101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

by Brianna Wiest

What if the series of rote tasks we want our lives to be better than aren’t better than us at all? What if they’re what we’re scheduled to do? What if there is no greater meaning than just simply doing them? What if what we feel in those little moments we want to escape and place in the context of a greater meaning is the meaning itself? If healing is just acknowledging pain, then maybe living is just acknowledging life.

(Another Harvard study he cited estimated that sleep deprivation costs American companies $63.2 billion a year in lost productivity.)

Cultivating mindfulness aids in reducing general stress, improving memory, decreasing emotional reactivity, more relationship satisfaction, cognitive flexibility, empathy, compassion, general decrease of anxiety and depression/increase of overall quality of life, and on and on.

What you need to do is open up to the reality that love is scary, especially the kind of love that’s worthwhile. Take your time, but don’t choose the easy way out.

They don’t grow because they don’t have to. (A sad but important thing to know about humans is that they don’t change until not changing is the less comfortable option.)

“The worst things to happen to me were the things that had to teach me what nothing else could, to prepare me for things so wonderful, I couldn’t imagine them, let alone know I had to get ready for them.”

The “spotlight complex” is undoubtedly linked to social media, but regardless, nobody is thinking about you the way you are thinking about you, nor nearly as much. Nobody cares if you wear an unflattering shirt out to the pharmacy. Nobody really cares what you do with your life, so stop making choices as though they do.

“Busyness” is a good thing. Being busy is what happens when people are ill equipped to manage their stress. People who actually have a lot to do focus on getting it done simply because they don’t have another choice.

You cannot choose a feeling, but you can always choose what you think about.

Wanting is the ugliest thing you can do. It keeps your experience in a state of “not having.”

Acceptance is the root of abundance.

There is just as much value in the negative space. Not every second of your life has to be filled. A packed agenda is not success. Living to work as opposed to working to live is not a quality of life. Things are not split into “times in which you’re doing something that other people can quantify” and “times you’re doing nothing.” It’s all important.

Unfortunately, nothing and nobody can hand you your happiness. Fortunately, nothing and nobody can take it away.

The universe whispers until it screams. Your body whispers until it screams. “Bad” feelings are not meant to be staved off. They are not meant to be inconveniencing. They are you, or something greater than you, telling yourself: Something is not right.

The people who love what they do are always, always more successful than the people who “work hard” or claim to. There’s an X factor you can’t mimic when you do something you’re genuinely passionate about. You tap into an otherwise untouchable energy.

You do not have to only be what other people are comfortable with.

Predicting your future does not make it more guaranteed to happen. It just closes you off. It gets you attached to an idea that you only want to be reality because you’re attached to it.

Things will work out better than you could have chosen or designed them.

Your life will unfold in direct proportion to how much you believe you deserve. Not how much you think you should have. How much you believe you deserve.

Do you try to relate to other human beings, or do you try to exert superiority over them? Do you want to connect or do you want to seem impressive? Do you engage in discussion to learn, or to sell someone on your way of thinking so you feel supported and “correct?”

We’re suffering from anxiety and depression and loneliness and uncertainty and fear and failure mostly because we have to continue to paint an outward picture of the opposite.

Every influencer ever

It’s not “mean” to tell the truth; we’re just not used to hearing anything other than what we want to hear.

At our core, there is only light. I guarantee there is not one person you wouldn’t love if you knew their true story, their whole story, if you lived a day or a year or a lifetime in their shoes. We can’t expect equality when we’re holding up façades of inequality through dishonesty. How can we expect people to treat all others as equals if they’re constantly feeling beneath someone else?

You should tell the people you love that you love them. You should tell the people you don’t that you don’t, and let them find people who really do.

You should evaluate your choices not in light of how other people will perceive them, but how in line with your deepest, truest self they are.

It’s my belief that if we could understand why our pain is necessary, we could bear it with more grace, or at least learn to listen to it before it forces us to.

To be truly fulfilled is to be happy because of your own self-realization. It is to come to such a genuine understanding of what you want that not doing it isn’t an option anymore. It’s seeing beyond the mindsets you adopted, or the ideals that are not inherently your own. It is the humble simplicity of what you want to offer the world each day, and it is the love you awaken as you do it.

your true soul mate is the one who shows you to yourself.

They know what it’s like for there to be strangers in the world who once knew everything about you.

They know you never lose love. They know that what you experience, how you grow, what you take and learn and see and do because of it, is the point. Not to have it forever, but to become what it was meant to make you.

Nothing is as it is; it is as you are.

How other people want to perceive you is their problem, which they will have to come to terms with eventually. How much you want to allow their perceptions to affect you is yours.

In the Tao, it says that softness is the equivalent of life. Bodies stiffen in death. Trees that harden are cut down. Therefore, hardness is death and softness is life.

But we end up caging ourselves. We inevitably fall within what we once said was “wrong,” because we’re human beings, and dangerous territory is the mind that doesn’t leave room for the soul to falter.

The point of experiencing anything is learning how to think about it differently.

The more we experience, the more capable we are of seeing the world with varied lenses, thinking with more dimension, considering possibilities that were previously inconceivable. Real education is not learning what to think about, but how to think in general.

What this means is that whatever problem you think you have in your life is not the problem, it’s the fact that you see it as a problem, rather than a signal you refuse to respond to, or a product of over-ascribing meaning, extrapolation, irrational thoughts that created irrational emotions that continue to go unchecked, and so on.

The problem is not the problem, it is how you think about the problem.

It is why heartbreak is crucial to human growth. The obstacle that becomes the way. Any idiot can enjoy the positive things in their lives, but it is only a few that can take the negative and find something even more profound.

Your new best friends will be structure and productivity.

You can change how you feel. This is something you must remember. It’s as simple as: “I want to feel differently about this, so I am going to focus on a different aspect of it.”

If you want to be happy, you need to stop chasing happiness. Happiness is a byproduct of doing things that are challenging, meaningful, beautiful, and worthwhile.