A Good Life is a Life of Struggle This is because struggle makes you stronger, and strength is the source of physical and psychological freedom. It’s obvious how struggling against heavy weights in the gym or struggling against a steep mountain while hiking makes you stronger – your muscles respond to such challenges by growing. What’s less obvious is how this principle applies to your mind. The brain is like… Read More »Struggle Makes You Stronger
In March of 2015, I was severely depressed. Actually, I had been down for a long time, but this was the worst it had ever been. There were many external reasons for this: I was single and lonely, I was working six days a week to barely afford a noisy apartment in a crummy neighborhood, and I was in constant pain from seven different injuries. To “deal” with my problems,… Read More »The Importance of Living with Integrity
Anxiety and avoidance coexist in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. You feel anxious about a task, so you avoid it. But now it feels even harder to get started. And have even less time to finish. So you get more anxious, making you even more inclined to avoid the task. How do you get out of this downward spiral? It would be nice if you could snap your fingers and stop… Read More »You Won’t Feel Better Until You Start
You make what feels like a reasonable to-do list for the day, but then you only get half of it done. You carefully calculate how early you need to wake up to make it out the door on time, but then you wind up running late anyway. You tell your guests dinner will be at 6:00, but the food isn’t ready until 7:30. In each of these cases, you’ve fallen… Read More »How to Overcome the Planning Fallacy