if we are to have any chance at improving a broken world, we must learn how to navigate it without becoming broken people.

you can align your expectations with reality and minimize your resistance to pain and discomfort—or more broadly, to everything that is hard to face, to the truth of dukkha—you set yourself up for the best experience and outcome, regardless of what you are facing.

Is there a way to be a performance-driven athlete at specific times but not at others? Can I learn how to flip the switch on demand? And beyond that, who am I if not a performance-driven athlete? What does it mean to know that I’ll likely go through similar transformations with other parts of my identity in the future?

“The key goal of regulation3 is not rigid constancy,” writes Sterling. “Rather, it is the flexible capacity for adaptive variation.”

a secure confidence borne out of the evidence-based belief that you are capable of showing up and taking deliberate actions during difficulties.

When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

Meanwhile, judging yourself for feeling down, or internalizing the idea that there is something wrong with you when you are sad (or that sadness is a weakness), only makes whatever you are going through harder.

benefit of impermanence is that it does not discriminate: The lows pass too and in all likelihood, we’ll derive at least some meaning and growth from our experience, even if it takes time.

Fromm writes that true joy is “what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourselves.”