Resilient

If you can be happy when others are happy, you can always be happy, since there is always someone somewhere who is happy.

Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.

It’s motivating, not morbid, to realize that we’re all running out of runway, that it’s time to change something that could add quality years to your life.

To have more acceptance of your body, start by bringing to mind some people you like and respect. How much does the way they look matter to you? Probably very little. Also think about meeting new people. How long does it take to get past how they look to a deeper sense of them? Probably less than a minute. We worry about what others are thinking about how we look, but usually they are thinking about it about as much as we are thinking about their appearance…not much at all!

If a person doesn’t like his or her body, it’s harder to take good care of it; then vitality declines, and with it, grit and resilience. We need to accept, appreciate, and nurture the body, and treat it more like a friend than a disposable beast.

The first is delay of gratification, the willingness to put off immediate rewards for the sake of a greater future reward. The second is distress tolerance, the capacity to endure a painful experience without making a bad thing worse, such as “self-medicating” with overeating or alcohol.

Patience doesn’t mean ignoring real problems, but life is full of delays and discomfort, and sometimes we just have to wait.

Many of the mistakes in my life have come from being impatient

Agency is the sense of being a cause rather than an effect. Agency is present if you deliberately pick a blue sweater over a red one or listen to someone express an opinion and think, “Nah, I don’t agree with that.”

Because of the negativity bias, stressful experiences over the course of your life have been prioritized for storage in your brain, especially into what’s called implicit memory: the residues of lived experience that shape your expectations, ways of relating to others, and background sense of what it feels like to be you.