Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Emotions

The Best Breathing Exercise for Anxiety

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Diaphragmatic breathing (also called belly breathing and abdominal breathing) engages the diaphragm—that large, dome-shaped muscle at the base of the lungs, separating the chest cavity from the abdomen.

In Meditation for the Rest of Us (2009,) James Baltzell suggests observing sleeping babies and following their lead: draw air deep through your nose into their lungs, expanding the pulmonary cavity that houses your heart and lungs. The diaphragm moves down and fills your lungs with oxygen. New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Dr. Chiti Parikh recommends starting out lying down so that the surface beneath can give you feedback on whether you’re breathing back into the back of your body:

Lie on your back, relax your muscles, and place one hand on the chest and the other on the belly. Take long, slow breaths in and out through your nose, and watch your hands as they move. Breathe in for four seconds, and then out for six. Over time, lengthen your exhales. Notice how, with shallow breaths, the chest moves, but with deep breathing, the belly moves too.

Don’t get aggravated as thoughts of worry or anxiety enter the mind. Don’t quell your unquiet mind. Gently acknowledge the thoughts and let your attention slip from them.

Idea for Impact: Learning to breathe deep, focus your attention, and relax is a skill that can help subdue stress and stay calm. Practice this exercise whenever you’re anxious and realize quick, shallow breathing. As with any skill, your ability to anchor your mind in the present moment will improve with practice.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed
  2. How to Encourage Yourself During Tough Times
  3. A Quick Way to De-stress: The “Four Corners Breathing” Exercise
  4. If Meditation Isn’t Working For You, Try Intermittent Silence
  5. The Law of Petty Irritations

It’s Not What You See; It’s How You See It

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Try to consider the sunny side of a situation rather than focusing on what’s wrong with it.

If it’s pouring rain, don’t upset yourself over plans hampered or stress about getting drenched. Instead, relish the splendor of landscape under the grey sky, delight in the pattering noise of the rain, and savor how the flowers have their heads as if to rest. Appreciate how rain is the great facilitator of life. And use this as a perfect excuse to curl up with a good book and chill out.

It’s not what you see; it’s how you see it.

Got a demanding new boss? Bring to mind all the things you can learn from her—including what not to do as a manager.

Reframing allows you an expanded view of your reality. You can move your experience from a negative frame to a more hopeful one, filled with opportunities.

How you frame something can change everything. When you change your point of view, the facts of the situation remain the same. But the shift in your emotional tone changes the meaning that you give to the situation.

Idea for Impact: Practice cognitive control. Learn how to put things in perspective.

When something or somebody annoys you, shift your attention. Ask, “What’s right about this? What’s to be appreciated about this?” Imagine the best possible outcomes.

Reframing an event or stimulus changes your emotional response to it—and it helps keep stress in check.

Changing the way you see the world is not a denial. It doesn’t imply naive optimism. Instead, it is the purging of mental pollutants such as dislike and anger—even aggression—that poison the mind and disable you from finding refuge in presence.

In Buddhism, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Law of Petty Irritations
  2. Imagine a Better Response
  3. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  4. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  5. Summary of Richard Carlson’s ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’

Change Your Perspective, Change Your Reactions

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From the eighth-century Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryavatara (“Entrance to the Path of Awakening,”) a translation from Stephen Batchelor’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (1979:)

Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But just leather on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it
 
Likewise it is not possible for me
To restrain the external course of things
But should I restrain this mind of mine
What would be the need to restrain all else?

A powerful reminder that you can’t magically make the whole world and its people run smooth and easy, but you can reorient your heart and mind to change your perspective and endure the bumps that you’ll encounter.

Idea for Impact: If something isn’t to your liking, change your liking or find something else of your liking. The willingness to adjust is perhaps the single most critical human faculty.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  2. What the Buddha Taught About Restraining and Dealing with Anger
  3. Begin with Yourself
  4. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  5. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be

Get Rid of Relationship Clutter

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Don’t hold on to relationships that aren’t supportive or beautiful—they’re robbing you of joy and nourishment. They’re exhausting your resources for the relationships that do matter.

Letting go of relationship clutter isn’t about tossing people out like tatty pairs of shoes. It’s about getting reflective if our relationships honor our soul self. Is there respect, love, and a sense of wanting the best for each other?

Find ways to distance yourself from relationships that drain your soul. Don’t burn bridges, though. Don’t hold onto every issue or argument. It’s more gracious—and better for you—just walk away, head held high, mouth shut. You’ll be glad you did it that way.

Idea for Impact: To get rid of clutter is to make room for more supportive and nurturing relationships.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Affection Is No Defense: Good Intentions Make Excellent Alibis
  2. The Secret to Happiness in Relationships is Lowering Your Expectations
  3. How to … Break the Complaint Habit
  4. To Love Without Risk Is to Live Without Meaning
  5. What the Buddha Taught About Restraining and Dealing with Anger

How to Encourage Yourself During Tough Times

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My biggest takeaway from Daniel M. Cable’s Exceptional: Build Your Personal Highlight Reel and Unlock Your Potential (2020) is maintaining an inventory of reminders of all of the things you’re grateful for: the achievements, accomplishments, things you’re proud of, and events you want to celebrate—even others’ notes of gratitude.

When you’re entranced by ongoing anxieties and unable to find refuge in presence, the negative self-talk becomes your default setting. Unable to focus on what is happening right now, you spiral downward and find yourself in ruts that hold you back from your potential. Reigniting a certain sense of pride within yourself can jolt you into a more optimistic cycle and create real personal change. It can enable you to maintain a stable center no matter what’s going on in your life right now.

Research on the ‘Reflected Best-Self Exercise’ indicates that scanning the “highlight reel” of the best you’ve achieved in your life can help you, as it would a professional athlete, rediscover and reinforce how to repeat past successes. It can energize you to use your strengths even more and give more to others.

Idea for Impact: You make your most significant impact when focusing on what you do best. A personal highlight reel will remind you how others perceive you when you make your best impact and hope you build upon the unique strengths that make you exceptional.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed
  2. The Best Breathing Exercise for Anxiety
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. The Law of Petty Irritations
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

How Emotional Resilience Improves with Age

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Studies of social and emotional aging have consistently shown that we tend to enjoy a better sense of emotional well-being as we grow older—starting from our late 50s.

The brain slows down, and memory deteriorates with age, so we process information slower. We get better at regulating the instinct to enact annoyance and anger.

As we get older, we tend to have a positive bias. We stop sweating the small stuff, pick our battles wisely, and find it easier to let go of situations we experience as unfavorable, especially with friends and family.

The lessons these studies bear for us all: organize your life’s physical and social aspects to reduce unnecessary stressors. Happiness is indeed a result, not a cause.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  2. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. This Trick Can Relieve Your Anxiety: “What’s the worst that can happen?”
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

Don’t Suppress Your Emotions

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The Buddha taught that emotions are part of being human. Redemption comes solely from knowledge, the root of which lies in the awareness of the reasons for suffering.

Buddhism discourages you from ignoring unpleasant emotions so that you don’t have to experience them.

Acknowledging the way things are—and that they can’t change—may be the most challenging step toward happiness. It’s worth trying because you really can be happy, even when your life looks nothing like you thought it would.

Don’t try to quash your emotions; let yourself feel them. Yes, even the unpleasant ones. This attitude enables you to process them and challenge the dread that you won’t handle them.

Idea for Impact: Acceptance helps you work with the life you have. You can feel contentment in life without berating yourself for not feeling what you think you’re supposed to feel.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to … Embrace the Transience of Emotions
  2. Feeling Is the Enemy of Thinking—Sometimes
  3. The Power of Negative Thinking
  4. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  5. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

Mindfulness Can Disengage You from Others

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This BBC article warns that mindfulness has a way of stirring people to think of themselves in more independent—not interdependent—terms:

A recent study suggests that, in some contexts, practicing mindfulness really can exaggerate some people’s selfish tendencies. With their increased inward focus, they seem to forget about others and are less willing to help those in need.

To counteract these effects, experts suggest other mindfulness techniques such as “loving-kindness meditation” (deliberately thinking about our sense of connection with others) and “mindful listening” (paying particular attention to another’s descriptions of emotional situations.)

Mindfulness is an expansive nonjudgmental awareness of one’s experiences. While mindfulness may help you get a deeper understanding of yourself and comprehend “you” and “your mind stuff” deeper, it takes deep listening, sensitivity, and empathy to learn about “others” and “you and others.” As you tune more into yourself, you should become more able to tune into others.

The original practice and philosophy of mindfulness meditation actually consist of many of these other features mentioned in the BBC article. Somehow, those notions have gotten lost in the monetization and industrialization of mindfulness in the West.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Affection Is No Defense: Good Intentions Make Excellent Alibis
  2. How to … Stop Getting Defensive
  3. How to … Deal with Less Intelligent People
  4. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?
  5. Summary of Richard Carlson’s ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’

How to Stop a Worry Spiral

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If you tend to worry a lot—about your weight or money, what others think of you, going to a job you dislike, your life path,—you can use a simple trick proposed by the self-help author Shannon Kaiser.

In Joy Seeker (2019,) Kaiser suggests turning “what if” statements into “I wonder” statements. This reframing exercise helps quiet down your anxiety-filled thoughts and refocuses your mind on the best possible scenario rather than the worst:

Worry: What if I fail and it doesn’t work out?
Wonder: What if things go better than planned, and I am happier than I ever thought I could be?

Worry: What if people don’t understand or approve of what I do?
Wonder: What if people love it and my idea is well received?

Worry: What if I am rejected?
Wonder: What if I am accepted? My life will change for the better.

When you are too consumed with fear, your vision narrows, and your mind homes in on the threats you’re facing at the moment. You can’t focus on what you want. You can’t see the truth of the situation. Choosing wonder over worry helps you tap into the possibilities instead of getting sucked in by the limitations.

Idea for Impact: Approaching uncertainty with curiosity can help you fight hopelessness. Rather than admitting a terrible outcome as a foregone conclusion, you become open to possibility. You avoid sliding down into a pit of dread and despair. You’re far more likely to come up with effective ways for coping with the situation in question.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Power of Negative Thinking
  2. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  3. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  4. The Law of Petty Irritations
  5. How to … Silence Your Inner Critic with Gentle Self-Compassion

Entitlement and Anger Go Together

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Exaggerated entitlement could possibly explain what’s driving the recent surge of abusive or violent incidents on flights in America.

We live in a time where everyone seems hypervigilant to the point where even a slight snub can be taken as an act of deliberate aggression—either reactively or without provocation. People want to assert themselves, and every little social interaction seems to turn quickly into a battleground of entitlement.

Self-Protective Efforts Heighten Entitlement

To make things worse, air travel sits at the confluence of so many things involving so many people (and circumstances) where each “participant” has little direct control over what’s happening to them and others around. Political polarization and mask mandates seem to have intensified these anxieties too. Moreover, the FAA’s zero-tolerance policy toward disturbances and the threat of massive fines are unlikely to disincentivize passengers and staff in the heat of the moment.

When people feel entitled, they’re not just frustrated when others fail to acknowledge and entertain—even listen to—their presumed superior rights. People feel deceived and wronged. They feel victimized, get angry, and exude hostility. Worse, they feel even more justified in their demands and thus assume an even stronger sense of entitlement as compensation.

Idea for Impact: Entitlement and Responsibility are Inextricably Linked

Underlying this kind of anger process is a lack of separation of rights from responsibility. No professional, social, or domestic environment can remain stable and peaceful without everyone respecting the fact that rights and responsibilities are inseparable.

Nobody is entitled to compassion or fair treatment without acting on the responsibility to give it to others. If you don’t care about how others feel, you can’t demand that they care about how you feel. It’s a formula for disaster in human interactions.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?
  2. Don’t Abruptly Walk Away from an Emotionally Charged Conflict
  3. Think Twice Before You Launch That Truth Bomb
  4. Who Told You That Everybody Was Going to Like You?
  5. Hate is Self-Defeating