“Life is composed of joys and miseries. They go hand in hand.” –Bhante Gunaratana1 On the ride of life, pain is the price of admission. We know pain right from birth. Pain is with us, in ways large and small, every day of our lives. Our discomforts range from the annoying to the agonizing. Embarrassments, mistakes, and failures are inevitable. We must all face unfairness, misfortune, and tragedy. This, I posit,… Read More »The Price of Admission
“Our brains have not evolved for this world of plenty. As Dr. Tom Finucane … said, ‘We are cacti in the rain forest.’ And like cacti adapted to an arid climate, we are drowning in dopamine.”1 I’ve killed more houseplants by overwatering than by underwatering. Many plants aren’t evolved to receive very much water: snake plants, succulents, cacti. Keep that in mind because you are one of those plants, and… Read More »Are You Overwatered?
We’ve already covered the strategic value of predicting how you could fail when you’re trying to establish a new habit or quit an old one: Imagining the situations that could lead you to slip up gives you a chance to mitigate them in advance. One thing we haven’t discussed that I’ve come to see as equally important is the emotional value of imagining failure. Here’s what that looks like: Think… Read More »Visualizing Failure
You are what you repeatedly do.1 Any behavior that you repeat over years naturally solidifies into part of your identity. This makes the behavior feel impossible to change – like it’s just who you are. But this is wrong. You can still change; it’ll just be harder. I was a marijuana addict for 11 years. For much of that time, it felt like I couldn’t possibly be anything else. The… Read More »You Are What You Repeat