Treat yourself like a good friend or a good coach, not a drill sergeant, to build resilience and avoid self-deprecation when you make mistakes or face difficulties like panic attacks.
Share your worries and uncertainties with trusted friends, family, and colleagues, as quality relationships are crucial for mitigating stress and helping you cope with difficult situations.
Regularly reflect on your motivations for actions, nudging yourself toward altruism, as doing good for others is also good for your own happiness and well-being.
When your nervous system is relaxed, look for opportunities embedded in crises and embrace experimentation, as failure provides valuable lessons and is a seed of progress.
Adopt ‘radical optimism’ by acknowledging that things can suck, but even in calamity, there are always seeds of progress and something valuable to learn.
Learn to communicate clearly, state needs, set boundaries, and listen to the other side. Practice intellectual openness by attempting to understand the other’s viewpoint, as curiosity can lead to compassion and prevent rage-driven interactions.
In conflict, make a move of intellectual openness to see the situation from the other side’s viewpoint, even if you don’t agree, because they have a rationale for their beliefs.
Use mindfulness and meditation to identify the deeper emotions (like anxiety or fear) that anger often covers up, and work with those underlying feelings instead of the anger itself.
When caught in a reflexive anger story, use the phrase ‘dead end’ to change the channel, followed by ’love no matter what’ to remember that everyone is acting out their own issues, which helps disarm rage.
Develop a kinder relationship with disliked parts of your personality, like anger, by acknowledging them as ancient self-protective programs (e.g., ‘Thank you, I know you’re trying to help me, but not now’) rather than making them ‘bad.’
Perform 10-30 minutes of walking meditation before bed by walking back and forth in a small area, focusing attention on body movement and using mental noting, to exhaust physical restlessness and aid sleep.
If you’re struggling to fall asleep, get out of bed and do something enjoyable like reading or meditating to avoid training your mind to associate the bed with struggle.
When you can’t sleep, talk to yourself productively, reminding yourself that you’ve survived sleeplessness before and will be fine, as surrendering to the potential of sleeplessness can sometimes initiate sleep.
Find friends who are ‘cool with every part of your personality,’ including your anger or other difficult emotions, as their unconditional acceptance can help you handle anything.
When consumed by personal problems, remind yourself, ‘It’s not [global catastrophe],’ to gain a ‘bolus of perspective’ that can calm you down, acknowledging this applies primarily to the ‘worried well.’
Use a personal reminder, like an acronym or phrase (‘For The Benefit Of All Beings’), to consistently nudge yourself back to the motivation of being useful, which can make existential worries evaporate.
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