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In my own cushioned life, I had visited the edge of the valley, but clearly had not dropped to its very bottom.
Misery changes everything. It affects how we feel, how we think, what we do—and it alters our impulses. When we are miserable, we are usually tempted to do precisely what, at other times, we know will make it worse. The result can be that we appear to be bringing on our own discomfort.
what feels right when you’re miserable is what feeds the misery, not what feeds you.”
We are not in full control of the circumstances of our lives.
Given that many of our decisions about present action are based on hypothesized future happiness, this means that we, as a species, constantly strike out confidently in precisely the wrong direction.
As the mood darkens, the natural tendency is to withdraw and self-protect, conserving energy as we retreat into the depths of the cave to recover.
Consider your life in a broader context, and all the problems you are unlikely ever to solve.
The key point, for our purposes, is that the futile quest for emotional fulfillment via the purchase of objects is an excellent strategy for the longer-term cultivation of misery.
a great part of her anxiety was caused by her financial situation and a sense that, as a result, she lacked the freedom to maneuver in her life—change her job, move apartments, travel, respond to emergencies. Her credit cards were handcuffs.
It is widely believed that money cannot buy happiness, but lack of money can definitely purchase misery.
For maximum misery, treat the marathon of your work life as though it was a sprint.
Most ultimate goals are a long way off—hence the need to break them down into smaller steps. You might achieve them only once, and only after a great deal of effort. If you allow yourself to focus on the immediate goals, you will frequently find that you have succeeded.
Our emotions and our behavior depend not on the events of our lives, but on our perception and evaluation of those events.
You know that this image is a possibility, not a fact. It has a certain likelihood of occurring, which means it has a corresponding likelihood that it won’t.
The better your life is, the more miserable you can make yourself by the contemplation of losing it all.
although we can imagine various
both hope and fear come from a focus on the imaginary future rather than the singular moment of present reality. It is in the present that we actually live, in the present that we have a degree of real influence, and in the present that our misery can be most easily interrupted by contentment, satisfaction, and calm. The present is almost always manageable, though it is typically less exciting than the melodramas playing out on the other screens of the mental cinema—hence the difficulty that aficionados of mindfulness report in keeping their minds there. Misery is easier.
belief in the power of pure hope over action pulls us from contact with our actual present-day lives, promotes anxiety, and encourages a passive and ineffective approach to the realization of our goals.
Your emotions are governed not by the circumstances of your life, but by the circumstances to which you pay attention.
The odds that you made the best selection from the hundreds or thousands of options that were open to you are pretty minimal.
Pitching their minimum expectations low, they are almost always relaxed and sanguine about their outcomes.
The truth is, people with good self-esteem are not constantly evaluating themselves. It’s the ones without it who do this. Our culture teaches us that having self-esteem is an active process of building ourselves up. It isn’t. Cats, three-year-olds, and adults with good self-esteem aren’t doing much of anything—they’re just focused on the task at hand.
Self-esteem, in other words, does not exist. Self-loathing, however, is very real.
Similarly, believers in self-esteem strive to import a sense of self-worth, neglecting the fact that no such efforts are really necessary: all they need to do is remove the plug that prevents self-worth from flowing. That plug is the relentless self-criticism in which they engage.
the more you adopt a disguise, the more you deny yourself; and the more you pretend to be something other than what you are, the more unhappy you are likely to become. In some ways, this can be more painful than simple isolation.
resentment is seductive. A part of us likes to feel aggrieved at the unreasonable demands of other people. We enjoy the comforting self-pity of being nailed to the cross and don’t like to see that we are the ones holding the hammer.
We tell ourselves that others are the problem, so they are the ones who have to change. But we can’t change them (despite our efforts), so we’re stuck. Real control would mean relinquishing attempts to change them and changing our own behavior instead.
by demanding that grown adults conform to your vision, you may be placing a roadblock in the way of their change, thus ensuring your misery.
The fact that every discussion doesn’t quickly devolve into confusion is a miracle. The messages we receive are seldom exact replicas of the messages that were sent. They are a blend of the intended meaning and the distortions produced by our own hopes and fears about what the person really meant.
The closer the relationship, the greater the opportunity for misunderstandings and unhappiness. You can tell yourself with assurance that you truly know the other person, so you can believe in your interpretations even more than you ordinarily would.
One of the maxims used by relationship therapists is, “Whatever the argument is about is not really what it’s about.”
Most things that will elevate your mood bring relatively little anticipatory desire: exercise, eating healthy food, getting to bed on time, returning friends’ messages, saving for retirement, doing your taxes. They feel either a bit flat or outright aversive. If you guide your behavior by this anticipatory feeling, you will put off almost anything that might improve your outlook.
The things that we feel tempted to do are often those that make us feel worse in the long run:
Live your life by your anticipatory feelings—your temptations—and you will often find yourself doing things that you regret and that drag you lower. You will never again pay your taxes, exercise, eat unfamiliar food, get out of bed early to go hiking, organize birthday parties for friends, or get to work on time. You will stay in your ever-shrinking comfort zone, you will indulge your worst tendencies, and you will seldom try anything new.
the mutual contributions of thousands combine to create great forces of change.
Even if you can keep the flame of your passion burning, you may find that you have realized one life goal (such as career success) but missed out on all the others.
The Zone of Comfort hides a secret: the longer you spend in it, the smaller it gets.
The Zone of Discomfort shrinks when you enter it.
confidence does not precede action; it follows.
The ungrounded, uncertain feeling is what we get when we leave the Zone of Comfort to do something new. It is not a signal to retreat; it is the sensation of one’s life expanding.
certain steps forward are only possible when you are not distracted by social contact.
the life we choose to lead creates us.
“If there were no applause and no criticism, who would you be?”
“Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.”
Cognitive therapists argue that most of our emotions arise from our appraisals of events, not from the events themselves.
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm. —Euripides
When we are feeling low, our motivational matrix shifts dramatically. Our horizon shortens, tempting us to act based on short-term outcomes more than we usually would.
When you are feeling down, the majority of temptations you experience will lead you even lower.
Learning from experience—one of the prime pillars of wisdom—means turning away from our illusions and taking a clear-eyed look at the past.
We will not eliminate negative emotion from our lives. Some pain is caused by our own actions or ways of thinking. Much is not.
