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April 20 - April 30, 2025
Prentis Hemphill, describes a boundary as “the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
Some boundaries are nonnegotiable and fixed; for example, “I don’t get in the car with someone who’s been drinking.” Other boundaries require regular calibration because they’re based on shifting needs.
Sleep does for your brain what hydrating does for your skin—sleep makes your brain glow.
When you don’t get enough sleep, it’s like not flushing a toilet inside your body. Guzzling a ton of coffee the next day is like spraying a bunch of air freshener in a bathroom with a broken toilet; it ain’t gonna cut it.
The more you consider the staggering amount of emotional and physiological regeneration that occurs during sleep, the more difficult it becomes to think of sleep as unproductive.
Have you ever wondered why you sometimes get ravenously hungry even though you just ate? It might be because you’re not getting enough sleep.
Prolonged sleep deprivation does horrible things to your mind and body, which is why sleep deprivation is used as a method of torture in warfare.
Our mental health is best honored through practical action. Breathing deeply, walking, sleeping—these are highly efficacious mental health interventions.
Optimizing your sleep preemptively is a protective measure for your mental health, too. Your body will step in and do so much of the work of healing for you if you give it the chance.
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.
Taking time to clarify your value system is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
Whatever you value, consciously or not, you’re going to pursue with full force; as a perfectionist, you won’t be able to help it. To the best of your ability, get clear and intentional on what your most deeply held values are.
When you accept responsibility for the decisions you make, you position yourself to be less resentful. Resentment is a barrier to joy.
A power mindset registers resentment as a signal to explore how much energy you are devoting to a person, a narrative, or a task.
Realizing your power means that you’re free. What comes next is learning how to enjoy your freedom.
Love from a martyr is the blood-money version of love; it doesn’t feel good to receive it. The only people who are happy to receive offerings from martyrs are narcissists.
Pleasure is an interesting string to pull. Examining the areas of your life in which you are sacrificing pleasure will lead you to a direct understanding of the conditions you place upon feeling joyful and free.
Self-compassion primes joy because it invites pleasure; you’re no longer punishing yourself by restricting pleasure until you’ve “earned” the right to feel good. Without self-compassion or pleasure, joy is elusive.
From a clinical perspective, sacrificing your pleasure is not a virtue; it’s a serious risk factor.
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.
The more you deny yourself access to pleasure, the less you can access your instincts about what you need and when you need it.
When you make your access to pleasure conditional (a “treat” for being good), you’re communicating to yourself that whether you deserve to feel good lies in direct proportion to your performance, not your existence.
We don’t take the “I want it, so I’ll do it” approach because we don’t trust ourselves. We think we’ll want too much.
The research is clear on this, the irony of prioritizing efficiency over joy is that joyful people get more done in the long term because they don’t burn out.[2]
When you don’t trust yourself, you move through life trying to memorize the right thing to do instead of trusting yourself to know it. You interpret setbacks as failures because you don’t have the security to operate from a wider perspective.
You live with an attachment to a future outcome that generates chronic excess anxiety and you call that anxiety “hope.”
No matter how much you love yourself, if you don’t trust yourself, you meet your gestures of self-love with low-key suspicion and hesitation.
You can’t enjoy relationships in which trust has gone bankrupt; your relationship with yourself is no exception.
We think that the more we trust ourselves, the fewer boundaries we’ll need; the opposite is true. The people who trust themselves the most are the ones who honor their boundaries the most.
When you trust yourself to lead your own life, not only are you secure enough to hear other people’s perspectives, you’re secure enough to actively seek out those perspectives.
When you trust yourself, you’re not trying to prove anything. You may take more risks, which may mean you make more mistakes.
Trust engenders curiosity and openness. When you trust yourself, you focus on being curious about what you need instead of being suspicious about who you are.
When you don’t trust yourself, you’re waiting to catch yourself in a mistake so you can pounce on your own certainty about how unworthy of trust you are.
Healing is not about figuring out what to do; it doesn’t matter if you know what to do if you don’t trust yourself to do it. Healing is about learning to trust yourself.
Trusting yourself is not something that happens to you; it’s a choice you make and support through action.
You don’t have to grand gesture yourself. Any size action that is aligned with your values will help you rebuild trust with yourself.
You know why you’re not leading with that part yet? The part where you stake claim to what you really want? Because you don’t trust yourself to live up to that version of your story.
When you’re ready to face your fears, you don’t ask yourself what the worst thing that could happen is; you ask yourself what you truly want.
There’s a voice inside you that’s always there. It tells you what feels right and what doesn’t. It tells you what you need, what you desire, and where your true pleasure lies. To adapt to your truest self, you need to listen to your intuitive voice.
Once you’ve identified what you want, thinking and speaking about yourself in a manner that supports the idea that you are a person who can get what you want proves to be a whole other animal. There can be a deep reluctance to honor the intuitive knowing you hold inside: that you’re capable and worthy.
When you’re in the middle of the change, you don’t realize how much you’re changing. Inevitably, there are moments of discouragement when you don’t think you’re changing at all. Then, a single visible moment stacked upon thousands of invisible ones bursts through.
Zero-gravity, raw, utterly “lost” moments beckon for surrender. Surrender is the ultimate loss of control and the greatest form of power. Surrendering is not conceding to defeat. Surrendering is conceding to potentialities beyond your imagining.
In secular terms, God is wherever you find meaning, and prayer is communing with that meaning.
It’s not uncommon to arrive at the point of surrender after being broken open. It doesn’t matter how you arrive at the point of openness. What matters is that you understand that being open is powerful.
You think it’s all up to you, and in the thick of that impossible pressure, you feel that you must control everything. Because it’s not all up to you and you can’t control everything, you fail.
You have the power to assign meaning to whatever you choose. You also have the power to take what’s meaningful to you and bring it to life through personal policy.
When you don’t give yourself the chance to animate what’s meaningful for you, you set yourself up for a death-by-papercut life in which you never get to be your real self in the world.
As you adapt inwardly, the shift you experience will be a subtlety imperceptible to anyone but you. At least at first, only you will feel it, only you will know.
If you’re trying to rebuild trust with yourself, it behooves you to take an inventory of past versions of yourself that may need your present-day forgiveness.
Loving yourself doesn’t hinge on loving your body. Loving yourself and loving your body are not the same thing, because you are not your body.
