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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nick Trenton
Started reading
August 18, 2025
They make a mountain out of a molehill and then convince themselves there’s nothing they can do about it.
Being grateful means acknowledging and enjoying everything that is currently going well for you—in a way, the opposite of the stressed and anxious orientation.
“gratitude writing”
Deliberately turn your mind to focus on the things that are actually not problems for you at the moment.
Attitude 4: Focus on the present, not the past or the future
Anxiety always lives elsewhere.
conscious awareness and useful action don’t belong elsewhere: they live in the present.
Pull your awareness to what is going on right now, and you narrow the scope for overthinking.
this makes it impossible to appreciate the brand-new moment they have right now?
Focusing on needs rather than wants helps you get to the core of things and prioritize what’s ultimately important.
focus on what really matters and let go of what doesn’t.
Trying to endlessly optimize takes us further and further away from our core values and gets us distracted with things that are important but not fundamental.
Focusing on needs also allows you to be more resilient with changes, challenges, or disappointments that aren’t great but aren’t the end of the world.
When you focus on your most basic and fundamental needs, you’re forced to think of your truest values;
Practice a bit of mental minimalism, trim things down, and don’t try to control big decisions to an extreme degree.
True needs are often felt simply and directly, whereas those decisions and desires we notice ourselves endlessly justifying and explaining are usually not genuine needs.
Take the stress and coercion out of communication by clearly sharing your own needs and listening for the needs of others.
Focusing on needs avoids so many potential avenues of stress.
Put your awareness on everything that is good in any situation—i.e., your options, your resources, your potential for action, and your constant ability to act in your own best interests no matter what adversities you face.
When we can recognize and master our own emotions, we can adopt the emotional state of mind that serves us best.
regulation begins with emotional acceptance.
We do not become better at working with our emotions by learning to push them away, but by learning their names and becoming well acquainted with them.
This first part of the emotional regulation process is not dissimilar from other meditative practices—you are simply letting your emotions be what they are.
The emotion behind much overthinking is fear—fear
we have the option to observe our feelings, to feel our fear, but to nevertheless choose to act differently.
We can have compassion for our fearful feelings and validate them as real and painful without necessarily indulging them.
the opposite action technique enables us to identify the emotional core behind these thoughts so we can try out an alternative that feels better.
It’s a great way to begin to practice better emotional regulation and self-control, bringing consciousness to what is so often an automatic and unhealthy dip into negative thoughts and behavior patterns.
understand that you need both awareness and distance from this tired old rerun of a story that may have never even been accurate in the first place.
Put a discrete fence around the sensation,
is what you’re doing problem solving or rumination?
Bring yourself into the concrete moment by actually doing something, rather than endlessly juggling potentials and guesses and worries.
find a way to improve things.
If you can’t improve anything, then put your energy into distraction, forgiveness, or moving on.
If you can’t think of anything, focus on sensations from your five senses, or simply engage in physical activity, such as jogging or yoga.
