Most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill.
- Well-being is a skill not suffering unnecessarily.
- It is a skill regulating noticing your emotional life.
- Regulating negative emotion is a skill.
Practicing mindfulness is just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience.
- You don’t add in anything to your experience.
- You’re just noticing what it’s like to be you a moment a moment, but in a way that is not reactive.
- You’re not grasping at what’s pleasant or pushing what’s unpleasant away.
Let’s say you have a fear of public speaking, and you feel anxiety because you’ve got to go out on stage.
- The default state of someone who doesn’t want to have that experience is one to worry about that experience in advance.
- Anxiety is kindled just by the mere thought of what you have to do.
- You feel the butterflies and you are at war with them.
Thoughts just come up from behind you so fast, and they seem to be you.
- You’re identified with each thought that emerges in consciousness and most people live their lives as though there’s no alternative
- We’re not given a rule book for how to operate a human mind.
- We kind of stumble out into adulthood more or less assuming that we have and will always have the minds we have.
- The only thing we can do to really upgrade our firmware is to just add new content
- We can read books we can we can develop new interests.
Mindfulness is a way of dropping a little bit lower and realizing there’s actually a place from which you can just feel it and be indifferent to it or anything else you could be feeling.
- Just notice that there’s even an unpleasant sensation
Re-source: Reframe
to frame (something) again and often in a different way : frame or express (words or a concept or plan) differently
Anxiety isn’t even that unpleasant. It’s so close to excitement.
- The difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just that the frame.
- It’s just the story you’re telling yourself
- If you felt these these tingles right before you’re about to go on a roller coaster, that’s part of why you’re going on the roller coaster.
- But it intolerable if you feel that way when you’re about to have an interview, or you’re about to walk out on stage.
So just dropping back and realizing the power of the framing it again is a skill that is has immense utility
- You can realize that the half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short.
- You can actually be psychologically free.
Don’t get stuck telling yourself a negative story
- You can become more and more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more
- You can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story.
- You can actually engineer and change the code that you’re running moment to moment.
Many of us have this sort of use of negative imagination where we think of all of the bad things that haven’t happened.
- If you’re stuck in traffic driving to the job that you don’t like and you’re frustrated, you can think of all the things that could happen to you.
You could be the person who is going to find out today that you’ve got cancer and have two months to live
- That hasn’t happened to you yet right, so using that kind of framework thinking can have a profound effect
You can reframe your experience in a way that doesn’t actually change anything material about your circumstance and it can let the light in.
craving and resource from Sam Harris on “Motivation Madness“