101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

particularly crappy time in your life? Let those things go, but
decide what to let go by thinking about what they make you
feel.
11. Place yourself. Make a chart with three columns and on the
left write everything you feel you’ve accomplished in your life
and in the middle write down what your daily life entails and
then on the right put what those consistent habits will lead
to/what you hope to do in the future. It helps you focus on the
big picture; getting lost in minutiae usually causes people
anxiety.
12. Shift your physical position every time you start falling back
into toxic thought cycles. This basically creates a new
experience for your body and refocuses you in the moment
(and it’s simple enough to do at your desk at work).
13. Stretch your brain. Pick up a book on something that interests
you and learn more about it. Look at research on something
you have a theory about. Learn to love learning through
actively engaging with things that naturally interest you. If
nothing else, it will make you a bit more aware of the world.
14. Reevaluate the extent of your connected disconnectedness. If
the bulk of your relationships happen digitally (that aren’t
long-distance) and you haven’t had a conversation in person
without being interrupted by a phone in a long enough time,
evaluate how much you’re prioritizing people in your life, and
realize that screens > people is basically the best way to
create an extremely anxious lifestyle for yourself.
15. Identify what your addictions are keeping you distracted from.
Most things people struggle with are addictions in some form:
a thing you keep doing though you don’t really want to.
Understand that addiction is a disconnection from yourself,
and a disconnection from yourself is born of something
present that you (think) you can’t face.
16. Learn to let "good enough" not be the opposite of perfect. If
there is one thing that will give you the most mental-emotional

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relief it is in letting good enough be good enough.
17. Dismantle the parts of your life that are solely performative.
The thing is that most of what clogs our minds is all the
unnecessary effort we put into constructing a life that seems a
little more palatable, a little more noble, a little better than
someone else’s (so therefore good enough). But it
accomplishes the opposite of what we intend: We place
ourselves further from a genuinely happy experience (which
is in accepting that life is small and simple and more than
enough) through grandiose ideas and attachments that end
up making us into characters, not people.
18. Write down what you hate about other people. This is what
you need to change about yourself/your life (but are resisting
too much to actually do something about). Know that it’s often
not a surface level issue: You don’t hate your annoying
neighbor because she always bothers you for lunch and you
secretly bother other people for lunch, you hate her because
she acts as though she’s desperate for love and you feel that
way too but avoid it because you think it’s embarrassing. This
is a cheat sheet to seeing what’s actually wrong in your life.
It’s important because completely understanding the problem
is the same thing as knowing the solution. If you don’t know
what to do, you don’t know what’s wrong. If you don’t know
what’s wrong, it’s because some part of you is resisting
seeing it.

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39
12 SIGNS 
THE ONLY PROBLEM 
WITH YOUR LIFE 
is that you
THINK ABOUT IT 
more than
YOU LIVE IT
Anxiety is usually bred out of inaction. We were born to actualize our
potential, not just analyze it. Binge thinking is what happens when
introspection becomes a means of avoiding a problem. Critically
evaluating your life is supposed to facilitate living it, not the other
way around. Here, all the things that happen when you let your life
exist more in your brain than in reality.
01. Your goals are perfect outcomes, not perfect actions. You’re
more in love with ideas than you are with work and processes
required to make them reality. When you dream up your
perfect life, you think about how you’re seen, rather than what
your daily tasks include.
02. You’re a maladaptive daydreamer. Maladaptive daydreaming
is when you imagine extensive fantasies to replace human
interaction or general function. Many people experience it
while listening to music or doing some kind of rocking motion
(walking, pacing, swinging, etc.). Rather than cope with
issues in life, you just daydream about grandiose alternatives
that give you a “high” to eliminate the uncomfortable feeling.
03. Your purpose in life is abstract. You know that you want to
help people, or teach, or give a voice to the voiceless, but you
don’t know how to do it, and you certainly don’t focus on
embodying it in your present life, in the situations you’re

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already in, with people you come across in day-to-day
interactions.
04. The solution to most of your problems would just be to make
some small change but you absolutely refuse to. This is the
classic sign that you’re using overthinking as a means of
deflection. It’s easy to do, as picking apart a problem is a
noble-seeming distraction, but it’s only useful until you have
the answer—then you actually have to act on it.
05. You’re always busy, yet never productive enough. Your work
never seems to be done, you lose hours and don’t know
where they’ve gone, you’re always stressed and frizzling-out
your brain, as though you’re perpetually in the middle of a
high-intensity task that never sees completion.
06. You tend to resist what you want the most. Rather than
putting forth genuine effort, opening up to it bit-by-bit, you’ve
convinced yourself that you’re not worth it, or that it’s
impossible, or that to have what you want means you could
also lose what you want (so better not to have it ever than
have it for a little bit).
07. You’re one of those people who only bonds over what you
hate. All this really means is that you: a) aren’t doing enough
to have something else/more interesting to talk about, or b)
are so deeply insecure you thrive off of recognizing that
someone else is on your level (judgment = a need to be
superior, which = feeling incredibly inferior).
08. Most of your problems come back down to a fear of
judgment, or exclusion. If this fear is present in your life to
any significant degree it’s usually because you’ve already
constructed a lot of what you think you like or do based on
what other people think. It’s for this reason that you don’t
naturally take action—you think about it, change what you
want to do in some way, and then (maybe) act (still fearful)
that people will not like the façade, either.
09. If you stopped and thought about it, you could come up with
10 things you are grateful for. Your “problems” aren’t so much

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“not having” as they are not recognizing what you do have.
Gratitude incites more doing, more reciprocation. Positive
feelings never leave you stagnating and over-thinking them.
10. You want to change something about your life, but your focus
is on dismantling the old rather than building something new
that renders it obsolete. In other words, you’re one of those
people who tries to find comfort in overanalyzing old things to
make more sense of them, when in reality, complexity is a
product of insecurity, and insecurity a product of being unable
to accept the simple reality of the situation.
11. You look for quick solutions more than you focus on
restructuring the questions. When you try and fail at
something, you spend too long focusing on why you failed,
rather than learning what you need to then moving on and
trying something new. You keep yourself stuck between
knowing what’s not right and not being willing to figure out
what might be.
12. You’re always imagining what you want to do, yet never really
doing it. You’ve convinced yourself that life begins when all
the pieces are in place, but in reality, life is the act of doing
just that.

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40
WHY LOGICAL 
PEOPLE LEAD 
BETTER LIVES