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Suffering

Get Everything Out of Your Head

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When there’s so much going on in your head, you’re constantly playing mental ping-pong. All those unfinished tasks can indeed affect your ability to be present with anything that you’re doing.

Sitting down to write out all the things that are weighing on your mind can boot out the clutter. Per the Zeigarnik Effect, interrupted tasks and unfinished thoughts tend to inundate you with a constant stream of reminders. Just the simple act of capturing a task can achieve a sense of completion for the moment.

Get It All Out Of Your Head - Reduce Stress Clear off your cluttered desk, pour some tea, put on some relaxing music, light a candle, mute the phone, and write down all the things you need to pay attention to. Work stuff, home stuff, kids stuff, paperwork, school stuff, friends stuff—all the stuff! Get it all out of your head.

Writing down everything that’s occupying your mind right now won’t solve your problems, but it makes them evident. This exercise makes it a lot easier to make good intuitive choices about where you should focus now and where it’s okay that you don’t focus now.

Idea for Impact: Stop what you’re doing right now and write down everything you have in your head. Not only will this exercise put in perspective all those things you need to keep track of, but also it’s a great way to reset your day.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  2. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  3. Writing To-Do Lists Can Help You Sleep
  4. The Power of Negative Thinking
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

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.

'Joy Seeker' by Shannon Kaiser (ISBN 0806540257) 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. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  2. The Nature of Worry
  3. Think Your Way Out of a Negative Thought
  4. The Power of Negative Thinking
  5. This Trick Can Relieve Your Anxiety: “What’s the worst that can happen?”

Mental Health Issues are Much More Common Than Acknowledged

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Japanese tennis superstar Naomi Osaka generated enormous attention when she withdrew from the French Open earlier this month. Osaka was penalized $15,000 by the organizers and threatened with expulsion for refusing the mandatory media assignments required by the tournament’s rules. (Osaka has announced that she’ll skip the Wimbledon, too, for personal reasons.)

Mental Health Issues are Much More Common Than Acknowledged

Osaka said she experiences “huge waves of anxiety” before speaking to the media and revealed that she has “suffered long bouts of depression.” She framed her decision as a mental health issue, declaring that answering questions after a loss can create self-doubt.

Osaka’s withdrawal has brought to the fore the fact that celebrities—just like regular people—struggle with mental wellness at work. No one is immune.

Osaka must be admired for talking about mental hardship openly. Her actions empower others with anxiety and depression to take care of mental health first.

It’s very human to be terrified of stuff that makes us very vulnerable. Not everybody is comfortable with public speaking, and few people feel they’re good at it. And, more to Osaka’s point, almost everyone hates talking publicly about what they did wrong after a defeat or a setback.

Idea for Impact: Bringing depression out of the shadows is a tough thing to do. Nobody has the right to invalidate or question how someone is trying to cope, especially when they’ve been strong enough to open up about it.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  2. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  3. The Power of Negative Thinking
  4. Stressed, Lonely, or Depressed? Could a Pet Help?
  5. Think Your Way Out of a Negative Thought

Think Your Way Out of a Negative Thought

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Think Your Way Out of a Negative Thought

The human mind can become more blinkered in times of emotional turmoil.

The reasons for negative thoughts aren’t always logical, but challenging the stimuli with the following probing questions can help you reappraise the situation and distance yourself from the negative thoughts.

  • What am I concerned about?
  • Is this thought mine or someone else’s that I’ve picked up on?
  • Do I believe this thought?
  • Is this thought accurate?
  • Is this thought realistic?
  • Are the barriers and threats really insurmountable?
  • What’s the worst that can happen?
  • Am I too harsh on myself?
  • What can I learn about this thought?
  • What belief is attached to this thought?
  • How can I reframe this thought to be more realistic and pragmatic?
  • How can I cheer myself up as I would a friend?
  • What’s an affirming baby step that I can take now to pick myself up and rectify this situation?

Idea for Impact: How you think about a condition influences how you feel about it. Often a thought-out, levelheaded analysis of the situation can unshackle the mind’s echo chamber and nudge you to think your way out of a problem and look beyond it.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Power of Negative Thinking
  2. “What Am I Sad About?”
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  5. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

Don’t Hide from Your Feelings, Accept Them

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Emotional Acceptance---Don't Hide from Your Feelings, Accept Them When you’re feeling upset, angry, stressed, or sad, don’t deny, withhold, or hide from your feelings. Think about what it is that’s making you feel this way.

Emotional Acceptance refers to the willingness and ability to accept and experience negative emotions—to acknowledge and absorb them. Jan Chozen Bays, a pediatrician-turned Zen teacher, writes in Mindfulness on the Go: Simple Meditation Practices You Can Do Anywhere (2014,) a practical guide for engaging the mind,

A very important way to work with discomfort is to stop avoiding it. You will walk right into it and feel from within the body what is true. You investigate the discomfort—its size, shape, surface texture and even its color and sound. Is it constant or intermittent? When you are this attentive, when your meditative absorption is deep, what we call discomfort or pain begins to shift and even disappear. It becomes a series of sensations just appearing and disappearing in empty space, twinkling on and off. It is most interesting.

Mindfulness practice needn’t be just for negative emotions, either. Are you feeling happy and joyful? Calm and content? Apprehensive or remorseful? No matter the case, taking stock of how you’re feeling can help you realize that your emotions do not represent you. They don’t have to define your thoughts.

Practicing this self-reflective process regularly will help you better understand yourself, break negative patterns in your life, and react to emotional situations in a wholesome, more productive way.

Idea for Impact: Practice Emotional Acceptance—Feeling Bad Can Be Good

Emotional avoidance appears to be a reasonable thing to do. Yes, it provides momentary relief in the here and now. But emotional avoidance often involves denying the truth—and that isn’t a good foundation for a healthy life.

Over time, it only makes things worse to avoid the thing that scares you. Create the awareness to feel your feelings, label them, accept them, and then let them fade.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Power of Negative Thinking
  2. “What Am I Sad About?”
  3. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  4. Understand What’s Stressing You Out
  5. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be

“What Am I Sad About?”

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When you’re struggling with sadness, part of your feelings may involve experiencing a lot of distress and shame about how sad you feel.

You probably won’t even realize it’s happening, but you’ll feel like “I shouldn’t be this sad” and that “my sadness is a weakness.”

Befriending your feelings and feeling your emotions

It shouldn’t always feel like it’s just you.

When you acknowledge your sadness, you can actually perceive how you’re tunneling yourself into more gloom. Then you could do a much better job of accepting your sadness as it is, as the Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke reminds in the masterpiece Letters to a Young Poet (1929):

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races – the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you’ve ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you; that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Thinking through “What am I sad about?” can help you get happier

Try to redirect the blame from yourself and recognize that sadness is a natural and reasonable response to the miseries of the world—some of them personal, some collective.

Yes, believing in yourself in the face of self-doubt can be challenging. But the extent of sadness isn’t immutable.

Thinking through Sadness with Self-Compassion You can trigger a vast shift in how you feel by dropping self-criticism and embracing a more kind, non-judgmental relationship with yourself. Sadness isn’t a state of sin.

  • Change “I can’t do this” to “this will be a challenge for me; it’s normal to feel anxious.
  • Accept “I hate this” with “this is a tough situation to handle, and I’m doing my best.”
  • Persuade yourself to substitute “I hate myself” with “I’m overwhelmed with low self-esteem at the moment, and I need to cheer myself as I would a friend.”
  • Instead of repenting, “I can’t believe it slipped my mind again,” let yourself off by acknowledging, “it’s difficult to balance so many things. Perhaps I need to let go of some of them.”

Idea for Impact: Befriending your feelings and not identifying with these feelings as your self can affirm not only who you are but also what you believe you can be. Even when you feel disturbed because you’re falling back into past patterns, bear in mind that simply being aware that you’ve retreated into going over the past is a precursor of growth. Self-awareness can pave the way to a great leap forward in your personal transformation.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  2. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  3. The Power of Negative Thinking
  4. Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself

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It’s okay to be wrong about things. It’s okay to be upset. It’s okay if things don’t go the way you purposed. It’s okay if you say something embarrassing. It’s okay if you make a fool of yourself. It’s okay if you failed. It’s okay if you disappointed a loved one.

We’ve all made mistakes—rushed decisions, careless oversights, and lapses of judgment. Even after taking the thoughtful time and overanalyzing them, we’ve not been able to avoid faults.

And after their immediate effects come to pass, our minds are assaulted by those woulda-coulda-shoulda ruminations.

Don't Be So Hard on Yourself Mistakes are a natural part of your journey. They’re patches of rough and bumpy ground that will eventually help you get where you need to go. Life is a long game, and you’ll never know what your current experiences will mean over time.

Mistakes can offer a kind of insight and perspective that nothing else does. After all, you don’t learn quite as much from a right decision as you do from a wrong one.

Curb the idea that you have to be successful at everything you attempt. In the grand scheme of things, no one’s going to care about your failures, and neither should you.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be so hard on yourself. You are not your mistakes. Perhaps, when life rejects you from something good, it may be redirecting you to something better, whether or not you realize it at that time. Seek ways to move forward.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  2. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  3. The Power of Negative Thinking
  4. Learn to Manage Your Negative Emotions and Yourself
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

Discover the Essence of Buddhism in 5 Minutes

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“One thing I teach: suffering and the end of suffering. It is just Ill and the ceasing of Ill that I proclaim.” The historical Buddha is said to have announced at his first sermon (Dharmacakrapravarta) to a group of five former ascetic companions (the Pañcavargika.) Following his enlightenment, the Buddha was living at the Deer Park (Mṛgadāva) at the Resort of Seers (Ṛṣipatana) near the Bārāṇasī Forest, in the modern-day Sārnāth in India.

The Buddha’s teaching centered on the notion that all sentient beings seek happiness—and happiness is anchored in the freedom from suffering.

To discover the essence of Buddhism, then, is to become aware of what causes suffering and how you can cease suffering.

The truth of the nature of suffering is also the path to the end of suffering.

The Essence of Buddhism: You suffer because of your ignorance American psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein has argued (Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Winter 1991) that the answer to this question is the whole of Buddha’s teaching:

If you pay attention for just five minutes, you know some very fundamental dharma [of the Buddha]: things change, nothing stays comfortable, sensations come and go quite impersonally, according to conditions, but not because of anything you think or do. Changes come and go quite by themselves. In the first five minutes of paying attention, you learn that pleasant sensations lead to the desire that these sensations will stay and that unpleasant sensations lead to the hope that they will go away. And both the attraction and the aversion amount to tension in the mind. Both are uncomfortable. So in the first five minutes, you get a big lesson about suffering: wanting things to be other than they are. Such a tremendous amount of truth to be learned just closing your eyes and paying attention to bodily sensations.

While you must welcome pleasant, pleasurable feelings, you must bear in mind that pleasure is transient, like every other feeling. Clinging—wishing to hang on to those people, places, possessions, or experiences that bring about pleasant experiences—is hopeless. By the same token, being aversive to painful or unpleasant experiences is impossible.

Idea for Impact: The essence of Buddhism isn’t a dogma, but the very practical problem of suffering.

Buddhism teaches that you, too, can initiate into the dharma “spiritual” practice by learning to cease your attachment to pleasant experiences and your revulsion against unpleasant ones.

The essence of the Buddha’s teaching is … that you suffer because of your ignorance—because you don’t realize the real nature of reality.

The truth of the nature of suffering is also the path to the end of suffering. In other words, pleasure without pain is achievable only as you evolve toward higher states of mindfulness.

The Buddha’s teaching isn’t pessimistic. It doesn’t stress only the suffering, pain, and unhappiness at the heart of the human experience. In fact, it’s the opposite. The Buddha’s teaching summons joyful participation in a world of sorrows by clarifying what is unsatisfactory and suggesting how to overcome it.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Addiction to Pleasure is a Symptom of Fear
  2. “Release Your Cows” … Be Happy
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. What the Buddha Taught About Restraining and Dealing with Anger
  5. Gandhi on the Doctrine of Ahimsa + Non-Violence in Buddhism

The Power of Negative Thinking

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Stoic philosophy recommends a practice called premeditatio malorum (“the premeditation of evils,”) i.e. intentionally visualizing the worst-case scenario in your mind’s eye.

The first point is to acknowledge that misfortunes and difficulties could, rather than certainly will, come about. The second is to envisage your most constructive response should the worst-case scenario transpire. For instance, if you’d lose your job due to coronavirus, what resources could you rely on, and how could you handle the consequences?

The direct benefit of premeditatio malorum is in taming your anxiety: when you soberly conjure up how bad things could go, you typically reckon that you could indeed cope. You’ll not dwell in the negative thoughts. Even the worst possible scenario couldn’t be so terrible after all.

Another surprising benefit of negative visualization is in raising your awareness that you could lose your relationships, possessions, routines, blessings, and everything else that you currently enjoy—but perhaps take for granted. This increases your gratitude for having them now.

Premeditatio Malorum in Stoicism - The Power of Negative Thinking

This Stoic exercise has an equivalent in Buddhist meditation-based mindfulness practices that encourage nonjudgmental awareness of unpleasant sensations (the vedanā.)

Your emotions, sensations, and events are in flux. They arise and pass. You’re merely to regard yourself as the observer of these thoughts and feelings, but you’re not to identify with them. You are not your thoughts … you are not your feelings. The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes in The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology (2015,)

Thoughts and opinions arise but they think themselves and disappear, “like bubbles on the Ganges,” says the Buddha. When we do not cling to them, they lose their hold on us. In the light of awareness, the constructed self of our identification relaxes. And what is seen is just the process of life, not self nor other, but life unfolding as part of the whole.

Idea for Impact: Could you benefit from reflecting on how you think of potential negative events?

An awareness of the possible—and the self-determining attitude—can be quite liberating. Premeditatio malorum is a surprisingly useful technique, if only with a scary name.

“What then should each of us say as each hardship befalls us? It was for this that I was exercising, It was for this that I was training,” as Epictetus philosophized in Discourses (3.10.7–8.)

Wondering what to read next?

  1. This Trick Can Relieve Your Anxiety: “What’s the worst that can happen?”
  2. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  3. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  4. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

Is Your Harried Mind Causing You to Underachieve?

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American psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, author of Driven to Distraction (2011,) surveyed cognitive effects such as reduced attention instigated by the hyperkinetic environment that’s become an artifact of modern life.

Is your frenzied mind barraged of stimuli and sensations and causing underachievement? A never-ending barrage of stimuli and sensations have instigated distractibility, mayhem, inner frenzy, and impatience. Consequently, people can’t stay organized, establish priorities, and manage time effectively—causing them to underachieve.

Hallowell described how “Attention Deficit Trait (ADT)” makes smart people underperform in this Harvard Business Review article.

ADT is brought on by the demands on our time and attention that have exploded over the past two decades. As our minds fill with noise, the brain gradually loses its capacity to attend fully and thoroughly to anything.

The symptoms of ADT come upon a person gradually. The sufferer doesn’t experience a single crisis but rather a series of minor emergencies while he or she tries harder and harder to keep up. Shouldering a responsibility to “suck it up” and not complain as the workload increases, executives with ADT do whatever they can to handle a load they simply cannot manage as well as they’d like. The ADT sufferer therefore feels a constant low level of panic and guilt. Facing a tidal wave of tasks, the executive becomes increasingly hurried, curt, peremptory, and unfocused, while pretending that everything is fine.

At a time when the modern corporate culture over-rewards folks who can multitask, deal with ever more responsibilities, and respond now, Hallowell offers the following solutions:

  • Promote positive emotions. Create a work positive, fear-free emotional work environment in which the brain can function at its best.
  • Take physical care of your brain. Adequate sleep, a proper diet (increase complex carbohydrates and protein intake,) exercise, and meditation are vital for staving off ADT.
  • Get organized. Take note of the times of day when you tend to perform at your best; do your most important work then, and save the routine work for other times. Reserve a part of the day to think, plan, and do “deep work.”
  • Regulate your emotions. To thwart an imminent overreaction to stress (“amygdala hijack” per Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (1995,)) distract yourself by stopping and doing something else. A self-soothing action calms you down until you can focus again.

Idea for Impact: Stress is a terrible ailment in today’s workforce. Learn to manage yourself actively instead of continually reacting to problems as they happen. Avoid overburdening yourself and squandering your willpower. Regulate your work environment, tweak your work habits, get organized, and manage your emotional and physical health.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  2. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  3. How Mindfulness Can Make You Better at Your Job // Book Summary of David Gelles’s ‘Mindful Work’
  4. Understand What’s Stressing You Out
  5. A Quick Way to De-stress: The “Four Corners Breathing” Exercise