time and new input for your mind to rewire the system and restore lost energy.
New input is what we’ll discuss next.
2. You control what enters the mind
“People think they need time to heal. But most of the time, what they really need is new experiences that show their nervous system a different reality. So what we actually need is new input.”
This is a quote that really opened my eyes. It made me think about depression differently, because I had thought that, given enough time, I would return to normal (which, of course, didn’t happen).
You see, the mind seeks what’s familiar, not what makes you happy and healthy. Your mind’s job is to keep you safe, and the safest things it knows are the familiar ones, even though they may have brought you nothing but pain.
It sounds stupid, but that’s how our minds have kept us alive through the ages. Familiar things were safe; anything unfamiliar could have been possibly life-threatening. It’s a survival wiring, a leftover from a different time.
The mind also has biases, one of the most prominent being the confirmation bias. This means that the mind seeks to confirm what you already know. You have a belief about life, and your mind tirelessly seeks evidence in your life that will confirm this belief.
If you believe you are not worthy of love, your mind will seek evidence for this. If you believe you have bad luck and are always left depressed, no matter what you do, that’s what’s familiar to your mind, and it will seek evidence to confirm this.
Your mind will shift your focus to what you believe to be true, whether positive or negative.
Your mind will guide your actions unconsciously, making you repeat patterns and habits that confirm what you already know to be true.
Imagination Is the Key to Healing
So how do you fix your mind? How do you make health, success, and happiness familiar to your mind? How do you give your mind “new input” to align your system?
This is perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned while recovering from depression:
Your mind responds to imagination the same way it does to real experiences.
Imagination can be used to gather information from your experiences to build something new, but it can also be a creative force, creating new experiences from pure thought alone.
The mind doesn’t really differentiate between what’s really happening and what’s imagined. It reacts pretty much the same way to both.
Think about it: Have you ever woken up from a nightmare covered in sweat, heart pounding? That was just a dream, but your mind (and body, because your mind, body, and spirit are one inseparable whole) reacted to it as if it were really happening.
So if you want to familiarise your mind with positive things, like great health, loving relationships, success at work, etc, you have to imagine it first.
That’s how your mind will learn to think and react in a new, positive way.
Imagine all the things you want, and your mind will become familiar with them.
Your mind will then use the confirmation bias to your advantage: It will seek evidence around you that proves your newfound beliefs right. It will make you think, speak, and act in a new way that confirms what your mind thinks is true.
That is the key.
Really, that is the key to healing, creating your dream life, and being happy (of course, there can be more to it, but this is the key to getting started).
Imagination is the gateway to everything you’ve ever dreamed of.
3. Suppressed emotions don’t magically disappear
Then, what’s stopping you from living your happiest, healthiest life, if it’s just as simple as imagining it?
Imagination is where it all begins, but then there may be obstacles along the way. I hate to admit this, but emotions have always been my greatest weakness. Showing, or even fully feeling, any emotions has been what’s made my life… let’s say, difficult at times.
But emotions are truth-tellers. They reveal our first, true thoughts about all situations in our lives. It makes sense if we try to avoid the negative emotions, such as grief and anger, but why avoid positive emotions such as love and joy?
In my case, it’s been fear that has blocked me from feeling my emotions fully. Fear of what might happen. Fear of people not liking me if I reveal who I truly am. My life was built on my ego, because I thought I had it all together. I was by society’s standards successful, but inside, I was a broken mess. (Still am, but making a great recovery.)
Whatever the case in your life, emotions are there to help you. You can’t run away from your emotions. I had to learn that the hard way last year – again (sigh). Emotions are, as mentioned, truth-tellers. They reveal how we truly feel about any given situation, and are there to help us navigate it. They are not our enemies, but signposts guiding us forward to a life filled with joy.
Knowing that, I still ignored how I felt. I didn’t pay attention to my emotions, ignored them, or tried to repress them. But the thing about emotions is that you can’t run away from them. They will catch up sooner or later, and the more you wait, the harder they will hit.
You Can’t Outrun Your Emotions
For me, I tried again, ignoring my emotions for well over a year. My emotions became like water, and my mind was a dam. As water keeps piling up behind a dam with no way out, guess what happens?
The dam breaks.
Avoiding emotions only works up to the point until it doesn’t. And the repercussions can be pretty brutal.
That is not to say there’s a point of no return, when you can’t make a recovery anymore. I believe there is always a chance to heal.
What’s interesting is my emotional dam broke when I finally felt safe enough to allow my emotions to express themselves. That’s what they do, and that’s how they “do the work” they are designed to do. Grief, anger, envy… They all have their way of pressing themselves out of us. If we simply allow them to (without directing them at others, that’s not necessary), they release their grip on us, and we are left lighter, clearer-headed, more optimistic, and even joyful. That’s how they work.
This is my favourite, and I keep repeating it a lot: the word ‘express’ comes from Latin origins, meaning ‘to press out’. And that’s what emotions do: they express themselves, quite literally meaning that they press themselves out. That’s how we move through fear, anger, envy, and grief. Emotions must be allowed to express themselves naturally, without directing them at others.
Please remember: you can’t run away from your emotions. Otherwise, all sorts of trouble will arise, like in my case, anxiety and depression. If emotions keep piling up, they will become like water behind a dam; eventually, everything will break. The healthy way to deal with your emotions is to face them and allow them to express themselves.
4. The Power of Expression
Speaking of expressing emotions…
There’s another thing that I like about expression (pressing out emotions): Creativity, i.e., expressing ourselves, is in human nature, both as a way to align with our spirit…
but also a way to literally “press out” feelings inside of us (I told you this was my favourite thing to say).
Last year, I experienced the power of expression through journaling. When I started, it was a long session. After pouring 2,000 words of emotions into my journal in one day, I felt lighter and clearer, almost as if those feelings had been pressed out of me. Which they were in quite a concrete way; by moving them through my system from mind, through body, to paper (which, in this case, was a laptop, but the motions remain the same).
When we write, speak, paint, draw, or create (express ourselves) in any way, we give emotions and thoughts a natural release instead of letting them pile up inside.
This is why journaling, therapy, or even just talking to someone can feel so healing: expression literally moves emotions out of the system, freeing up space for clarity and peace.
Conclusion: Happiness isn’t missing, it’s just buried under survival
You know what the most enduring, yet always the most surprising lesson was for me in 2025?
Depression didn’t destroy happiness. It just made it inaccessible.
Happiness is the default. It’s the factory setting, the baseline that we’re supposed to return to when we function normally and healthily.
That’s the argument I’ve made for years, and this time I had to prove it to myself by living it. 2025 was one of the toughest years in my life, and that’s saying a lot because I can remember at least two more years loaded with extremely negative events and emotions.
But the proof is in the pudding, as they say. Happiness is always there; it just may be very inaccessible.
This matters because it changes how we approach depression or any other negative state of being.
We do not have to struggle through something in hopes of finding or somehow creating happiness at the end of the road.
We only need to remove what blocks our access to it.
It’s an entirely different task, and it explains why brief moments of joy may still appear amidst all the negative emotions. It also explains why it feels like happiness returns in flashes before stabilizing. And it explains why training the mind for positivity feels more like remembering than learning.
At least that’s been true in my case. And it ties in with another example I like to use a lot: Happiness comes naturally to children. It’s so obvious when we watch them play. Happiness just is there, in the moment, needing no external validation, reward, searching, or anything like that.
Happiness exists very naturally in children. And it exists in us, adults, too; it just gets buried under so much stuff along the way. Children are happy because they’re not stuck in survival mode like most of us adults are (to cut corners and say it in the simplest way possible).
So the reality of finding happiness and living a happy life lies in training your mind and your nervous system to return to the baseline that it happiness, health, meaning, and peace of mind.
It requires learning to calm the nervous system, learning to restore energy, learning to deal with emotions in a healthy way, and learning to once again familiarise the mind with the positive, joyful state of being it was naturally wired with.
Disclaimer
The entire contents of this blog are based upon the opinions of the author. It is intended for informational and educational purposes only. The information in this blog is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your health care professional before trying any of the products or methods based on this content. I cannot guarantee that you will be free of stress, anxiety or depression, or that you will be happy. I simply want to share with you what I have discovered during my twenty years of seeking happiness and what has worked for me may not work for you.
