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101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think

Brianna Wiest

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42 quotes

spirituality

Subconscious Behaviors that are Keeping You from Having The Life You Want

  • The objectivity required to see the effects of present monoculture is very difficult to develop. Once you have so deeply accepted an idea as “truth” it doesn’t register as “cultural” or “subjective” anymoreJul 31 2021 2:31PM
  • You believe that creating your best life is a matter of deciding what you want and then going after it, but in reality, you are psychologically incapable of being able to predict what will make you happyJul 31 2021 2:32PM
  • The pattern of unnecessarily creating crises in your life is actually an avoidance technique. It distracts you from actually having to be vulnerable or held accountable for whatever it is you’re afraid ofJul 30 2021 10:38AM
  • You think that to change your beliefs, you have to adopt a new line of thinking, rather than seek experiences that make that thinking self-evident. A belief is what you know to be true because experience has made it evident to you. If you want to change your life, change your beliefs. If you want to change your beliefs, go out and have experiences that make them real to you. Not the opposite way around.Jul 31 2021 2:37PM
  • You think “problems” are roadblocks to achieving what you want, when in reality they are pathways.Jul 30 2021 10:34AM
  • Marcus Aurelius sums this up well: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Simply, running into a “problem” forces you to take action to resolve it. That action will inevitably lead you to think differently, behave differently, and choose differently. The “problem” becomes a catalyst for you to actualize the life you always wantedJul 30 2021 10:35AM

The Psychology of Daily Routine

  • In short, routine is important because habitualness creates mood, and mood creates the “nurture” aspect of your personality, not to mention that letting yourself be jerked around by impulsiveness is a breeding ground for everything you essentially do not want.Jul 31 2021 2:40PM
  • More is not better. Happiness is not experiencing something else; it’s continually experiencing what you already have in new and different waysJul 30 2021 10:39AM
  • When we don’t settle into routine, we teach ourselves that “fear” is an indicator that we’re doing the wrong thing, rather than just being very invested in the outcome.Jul 31 2021 2:49PM

10 Things Emotionally Intelligent People do not Do

  • They recognize their emotions as responses, not accurate gauges, of what’s going on.Jul 31 2021 5:37PM
  • They are aware of, and avoid, extrapolation, which is essentially projecting the present moment into the foreseeable future—believing that the moment at hand constitutes what your entire life amounted to, rather than just being another passing, transitory experience in the wholeJul 31 2021 5:47PM

How the People We Once Loved become Strangers Again

  • But the ease and access isn’t what we crave. It isn’t what I’m writing about right now. It isn’t what we revolve around after it’s gone. We are all just waiting for another universe to collide with ours, to change what we can’t ourselves. It’s interesting how we realize the storm returns to calm, but we see the stars differently now, and we don’t know, and we can’t choose, whose wreckage can do that for us.Jul 31 2021 6:09PM

16 Signs of a Socially Intelligent Person

  • To speak definitively about any one person or idea is to be blind to the multitude of perspectives that exist on it. It is the definition of closed-minded and short-sightedness.Jul 31 2021 6:11PM
  • an immediate emotional response without thoughtful consideration is just defensivenessJul 31 2021 6:12PM
  • When you accuse someone of being wrong, you close them off to considering another perspective by heightening their defensesJul 31 2021 6:14PM
  • posting anything that you are not confident to support means you are not being genuine to yourself (you are behaving on behalf of the part of you that wants other people to validate it).Jul 31 2021 6:20PM

Uncomfortable Feelings that actually Indicate you’re on the Right Path

  • Left brain” fogginess. When you’re utilizing the right hemisphere more often (you’re becoming more intuitive, you’re dealing with emotions, you’re creating) sometimes it can seem as though “left brain” functions leave you feeling fuzzy. Things such as focusing, organizing, and remembering small details suddenly become difficult.Jul 31 2021 6:28PM
  • The thing about negative people is that they rarely realize they are negative, and because you feel uncomfortable saying anythingJul 31 2021 6:30PM

What the Feelings you most Suppress are trying to Tell You

  • What you have to know is that suffering is just the refusal to accept what is. That’s it. Etymologically, it comes from the Latin word to “from below to bear.” Or, to “resist, endure, put under.”Jul 31 2021 6:41PM
  • As kids we were punished for crying out if our emotional experience wasn’t in accordance with our parents' convenienceJul 31 2021 6:42PM
  • Numbness is not nothing, neutral is nothing. Numbness is everything at once. Because your sadness is saying, “I am still attached to something being different.” Your guilt is saying, “I fear I have done bad in someone’s eyes,” and your shame, “I fear I am bad in someone’s eyes.”Jul 31 2021 6:43PM
  • The feelings you most suppress are the most important ways you guide yourself. Your apprehension to listen is not your own desire. It’s fear of being something more or less or greater or worse or simply different than those around you have implied they will accept.Jul 31 2021 6:46PM

the Parts of you that Aren’t “I”

  • Knowing who you are is grounding; it gives you a sense of trajectory. But when we assign words and meanings to what we know we like and value and want, we create attachments. We then strive to keep things within the parameters of which we’ve already accepted. Out of that, we create failure. We create suffering over self. We begin to believe that a static idea can represent a dynamic, evolving being. The ways we don’t live up to the ideas in our minds become our greatest grievances.Jul 31 2021 6:52PM
  • We’re more invested in how we’re perceived than who we are, in the idea of what the title means than the day-to-day work of the job, in the “do you promise to love me forever?” than the actual day-to-day lovingJul 31 2021 6:53PM

Breaking your “Upper Limit,” and how People Hold Themselves back from real Happiness

  • Other psychologists call it the “baseline,” the amount of happiness we “naturally” feel, and eventually revert back to, even if certain events or circumstances shift us temporarily.Jul 31 2021 6:59PM
  • This is the single most common root of discomfort: the space between knowing and doingJul 31 2021 7:05PM
  • By not acting immediately, we think we’re creating space for the truth to shift, when we’re really only creating discomfort so that we can sense it more completely (though we’re suffering needlessly in the processJul 31 2021 7:06PM
  • People think happiness is an emotional response facilitated by a set of circumstances, as opposed to a choice and shift of perception/awareness.Jul 31 2021 9:27PM
  • Worry is the Western cultural pastime, and it’s ultimately a deflection from the fact that we buoy between extremes: not caring about anything or caring so much about one thing it could break us altogetherJul 31 2021 9:30PM
  • If nothing else, happy people are stigmatized as being clueless and ill-informed and delusionally positive and disconnected from reality, but the only people who perceive them that way are people who do everything in their power to justify the negativity in their lives they feel they cannot controlJul 31 2021 9:31PM

the Happinessof Excellence

  • Eric Greitens says that there are three primary forms of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and the happiness of excellenceJul 31 2021 9:32PM
  • The happiness of pleasure is largely sensory. It’s a good meal when you’re hungry, the smell of air after it rains, waking up warm and cozy in your bedAug 1 2021 7:57PM
  • The happiness of grace is gratitude. It’s looking over to see the love of your life sleeping next to you and whispering, “thank you.” It’s taking inventory of what you do have. It’s when you speak to something greater than yourself, expressing humility and aweAug 1 2021 7:57PM
  • And then there is the happiness of excellence. The kind of happiness that comes from the pursuit of something greatAug 1 2021 7:57PM

the Knowing-Doing Gap: why we Avoid Doing What’s Best For Us, and how to Conquer Resistance For Good

  • Most things aren’t as hard or as trying as we chalk them up to be. They’re ultimately fun and rewarding and expressions of who we really are. That’s why we want them. Taking small steps will remind you that this is trueAug 1 2021 9:54PM

8 Cognitive Biases that are Creating the way You Experience Your Life

  • As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says: “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”Aug 1 2021 10:06PM
  • “naïve realism,” the assumption that we see the world as it actually is, and that our impression is an objective, accurate representation of realityAug 1 2021 10:08PM
  • We make assumptions based on what our current circumstances “mean” about us, and then also begin to believe that things will always be the way they are—hence why tragedies feel so insurmountable, yet happiness feels so fleeting (in fearing that happiness won’t last forever, we lose it—in fearing that grief will last forever, we create itAug 1 2021 10:11PM

10 Key Things We Misunderstand about Emotion

  • The emotion most associated with fear is interest, believe it or not. It’s even been said that fear has two invisible faces: one that wants to flee and the other that wants to investigate. This is to say, nothing is generally “scary” to us unless some part of us also wants to understand it, knows we are a part of it, and feels as though it will become part of our experience.Aug 3 2021 9:09AM

The Psychology of getting Unstuck and the 3 Stages Of Making Habits Autonomous

  • Cognitive: When we first intellectualize the task, make mistakes, and ultimately devise new strategies to perform better. Associative: When effort is still required to complete the task, but it’s less mentally strenuous than it was. Some aspects of the task are beginning to come naturally, mistakes are still being made. Autonomous: We go into “autopilot,” or in some cases, “flow.” We can release ourselves from conscious focus and let our programming take over.Aug 3 2021 9:17AM

The 6 Pillars Of Self-Esteem: why it is not How You Feel, but what you think You’re Capable Of

  • [Self-esteem is knowing] that we can determine our own course and that we can travel that course. It’s not that we travel the course alone, but we need the feeling of agency—that if everything were to fall apart, we could find a way to put things back together again.”Aug 3 2021 10:20PM

The Importance Of Stillness: why it’s Imperative Tomake time to Do Nothing

  • day-to-day tasks. Countless studies show that people who are deeply creative on a consistent basis, who develop the most innovative and unique ideas, are the ones who free themselves from structure and allow their minds to wander, rather than focus on various tasks at hand. Einstein called this initiating the “sacred intuitive mind” (as opposed to the rational mind, which he sees as its “servant”).Aug 4 2021 8:28AM

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