101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

by Brianna Wiest

The pattern of unnecessarily creating crises in your life is actually an avoidance technique. It distracts you from actually having to be vulnerable or held accountable for whatever it is you’re afraid of.

At the core of your desire to create a problem is simply the fear of being who you are and living the life you want.

If you want to change your life, change your beliefs. If you want to change your beliefs, go out and have experiences that make them real to you. Not the opposite way around.

The point is not what the routine consists of, but how steady and safe your subconscious mind is made through repetitive motions and expected outcomes.

Whatever you want your day-to-day life to consist of doesn’t matter, the point is that you decide and then stick to it.

Most things that bring genuine happiness are not just temporary, immediate gratifications, and those things also come with resistance and require sacrifice.

Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.

You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day—not your fears or impulses.

The more you train your body to respond to different cues: 7 a.m. is when you wake up, 2 p.m. is when you start writing, and so on, you naturally fall into flow with a lot more ease, just out of habit.

They know that happiness is a choice, but they don’t feel the need to make it all the time.

They are not stuck in the illusion that “happiness” is a sustained state of joy.

allow themselves time to process everything they are experiencing.

allow themselves to exist in their natural state. In that non-resistance,...

They don’t confuse a bad feeling for a bad life.

The fastest way to sound unintelligent is to say, “This idea is wrong.” (That idea may be wrong for you, but it exists because it is right to someone else.)

They validate other people’s feelings. To validate someone else’s feelings is to accept that they feel the way they do without trying to use logic to dismiss or deny or change their minds.

They recognize that their “shadow selves” are the traits, behaviors, and patterns that aggravate them about others.

One’s hatred of a misinformed politician could be a projection of their fear of being unintelligent or underqualified. One’s intense dislike for a particularly passive friend could be an identification of one’s own inclination to give others power in their life. It is not always an obvious connection, but when there is a strong emotional response involved, it is always there.

The main thing socially intelligent people understand is that your relationship to everyone else is an extension of your relationship to yourself.

In that same space coexist the organs we don’t identify with and the energy we do. If we removed the latter, what would be left? What would be there? What exists when you don’t? Have you

ever sat in that? Have you ever sat with that? Have you ever felt each part of your body and realized the parts are not “I?”

Have you ever felt the presentness that is somehow livened when attached? Have you ever identified the difference between what you call yours...

I think sometimes we get attached to the structures because we don’t like the contents.

We’re more invested in how we’re perceived than who we are, in the idea of what the title means than the day-to-day work of the job, in the “do you promise to love me forever?”

We’re more comforted by ideas of what things are as opposed to w...

You question yourself. You doubt your life. You feel miserable some days. This means you’re still open to growth. This means you can be objective and self-aware.

You can sense what isn’t right in your life. The first and most crucial step is simply being aware. Being able to communicate to yourself: “Something is not right, even though I am not yet sure what would feel better.”

Most people don’t want to be happy, which is why they aren’t. They just don’t realize this is the case.

People are programmed to chase their foremost desire at almost any cost. (Imagine the adrenaline-fueled superhuman powers people develop in life-or-death emergencies.)

soon as our circumstances extend beyond the amount of happiness we’re accustomed to and comfortable feeling, we unconsciously begin to self-sabotage.

We are programmed to seek what we’ve known.

So even though we think we’re after happiness, we’re actually trying to find whatever we’re most accustomed to, and we project that on whatev...

Everybody has a limited tolerance for feeling good.

When things go beyond that limit, we sabotage ourselves so we can return to our comfort zones.

The tired cliché of stepping outside them serves a crucial purpose: It makes people comfortable with discomfort, which is the gateway to expanding their tolerance for happiness.

There is a “likability limit” that people like to remain under: Everybody has a level of “success” that they perceive to be ad...

Most prefer the comfort of what they’ve known to the vulnerability of what they don’t.

Happiness is, in an essential form, acceptance.

interim between knowing and doing is the space where suffering thrives.

It’s about the resistance between what’s right and what’s easy, what’s best in the long v. short term.

This is the single most common root of discomfort: the space between knowing and doing.

Worrying conditions us to the worst possible outcomes so they don’t cause as much pain if they come to pass. We’re thinking through every irrational possibility so we can account for it, prepare for it, before it surprises us.

learning that people’s opinions of

you are largely projections of how they see themselves would solve your problem, which is evaluating your life through the idea of how other people could perceive it.

You’re mentally lazy. You know you should be more present, but you won’t put in the effort to practice it.

You know you should meditate and learn to train your brain to focus so it doesn’t become engulfed by negativity, but you head to the gym instead. You’re lazy in the way it matters most, and that’s your biggest problem.

You won’t let your idea of yourself evolve. You’re stuck in only being comfortable thinking of yourself the way you were 3, 5, 10 years ago, because that’s how other people are comfortable seeing you.

You choose what you think should be right rather than what actually is. You’re more loyal to the ideas you have about things than the honest reality you know them to be.

You think that “happiness” is a sustained state of feeling “good,” when it is really a higher “baseline” for perception. You are better able to process every emotion, and because you do so healthfully, you return to your general state of contentment quickly.

People who understand this use their time wisely: They eliminate unnecessary decision-making, reduce distractions, minimize what doesn’t matter, and then they focus.