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January 9 - January 11, 2024
Completing the cycle isn’t an intellectual decision; it’s a physiological shift.
cried at the top of a hill
How is it different from catharsis?
If anxiety starts, it ends.”
dealing with the stressor and dealing with the stress are two different processes, and you have to do both. You have to, or else your stress will gradually erode your well-being
It’s out of proportion to what’s happening in the here and now, but it’s not out of proportion to the suffering you’re holding inside.
If you’re hiding from your life, you’re past your threshold.
the strategies that deal with stressors have almost no relationship to the strategies that deal with the physiological reactions our bodies have to those stressors. 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.
Wellness is not a state of being, but a state of action.
It’s about knowing how to persist when you’re past the edge of your capabilities, and it’s about knowing when to quit. Specifically, it’s about what we call “the Monitor,”
for women, the gap quickly becomes a chasm.
It keeps a running tally of your effort-to-progress ratio, and it has a strong opinion about what that ratio should be. There are so many ways a plan can go wrong, some of which you can control and some of which you can’t, all of which will frustrate your Monitor.
Monitor switches its assessment of your goal from “attainable” to “unattainable,” and it pushes you off an emotional cliff, into a pit of despair
Planful Problem-Solving The Monitor keeps track of your effort and your progress. When a lot of effort fails to produce a satisfying amount of progress, we can change the kind of effort we’re investing.
The good news is that women are socialized to planfully solve problems. The bad news is that every problem calls for a specific kind of planning.
Positive reappraisal involves recognizing that sitting in traffic is worth it.
bad things, if they happen, are temporary, isolated events that will have no lasting impact.
When it’s dark, look for Stars.”
“I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere that I needed to be.”
Standing our ground is important in principle and can be effective when we’re not overwhelmed, but not when we’re stressed and out of control.
Suppressing is, “I didn’t let it get to me.”
Humans—especially women—have an extraordinary capacity to ignore this voice. We live in a culture that values “self-control,” “grit,” and persistence. Many of us are taught to see a shift in goals as “weakness” and “failure,” where another culture would see courage, strength, and openness to new possibilities. We have been taught that letting go of a goal is the same as failing. We share stories of people overcoming the odds to achieve remarkable things in the face of great resistance, which is inspiring. But these stories too often imply that we are the controllers of our destinies—as if we
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Say a squirrel hears a noise in the leaves somewhere close by, so she stops for a moment, listens…hears nothing else. But she’s vigilant now. Her stress response is activated. And she stays foraging in her current patch, because there’s more risk in trying a new patch,
How smoothly do I have to polish myself before I can move through the world without friction?
The quality of our lives is not measured by the amount of time we spend in a state of perfection.
We can tolerate any suffering, if we know why. And not knowing why is, itself, a profound type of suffering.
You can chart the progress of women in America by the things Disney heroines sing about in their “I Want” songs.
“Meaning” as one of the main elements that promote happiness in people who are otherwise healthy.2 Other research approaches meaning as a coping strategy for people who are recovering from illness or trauma.
“meaningful” activities are described as ones “seeking to use and develop the best in oneself,” in contrast to those devoted solely to “seeking pleasure.”5 In the trauma-healing model, “meaning” includes learning to “live with” chronic illness. In the first case, it’s like getting your nutrients from vegetables; in the second, it’s like getting nutrients through a painful but effective injection. Most of us would prefer the veggies, but sometimes the injection is our only choice.
greater sense of purpose was associated with a 17 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality.
source of meaning. Its mere existence is not enough, any more than the mere existence of green vegetables is enough for you to be nourished by them. You have to engage with it actively.
human beings have a moral obligation to be their whole humanity, while human givers have a moral obligation to give their whole humanity,
we are surrounded by people who are also “infected,” and they, too, treat themselves and us and everyone as if Human Giver Syndrome were just normal
Maybe—maybe—you can pursue your own personal (read: selfish) Something Larger, if you’ve thoroughly met the needs of everyone else and don’t stop being pretty and calm while you do it.
Women are a “place”; only men are “people” on a journey,
When life is stable, we don’t need much sense of meaning to stay well. We engage regularly with our Something Larger,
But sometimes the turbulence lasts too long, or the plane actually crashes. You survive, but you’re left in an “existential vacuum,” devoid of meaning.25 Terrible things happen, leaving us feeling trapped and convinced that nothing we do can make a difference.
Rewrite the narrative of your experience, focusing on the lessons and strengths you gained through adversity.27 We call this your “origin story,”
Meaning is not made by the terrible thing you experienced; it is made by the ways you survive.
Whatever calls you, whether it’s the ocean or art or family or democracy, isn’t out there. It’s inside you. Like all the cycles and rhythms we describe in this book, it comes and goes, accelerates and decelerates, falls away and rises again. Like a tide, inside you. But no matter what forces oppose you, whether it’s Human Giver Syndrome or natural disasters or personal loss, nothing can stand between you and your Something Larger.
the quietness inside ourselves, that knows the world makes sense.
our need for connection changes across our life-spans, but our fundamental need for connection does not.
loneliness is a form of starvation.
Even as adults, connection nourishes us in a literal, physiological way, regulating our heart rates and respiration rates, influencing the emotional activation in our brains, shifting our immune response to injuries and wounds, changing our exposure to stressors, and modulating our stress response.
Also in 2018, the United Kingdom’s government created a Commission on Loneliness, framing it as a public health issue
“common wisdom” is that individual development should be a linear progression from dependence to autonomy.
at which point he is a full-fledged human being. An infant girl, on the other hand, is supposed to grow independent up to a point, but then the next step is marriage and babies, at which point she is a full-fledged human giver. An identity grounded in autonomy is considered stronger, superior, and masculine. An identity grounded in connection is weaker, inferior, and feminine.
No wonder the first waves of feminists considered independence the ideal.
We don’t mean you “need a man” or any kind of romantic partner. We mean you need connection in any or all of its varied forms. And it is also true that the lifelong development of autonomy is as innate to human nature as the drive to connect. We need both connection and autonomy. That’s not a contradiction. Humans are built to oscillate
