Szia! Welcome to this week's digest. This week is a very special "Emo" edition, as we surface a variety of content to help us better understand and embrace our emotions, and live our lives with equanimity, despite all of the inherent uncertainty and volatility that life sends our way :D [Note: I am not a medical professional or doctor, nor do I play one on TV. If you are struggling with emotions or mental health conditions, I strongly recommend utilizing these resources for immediate help.]

This week's topics include the importance of living our lives with equanimity, the emotional origins of procrastination, and the principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (2x). Enjoy!



Source: Giphy

• PODCAST - Reboot #102: To Actually Live Your Life – with Khe Hy by Jerry Colonna - Extensive worrying about living the "right" way can paradoxically inhibit our ability to live well.
   
• ARTICLE - The New York Times: Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control) by Charlotte Lieberman - Procrastion is an emotional coping response that can be resolved with compassion, curiosity, and thoughtful design.
   
• ARTICLE - Aeon: Sailing into the storm by Joseph Trunzo - Acceptance and Commitment Therapy [ACT] develops mindfulness and psychological flexibility to enable thoughtful action in alignment with your values and in pursuit of your goals.
   
• BOOK - The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living: A Guide to ACT by Russ Harris (My full Kindle notes) - Russ Harris' primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy provides a wonderful framework for realizing a more realistic version of happiness.

• If you like this digest and know others who want to live an examined life, share this with them, sunbathe in the park, and / or attempt to draw a plant without looking down at your canvas.

• If you have any feedback, you can reply directly to this e-mail!

• Sensible Living: Reflecting on the Fine Essentials of a Beautiful Life
   
• TSD Ventures Consulting: We give Proactive Health companies strategic and financial clarity.
   
• TSD Ventures Coaching: We help our clients build healthy, fulfilling habits. Our clients aspire to cultivate proactive, healthy habits in areas like sleep, nutrition, exercise, mental health, and relationships.

• There's this nagging voice that you have the potential to do more, so that's not enough. And I think that's where the death bed test shows up... I literally go through this math in my head, where if you impacted 10 people's lives with 100 points of goodness, or you impacted a million people's lives with 3, the second one just feels better to me. And so then, therefore, you can live in a state of equanimity knowing that you were impactful, and at the time at which you transition [die], you could then rest... It's back to that same question of "Did you matter?"
   
• There's a false logic here, that purpose, meaning, matter, impact, is a function of the number of lives we have touched. And that false logic is an attempt to ward off the fear of dying and not having mattered, not having our passing noted by the world.
   
• Perhaps the way to break the cycle is to ask yourself what is it that I'm afraid of? What's the threat? The threat is that you'll have died and you won't have mattered, and therefore won't be remembered. You can never know what forces you've set in motion by your existence, so ultimately you cannot ever be sure that you have impacted the world the way you want to impact the world. You have to let go of the need to have it all figured out in order to just actually live your life.
   
• There is a real release and value that comes from simply living the path, and not worrying about whether or not you're on the right path. I think that's what you're reaching for. The equanimity that comes from placing one foot in front of the other, and folding the laundry, and chopping wood, and carrying water... That has made me less afraid of dying, and that has made me more happy with living. Which when I can manage to step marginally away from myself and look backwards, that feels like a good way to live... When I lay my head down at the pillow at night, most nights I don't feel that latent, persistent anxiety. It took me a long time.

• Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks... [P]rocrastination can be understood as “the primacy of short-term mood repair … over the longer-term pursuit of intended actions.”
   
• ...there’s an entire body of research dedicated to the ruminative, self-blaming thoughts many of us tend to have in the wake of procrastination, which are known as “procrastinatory cognitions.” The thoughts we have about procrastination typically exacerbate our distress and stress, which contribute to further procrastination... Over time, chronic procrastination has not only productivity costs, but measurably destructive effects on our mental and physical health...
   
• We must realize that, at its core, procrastination is about emotions, not productivity. The solution doesn’t involve downloading a time management app or learning new strategies for self-control. It has to do with managing our emotions in a new way... To rewire any habit, we have to give our brains what Dr. Brewer called the “Bigger Better Offer” or “B.B.O.” In the case of procrastination, we have to find a better reward than avoidance — one that can relieve our challenging feelings in the present moment without causing harm to our future selves.
   
• Cultivate curiosity: If you’re feeling tempted to procrastinate, bring your attention to the sensations arising in your mind and body. What feelings are eliciting your temptation? Where do you feel them in your body?

• ACT helps people develop psychological flexibility, which is the ability to pay very close attention to the present moment, especially in regards to feelings and bodily sensations, even if they are uncomfortable or painful. It is important to do this free of judgment, because it allows you to make decisions about your life based not on controlling or avoiding whatever discomfort or pain you are experiencing, but on moving towards your values and what is meaningfully important to you.
   
• Where CBT might make attempts to unravel the irrational nature of Alice’s momentary thoughts, ACT seeks only to identify them as either useful or not in moving her towards what she values in her current context.
   
• An important concept in ACT is that attempts to control thoughts or emotions usually lead to greater problems... ACT has often been criticised for asking people to ignore their emotions but, in reality, it encourages and helps people to do exactly the opposite, to lean into their emotional discomfort, explore it, and move through it, rather than trying to escape, avoid, extinguish or control it... [A]cceptance is not just ‘sucking it up’, it is remaining open to our most difficult and painful emotional experiences so that we can move through them, all the while staying as engaged in our lives in meaningful ways as much as possible.
   
• To be open and present requires an abdication of the control agenda. Rather than fighting or controlling pain and discomfort or past versions of ourselves, we must lean into things that are difficult and painful, with the understanding that we really do not have the ability to control our mind or our emotions, only how we react, behave and respond to them.
   
• Finally, at its core, ACT is a behaviourally based approach. It requires doing. The acronym is not an accident. Once values are identified and directions are determined, committed action must take place if meaningful living is to occur. This is another aspect of our lives over which we actually have control. We can control what we do, and everything we do should move us towards our values.

• ...[H]uman beings are generally most trapped by the illusions of their own mind...[E]volution has shaped our brains so that we are hardwired to suffer psychologically: to compare, evaluate, and criticize ourselves, to focus on what we’re lacking, to rapidly become dissatisfied with what we have, and to imagine all sorts of frightening scenarios, most of which will never happen.
   
• Western society assumes that mental suffering is abnormal. It is seen as a weakness or illness, a product of a mind that is somehow faulty or defective. This means that when we do inevitably experience painful thoughts and feelings, we often criticize ourselves for being weak or stupid... the normal thinking processes of a healthy human mind will naturally lead to psychological suffering. You’re not defective; your mind’s just doing what it evolved to do.
   
• ...[C]ontrol methods [like distraction] become problematic when: • You use them excessively. • You use them in situations where they can’t work. • Using them stops you from doing the things you truly value.
   
• It’s no surprise that life is richer and more fulfilling when we actively invest our time and energy in the things that are most important or meaningful to us. Yet all too often our attempts to avoid unpleasant feelings get in the way of doing what we truly value.
   
• So here is the happiness trap in a nutshell: to find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings, but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create.
   
• Psychological flexibility is the ability to adapt to a situation with awareness, openness, and focus and to take effective action, guided by your values.
   
• From an ACT perspective, we are far more interested in whether a thought is helpful than whether it’s true or false, serious or ridiculous, negative or positive, optimistic or pessimistic. The bottom line is always the same: does this thought help you make the most out of life?
   
• Ultimately, self-esteem is a bunch of thoughts about whether or not you’re a “good person.” And here’s the key thing: self-esteem is not a fact; it’s just an opinion... Self-acceptance means being okay with who you are. Treating yourself kindly. Accepting that you’re a human being and therefore imperfect. Allowing yourself to mess up, make mistakes, and learn from them.
   
• The values-focused life will always be more fulfilling than the goal-focused life because you get to appreciate the journey even as you’re moving toward your goals... To get to the values underlying a goal, you need to ask yourself, “What’s this goal in the service of? What will it enable me to do that’s truly meaningful?”
   
• As we go through life, we encounter all sorts of obstacles, difficulties, and challenges, and each time this happens we have a choice: we can embrace the situation as an opportunity to grow, learn, and develop, or we can fight, struggle, and try whatever we can to avoid it.
   
• ...[T]he basic ACT formula: A = Accept your thoughts and feelings and be present. C = Connect with your values. T = Take effective action.