You seriously could not have imagined that your life would
turn out as well as it did—that the worst things became
turning points, not endless black holes of emotion.
05. You think of money in terms of “obligation,” not “opportunity.”
Your mindset is: “I have to pay my bills” as opposed to “I get
to pay my bills, which house me, clothe me, and feed me, and
that I can pay for by myself.” If you don’t
value money by
appreciating what it does for you, you’ll never feel as though
you have enough.
06. You think you don’t have enough friends.
You’re measuring the connection in your life by a quantity, not
a quality, assuming that the problem is not enough around
you, when it’s really that there’s not enough inside you.
07. You’re either over-reliant or under-attached to the friends you
do have.
You either don’t keep in touch enough or you get easily
frustrated because you think that friends should make you
feel “better” and “happy” in an unrealistic way. So you think
that the only way to achieve that
is to over-bond yourself to
them or disregard them when they don’t fulfill the role you’ve
imposed on them. (Hence your feeling as though you don’t
have enough!)
08. You imagine your life as though someone else was seeing it.
Before you make a decision, you recite a storyline in your
head. It goes something like this: “She went to college, she
got this job, she married this guy after a terrible breakup, and
all was well.” This is what happens when your happiness
starts to come from how
other people feel about you, as
opposed to how you feel about yourself.
09. Your goals are outcomes, not actions.
Your goals are to “be successful” or “see a certain number in
the bank” as opposed to “enjoy what you do each day, no
matter what you’re doing” or “learn to love saving more than
frivolously spending.” Outcomes are just ideas. Actions are
results.
10. You assume you have time.
When it comes to doing what really matters to you—
reconnecting with family, writing that book, finding a new job
—you say “I’m only [such and such an age] I have a long
time.” If you assume you “have time” to do something, or that
you’ll do it later, you probably don’t want it as much as you
think you do. There isn’t more time. You don’t know. You
could be dead tomorrow. It doesn’t mean you have to get
everything done today, but that there’s rarely an excuse not to
start.
11. A bad feeling becomes a bad day.
You think that experiencing negative emotions is the result of
something being wrong in your life, when in reality, it’s usually
just a part of being human. Anxiety serves us, pain serves us,
depression does, too.
These things are signals,
communications, feedbacks, and precautions that literally
keep us alive. Until you begin thinking this way, all you will
perceive is that “good feelings mean keep going” and “bad
feelings mean stop,” and wonder why you’re paralyzed.
12. You think that being uncomfortable
and fearful means you
shouldn’t do something.
Being uncomfortable and fearful means you definitely should.
Being angry or indifferent means you definitely shouldn’t.
13. You wait to feel motivated or inspired before you act.
Losers wait to feel motivated. People who never get anything
done wait to feel inspired. Motivation and inspiration are not
sustaining forces. They crop up once in a while, and they’re
nice while they’re present, but you can’t expect to be able to
summon them any given hour of the day. You must learn to
work without them, to gather your strength from purpose, not
passion.
14. You maladaptively daydream.
Maladaptive daydreaming is when you imagine extensive
fantasies of an alternative life that you don’t have to replace
human interaction or general function. Most people
experiencing it while listening to music and/or moving
(walking,
riding in a car, pacing, swinging, etc.) Rather than
cope with issues in life, you just daydream to give yourself a
“high” that eliminates the uncomfortable feeling.
15. You’re saving up your happiness for another day.
You’re sitting on the train on the way to work, thinking how beautiful
the sunrise looks, and how you’d like to read your favorite book, but
you don’t in favor of checking your email again. You begin to feel a
sense of awe at something simple and beautiful and stop yourself,
because your dissatisfaction fuels you. You’re creating problems in
one area of your life to balance out thriving in another, because your
happiness is in a mental container.
