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December 11, 2020 - February 6, 2021
To be “well” is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you. Wellness happens when your body is a place of safety for you, even when your body is not necessarily in a safe place. You can be well, even during the times when you don’t feel good.
Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it. It means deciding that the effort, the discomfort, the frustration, the unanticipated obstacles, and even the repeated failure have value—not just because they are steps toward a worthwhile goal, but because you reframe difficulties as opportunities for growth and learning.3
With positive reappraisal, you can acknowledge when things are difficult, and you recognize that the difficulty is worth it—it is, in fact, an opportunity.
Groups that are more heterogeneous generate more innovation and better solutions to problems, even though those groups feel less confident about their solution and find the process more difficult.7
Struggle can increase creativity and learning, strengthen your capacity to cope with greater difficulties in the future, and empower you to continue working toward goals that matter to you.
“Meaning” as one of the main elements that promote happiness in people who are otherwise healthy.
“meaningful” activities are described as ones “seeking to use and develop the best in oneself,” in contrast to those devoted solely to “seeking pleasure.”
a life has meaning when a person contributes something positive to the world by the time they die—whether they enjoyed it or not.
Lives may be experienced as meaningful when they are felt to have significance beyond the trivial or momentary, to have purpose, or to have a coherence that transcends chaos.”
For most of us, meaning is what sustains us on the long, hard journey, no matter what we find at the end.
What am I doing when I feel most powerfully that I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing?
To suffer from Human Giver Syndrome is to be convinced, on some level, that everyone should suffer along with us.
But sometimes it’s enough just to get through the day and still feel like there’s a reason to keep struggling.
Animals, including humans, who repeatedly find themselves in bad situations from which they can’t escape may not even try to escape, even when given the opportunity.
And when anyone dropped into the pit of despair, the givers who surround them would turn toward them with generous compassion, without judgment.
because people tend to notice their adversarial headwinds and not their helpful tailwinds.
most of us tend to ignore or forget about advantages we’ve received, but remember the obstacles we’ve overcome, because the struggle against the obstacles requires more effort and energy than the easy parts.
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
When you feel trapped, free yourself from anything, and it will teach your body that you are not helpless.
The truth is you learned helplessness from experiences of being helpless.
With the time and money we spend on worrying about the shape of our bodies and attempting to make them “fit,” what else might we accomplish? Along with that comes “self-regulatory fatigue”; if you’re using up decision-making and attention-focusing cognitive resources on choices about food, clothes, exercise, makeup, body hair, “toxins,” and fretting about your body’s failures, what are you too exhausted to care about, that you would otherwise prioritize?
So yes indeed, it would be nice to be thin, because it would privilege us with the gift of being treated like actual people, no matter what. Thin privilege is as real as privilege associated with race, gender, and class. Women of color would face less adversity if they were white. Trans folks would face less adversity if they were cisgender. People on the autism spectrum would face less adversity if they were neurotypical. And, yes, fat people would face less adversity if they were thin. And none of those folks chose to be who they are. They can only choose to embrace who they are and try to
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Thin bodies are the bodies of women who behave themselves.
The point is, you define and redefine your body’s worth, on your own terms. Again and again, you turn toward your body with kindness and compassion.
“What if I could just decide I was valuable and it would be true?”
as a budding “human giver,” she learns that her body isn’t for her, it’s for other people. Other people’s pleasure, other people’s desire, other people’s acceptance or rejection.
social isolation and loneliness increased a person’s odds of an early death by 25 to 30 percent.
Your internal state is profoundly contagious, and it is profoundly susceptible to “catching” the internal states of the people around you at work and at home and at the grocery store and on the bus.
We hope you have at least one person in your life so attuned to you that they quite literally feel your pain, and stand with you inside it.
In real life, the “cupcakes” we give and receive in relationships can be almost anything—money, time, attention, actual cupcakes, or compassion for our difficult feelings. That last is the most important cupcake of all. If we turn toward someone with our difficult feelings—sadness, anger, hurt—and they tune in to our feelings without judgment or defensiveness, it helps us to move through that feeling, like a tunnel, to the light at the end.
Authenticity means “being totally yourself” and sharing the most intimate parts of yourself, including the parts people might judge.19
Life in the modern developed world is such that many of us have a vast overabundance of virtually everything…yet often we can’t meet our basic, life-sustaining, physiological needs without feeling guilty, ashamed, lazy, greedy, conflicted, or, at best, defiant.
Suppose you deal with all your stressors, you check all the boxes on your to-do list, and give yourself permission and opportunity to rest. If you’ve dealt with the stressors but haven’t dealt with the stress itself, your brain won’t let you rest.
which requires that employers prioritize workers’ ability to meet the demands of family equally with the demands of the organization.
We criticize ourselves for doing what is necessary for our own survival and not doing all the other things we could be doing.
But when we deprive ourselves of our own basic needs as mammals under the misguided apprehension that that’s how we show our commitment to an issue or to the people we love, we burn out. And then we drop out. Only by making sure we have as much energy coming in as we have going out can we all stay committed to the people, work, and ideas we love. What we’re saying is: An overlooked aspect of being “woke” is getting enough sleep.
