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April 20 - April 30, 2025
What they discovered was that silver medalists tend to feel worse than bronze medalists because the most salient counterfactual thought after winning silver is, I could have won gold, whereas the most salient counterfactual thought after winning bronze is, I could have not placed.
The sting of silver, as I call it, is real—it hurts. You have to acknowledge the hurt so you can extend self-compassion and move forward.
It’s not a bad thing to engage in counterfactual thinking. Studies show that upward counterfactuals increase motivation in adaptive perfectionists, who make more specific and additive counterfactuals than maladaptive perfectionists do.[13]
Perfectionists who don’t acknowledge that counterfactual thinking is a reflex waste energy trying to force themselves to stop thinking about what might have been.
While you can’t control the fact that you engage in counterfactual thinking, you do have the power to exploit counterfactuals to help you increase your levels of satisfaction and motivation.
Counterfactual thinking is a way in which your brain initially organizes information. How you construct meaning around that information is up to you.
When you become brave enough to risk failure, you’re going to play with some heavy hitters and you’re going to lose. The loss is proof that you’re not allowing yourself to be intimidated by the risk of unknown outcomes, you’re bold enough to go for it, and you’re allowing yourself to fail forward.
You’re allowed to have a layered experience. You can be disappointed and proud. You can be curious about what might have been and grateful for what is.
We often avoid reaching out to others in the low, everything-is-hard moments because we feel like, What can they really say to me to make me feel better?
But just because someone can’t offer you emotional support doesn’t mean they can’t come over and clean your kitchen. Tangible support is practical aid.
People want to show up for you, so when they say, “Let me know if I can do anything,” let them know. Tangible support, especially when it’s consistent and scheduled, can do wonders for your mental health.
Taking the initiative to ask for support is uncomfortable, but perhaps spending long bouts of time in this one precious life of yours feeling disconnected and stuck is more uncomfortable?
Engaging in talk therapy, therapy apps, an honest conversation with a trusted friend, a hotline, or a warmline—emotional support includes any outlet in which you can safely express feelings while receiving validation, positive encouragement, and (ideally) an informed perspective.
It’s true that even simple stretching releases endorphins, and don’t get me started on the miracle drug that is walking.[*][16]
As Neff explains, “One easy way to care for and comfort yourself when you’re feeling bad is to give yourself supportive touch. Touch activates the care system and the parasympathetic nervous system to help us calm down and feel safe.
HAND-TO-HEART TECHNIQUE: Place your hand over your chest (touch skin to skin if you can, instead of over your clothes). Breathe deeply.
HAND-TO-ARM TECHNIQUE: Take your dominant hand and place it on your opposite arm, between your shoulder and your elbow. Brush your hand up and down for some physical reassurance.
Sometimes what we need to get ourselves through a crisis and connect to stability is money. If shame is a moat around the castle of asking for help, the moat widens exponentially when asking for financial help.
Financial stress and mental health are inextricably linked.
A sense of belonging is a cardinal feature of mental wellness. We need community. Period.
Communities begin with one person and an invitation to connect. A community is any space in which you can regularly give and receive in ways that are meaningful to you.
Communities unlock entire worlds—even if you “only” make one genuine connection in a year, that’s a big deal!
Informational support can also be gained through independent study, like reading books on a topic or taking an online course.
If you’re struggling with your mental health, don’t assume it’s because there’s something wrong with you; assume it’s because you don’t have the support you need.
Support doesn’t add up; it compounds. Get any amount of support you can and build from there.
Human beings need support and connection throughout their entire lives. Including when things are going well. Including when we already know what to do.
Reducing change to a one-step process makes change seem easier to enact, which helps us in the short run (presumption of future success motivates us to try) and sabotages us in the long run (we can’t figure out why it’s so hard to do something so damn simple).
Here’s an unlock for anyone (especially procrastinator perfectionists) beating themselves up about why they haven’t started changing what they most want to change: not only have you already taken the first step, but you’re also probably ready for stage three.
PRECONTEMPLATION: You’re not thinking about changing.
CONTEMPLATION: You begin to encounter repeating thoughts and feelings about that little collection of experiences you’ve gathered. Some things are working well for you; others are not.
PREPARATION: By this stage, you’ve decided that you want to change, and you prepare to enact the change.
ACTION: The action stage is marked by behavioral changes. This is the stage that most people associate with change because it’s the stage that’s most visible.
MAINTENANCE: A crucial and often overlooked stage.
Regression is a natural part of growth. You will regress, and when you do, you need support around you to remind you that regression and failure are not the same thing.
Temporary changes are easy; maintaining change is the real challenge.
The amount of time you spend consciously engaging in whatever stage of change you’re in is not a barometer of inefficiency. The amount of time berating yourself for how long each stage took you or is taking you is what’s inefficient.
We make rapid comparisons that our minds automatically plug into hierarchies of first-rate, second-rate, better, worse, etc. Get out of the mindset of better or worse and get into the mindset of different.
You’re so dynamic that you couldn’t possibly begin to measure yourself against someone else, and you do yourself a disservice every time you do. You won’t be for everyone; that doesn’t mean you need to change.
Keeping your world small is a protective mechanism enacted by the part of you that does not understand that when you’re connected to your inherent worth, you have a built-in protection system.
What matters is that you’re living your life according to your values. There’s no point in comparing yourself to others because for one thing, you don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s private world. And for another, no one has the exact same set of values as you do.
What’s important to know about affective forecasting is that it stretches beyond the day you’re currently experiencing and into your perception of future events.
In the research world, happiness based on the prediction of a positive outcome for a future event is known as anticipatory pleasure; sometimes it’s also called anticipatory joy.[22]
Feeling stressed based on predictions of future stress is known as anticipatory anxiety.[23]
The affective direction of your anticipation has been shown to impact memory, motivation, social anxiety, planning, and corresponding emotional states, in addition to impacting the way neural mechanisms in your brain are operating.
We tend to think of happiness as existing primarily in the event itself, but we can extract so much happiness from anticipating and recalling (reminiscing about) the event.
We can create recall cues (framed pictures, displayed mementos), talk about enjoyable moments with others, or privately reminisce—the event doesn’t need to continue for you to continue to extract enjoyment from it.
Sustainable strategies for growth are marked by subtlety, not aggression.
Healing is less often big and bold and more often minute and silent. In hindsight, you can see that the signals of progress were there. In real time, healing feels too slow to count as legitimate growth.
Healing is anything you do when you act on behalf of your most authentic self. Healing requires an intense amount of work, but healing does not require that the intensity of the work be experienced in a consolidated fashion.
The notion of radical healing is a precarious one for perfectionists, who tend to attach an immediate expectation of “radical results” to the concept. If positive results don’t come in a linear manner commensurate to the output (which they won’t, because healing is not a linear process), perfectionists end up feeling like radical failures.
