More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jenny Taitz
Read between
September 29 - November 12, 2019
One thing you can do to help yourself when you’re in the middle of one of those I’ll always be alone! cycles is to remind yourself, compassionately, that your thinking is skewed. After all, there’s no way to predict how your life will unfold or whether you’ll meet someone, however sure you feel of your single fate.
You may even find that focusing on finding love, rather than loving your life, closes you off from great opportunities, or leads you to settle for something that doesn’t feel right.
You don’t need to live in a fantasy—but you surely don’t deserve to prepare for tragedy.
Regret = rumination + self-blame
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. —RUMI
The only way to reliably feel best is by learning to sit with feelings, even if they are painful. No matter who is around, you can never break up with your emotions. That’s a good thing, since they have a lot to teach us.
We all need a clear sense of purpose, one that comes from our values, not our goals. Values aren’t the same as goals. With a goal, we win or lose, get it or not. With values, if we’re acting (not just thinking) consistently with our aims, we can cherish a sense of mastery, independent of the end result. Values aren’t measured by what we get but by what we give.
A meaningful alternative to finding love is giving love. In the classic book The Art of Loving, psychologist Erich Fromm writes about how love isn’t simply a feeling, it’s an action.
In The Science of Happily Ever After, psychologist Ty Tashiro recommends choosing a partner who embodies values such as agreeableness and kindness. He explains that good relationships stem from choosing someone who cares about being a good person.
Needing to look good for someone else is dismissing your inherent worth.
Acceptance, while challenging, can also feel liberating. It isn’t resignation—it’s choosing to honor the pain that is there, a practice known as radical acceptance.
In a study led by empathy expert Sara Konrath, researchers found that volunteering for selfless reasons increased longevity, but only when acts of kindness were performed generously, rather than for self-oriented reasons.
After my breakup, someone congratulated me, saying, “At least you’ve spared yourself a divorce!” Not surprisingly, this didn’t make me suddenly feel lucky. I think the approach of quickly trying to look for the good is bound to backfire, because it feels dismissive of pain. A crucial part of self-compassion is noticing pain and adding kindness.
Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you must believe that thought.
Accepting uncertainty is a crucial part of happiness in life.
nice antidote to fearing the worst is maintaining hope and optimism.
An important step in managing emotions is learning to differentiate justified from unjustified emotions.
They found that maladaptive social cognitions, or negative thoughts related to interpersonal situations, were strong predictors of loneliness, and that thinking differently turned out to be the most powerful way to feel more connected.
Interestingly, research has found that reframing our relationships can make us feel less alone. Psychologists differentiate between perceived support and received support, and highlight that when it comes to reducing the risk of depression, perceived support is more important than actually receiving support.
Shockingly, loneliness is twice as dangerous as obesity in terms of its effect on your health; it also increases the risk of mortality to the same extent as smoking cigarettes.
When looking at Framingham participants, loneliness researcher John Cacioppo and his colleagues at the University of Chicago noticed a powerful effect of loneliness: It seems to be contagious, like the flu. When one person in a group started to share their lonely feelings, those close to them were also affected, and were 50 percent likelier to feel lonely as well.
Just because you’re by yourself doesn’t mean you have to be bad company.
My sense, influenced by principles in DBT, is that it’s inevitable that you’ll face dissatisfaction in relationships. Given this fact, the ability to repair relationships is more important than preventing a rift in the first place.
It drives me crazy to hear how often women are asked, “Why are you still single?” as if our relationship status is not just chance, but something to justify.
Men are also asked the same question
