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March 10 - April 9, 2024
As long as you are a human being, you will always have weaknesses and limitations. Wellness is not about figuring out how to get rid of your weaknesses; it’s about accepting your weaknesses so you can deploy your energy into maximizing your strengths. We’ve been trained to view mental health through a lens of pathology and deficit: What’s wrong with me, and how can I fix it? That kind of thinking is on the way out. Thirty years from now, therapy is going to center on the exploration of what’s going well and why.
You’re not desperate to find a spare fifteen minutes, you spent an hour watching trash TV last night before lurking all over Instagram. What you’re desperate for is not the time to do it; it’s the energy to do it.
Anything that helps you operate with premium energy is productive. With premium-quality energy, you can access your abilities in a way that “burnt-out you” could never compete with. One hour of premium-quality energy will serve you better than ten hours spent approaching a task while feeling rushed, resentful, disengaged, or exhausted. Half-assing a job for twice the amount of time does not equal a job well done.
productivity is anything that energizes you without hurting you. What energizes you without hurting you? How might your life change if you did more of that?
Focusing on the need for closure is a way for us to both delay and process our loss.
Your curiosity knows what you need to open yourself up to. Curiosity is the unsung hero of mental health. Curiosity is strong; it can pull you out of anything.
Grief is also a closure-less experience, and we hate that about grief. We hate that we can’t put our finger on what exactly it is about the subject of our grief that keeps drawing us in. Neither can we nail down the way grief seems to move and change each time we look at it—one moment it’s a soft memory, the next a bitter wince.
Counterfactual thinking is a cognitive reflex. Support comes in every color. Maintenance is a triumph. Swap “better or worse” for “different.” Happiness is experienced in three stages; so is stress. A feather’s-weight more weighs a lot. The difference between a struggle and a challenge is connection. Simple isn’t easy. Energy management beats time management. Closure is a fantasy.
You take an inventory of your values and decide what you want to commit to and what you don’t.
For procrastinator perfectionists, the loss is anticipatory: What if this thing I want doesn’t work out? Then who will I be? Then what will I have?
Reframing is a skill, and skills can be learned. To begin practicing the skill of reframing, ask yourself the following question: “What’s another way to look at this?” If you can’t think of another way yourself, ask around.
I’ve been feeling less and less [name the emotion] lately. I enjoy feeling [name the positive feeling you enjoy], and when [name the action] happens, I feel more [repeat the positive feeling you enjoy]. I don’t like feeling [name the undesirable emotion], and when [identify the event] happens, I feel more/less [repeat the undesirable emotion]. I miss feeling [name the emotion], and I’m trying to get that feeling back. I want to feel more [name the emotion] and less [name the emotion]. This matters to me because [share meaning].
The difference between an opinion and a judgment is that an opinion reflects your thoughts and perspective, whereas a judgment reflects your thoughts and perspective alongside an analysis of your worth as compared to that of others. For example:
You may identify other people whom you deem to be smarter, hotter, more patient, funnier, healthier, and otherwise more successful than yourself. Transmuting your opinion into a commentary on the other person’s worth, you consciously or unconsciously conclude that the other person is a better human being; thus, they’re more worthy of goodness than you are. When you do that, you’re being judgy.
Whenever we judge others, we create separation between us and “them.” Whenever we judge ourselves, we create separation between the parts of ourselves that we think deserve goodness and the parts that we think don’t. When we judge ourselves in either direction (as better than or less than), we make our worth conditional and set ourselves up for shame.
When you’re doing well, show up for the future you that’s having a hard time. Forge and reinforce protective factors around yourself. Create routines that restore your energy—find an exercise buddy, read books that teach and inspire you, go to therapy, nurture healthy habits, “broaden and build” your life.
Somewhere along the line, we got it in our heads that being healthy and strong means that we’ve finally figured out how to not need anything from anyone. We have that exactly backwards. Being healthy and strong means that we’ve finally figured out we could use help from everyone.
Sometimes the number one thing you need to do is less. Do less, fall back, say no, stop. The more you learn to listen to your instincts and set your intentions, the more clarity you’ll gain on what you care about and what you don’t. Not giving energy or time to that which you don’t care about is as brilliant as restoration strategies get.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. AnaÏs Nin
You know all about counterfactual thinking, liminal space,
Enjoying freedom isn’t a given. We can know we’re free and still feel trapped. When we feel trapped, we experience freedom as a technicality: I know I’m technically free to do what I want, but I could never actually do what I want.
Joy is healthy in any amount. Like the air you breathe, you never have to worry about having too much joy. Restricting joy is profoundly unnecessary. It’s not that perfectionists are consciously trying to restrict joy; perfectionists are consciously trying to restrict pleasure. We restrict pleasure in misguided expressions of responsibility, the irony being that when it comes to your mental health, restricting pleasure is an irresponsible decision. From a clinical perspective, sacrificing your pleasure is not a virtue; it’s a serious risk factor. “Enjoy” means you are “in joy,” not outside of
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Let’s clarify the difference between immediate gratification and pleasure. Both feel good in the moment, but pleasure also feels good in the anticipation of the pleasurable event and in the recall of the pleasurable event. In contrast, immediate gratification can produce excess anxiety before the event (I hope I don’t “give in”) and induce guilt after the event (I wish I hadn’t done that).
As women, we’re taught that we need to justify our pleasure, and the justification better be damn good. Accordingly, pleasure seeking is relegated to the bottom of our to-do scrolls, assuming it makes the list at all. Women wrestle so much with the mastery of immediate gratification that we don’t even give ourselves the chance to graduate to our pleasure.
Without pleasure, our lives become performative. We perform in ways we think will make us happy instead of trusting ourselves to explore what feels good and right. This generic-at-best formula for satisfaction leads to depression for one thing, and it also leads women to conflate being selfish with experiencing pleasure: “Well, it made me feel good, so it was selfish.” No. It made you feel good, so it was pleasurable.
There’s no greater competitive advantage than loving what you do and taking pleasure in your life.
The more you trust yourself, the more pleasure you allow yourself to experience.
Experts are people who stay committed to both informed and experiential approaches in their domain of expertise. Your domain of expertise is your own true self.
You don’t have to grand gesture yourself. Any size action that is aligned with your values will help you rebuild trust with yourself.
When you lose control and do surrender, what you’re left with is possibility. The possibility arises because in the process of surrendering, you let go of the narcissistic notion that you are the all-knowing being who can figure out every answer to every question and thereby control the universe at large.
Resentment is heavy. If you want to be light enough to be uplifted by joy, you have to let go of the things that weigh you down.
You detach, move on from, and let go of the idea that your worth as a human being is connected in any way to the number of mistakes you’ve made in the past. Entertain the notion that who you are in this moment is not defined by previous versions of yourself.
When you’re connected to yourself and you’re present, you don’t need certainty. When you trust yourself, you understand that no matter what changes around you, there are a thousand right paths to the true self within you.
If we know that what we’re doing represents the right choice, then we can know if we’re right or wrong. On a deeper level, this emotionally charged logic translates to our incessant need to verify our worth—if what we do is the good thing to do, then we are good. We also want what we do to be who we are because defining who you are outside of what you do is arduous work.
You are a human being. You are not what you do or what you have or who you’re with or what you look like. You are an expansive, powerful, large, ever-changing force in the world, like an ocean—not some tiny forgotten room in an old run-down house. The larger you allow yourself to be, the easier it is to find your way back to yourself.
You’re in a control mindset when you fixate on finding the one right person, the one right job, the one right house, or the one right life. There is no one right way to be who you are. There’s no “one right door” to enter before you get to you any more than there’s one right place to dive into the ocean.
Adaptive perfectionists cycle through change vigorously because we love pushing ourselves to grow, and you can’t grow without changing.
Change is scary because we think it requires us to rearrange ourselves such that we have to find the one right way all over again. Change is a lot less scary when you stay in touch with the notion that you are large, not small, so of course there are a thousand paths to yourself.
Remember that your worst day of actively working towards what you want in this life is going to be better than your best day of a life in which you are denying yourself your truest desire.
Those who get what they want with minimal to no effort miss the opportunity to cultivate the strengths and skills required to sustain success.
Resistance is an impartial force of nature, like gravity . . . The apparition of resistance is by definition a good sign, because resistance never appears except when preceded by a dream. The dream arises in our psyche (even if we deny it, even if we fail to or refuse to recognize it) like a tree ascending into the sunshine. Simultaneously the dream’s shadow appears—i.e., resistance—just as a physical tree casts a physical shadow. That’s a law of nature. Where there is a dream, there is resistance. Thus: where we encounter resistance, somewhere nearby is a dream.
The remedy to resistance is not discipline; it’s pleasure. Pleasure is an antidote for so much. Find what brings you real pleasure and you will find your way home to yourself.
or we work to align with our power. The choices you make moving forward belong only to you. Will you choose self-punishment or self-compassion? Absence or presence? Performance or freedom? Isolation or support? Resentment or forgiveness? Suspicion or trust? Immediate gratification or pleasure? Planning joy or joy now? Will you choose control or power?
