The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life

by Lauren Martin

When we’re anxious, we’re not really living. We’re surviving. We’re holding on, waiting for the anxiety to pass, losing out on minutes, hours, and days of our lives.

Actually, when I focused on the moment, two things happened: I didn’t have the time or mental space to worry about the future, and because I was paying attention to the moment, the future took care of itself. Because the future was the result of moments, and when I was living as presently in the moment as possible, I didn’t have to worry so much about what could be.

How the future was none of my business and the past was no longer my problem.

All of those times that we spend the day, or the conversation, or the entire relationship stressing about things that never come to pass—those lost moments are the ones that we sacrifice at the altar of our fear of pain. We’re so scared of pain that we inflict a different kind of pain trying to avoid it.

Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four. —Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck

You’re so used to your features, you forget how beautiful you look to a stranger.

When we say things will be better in the morning, it’s because sleep is one of the psychologically proven ways to restore willpower.

It’s a lot easier to have no fries than just one. It’s a lot easier to have no wine than “just one sip.” It’s a lot easier to ignore your vices when you don’t see them.

What many of us try to do is replace anxiety with the concept of calm. This doesn’t work because calm is not an aroused emotion. Excitement, like anxiety, arouses emotion. It increases heart rate and cortisol, preparing our body and mind for action. But excitement produces a positive emotion, unlike the negative one anxiety produces.

We think we understand what someone is saying, but we are only really hearing them through our own filters. Only when we realize that our personal interpretation of someone’s words and actions is usually inaccurate can we stop stressing so much about every interaction and start enjoying the people around us.

Thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people—to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole.

We let our memories and our emotions distort our perception of events and that’s where our miscommunications and misunderstandings stem from.

Charles Morin and researchers have concluded that the anxiety of loss of sleep is the main contributor to insomnia.

“you can tell a lot about a person by the way [s]he handles these three things: a rainy holiday, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights,”

The life isn’t fair motto has never worked for me. It didn’t soothe me when things felt out of control and unjust. But if life has taught me anything it’s that there’s always some silver lining if you stay around long enough to find it. Life isn’t fair, but there’s always justice somewhere if you’re willing to look for it.

Or the thing that went horribly wrong led to the thing they did right. That’s where magic happens—in the space in between what we think we want and what we get. When we’re forced down a road we wouldn’t be on if everything had worked out as we hoped.