An uncomfortable truth: when you feel really bad, it’s easy to become boring and selfish . You get so obsessed with the tempest inside your head that you can’t focus on anything outside of it. You start seeing a therapist, then you start treating all of your conversations like therapy. Your bad feelings become a handy excuse for being a bad friend.... See more

Some problems are like getting a diploma: you work at it for a while, and then you're done forever. Learning how to ride a bike is a classic diploma problem.But most problems aren’t like that. They’re more like toothbrushing problems: you have to work at them forever until you die. You can’t, as far as I know, just brush your teeth really really... See more

Attractor basins

I've been playing around with the idea of psychological attractor basins for a while. I talk about this concept a little bit here. Imagine a topographical map, with many high and low points. If you drop a ball, it'll roll towards "basins". Getting out of a basin requires putting in energy, and can be difficult if the basin is wide... See more

Q: I'm clinically depressed, and this keeps making me feel like I deserve unhappiness if indeed it's my choice. What should I do?

While the Option Method suggests that beliefs create unhappiness, this doesn't mean you're choosing depression or that it's your fault. Depression tells you that you're broken, defective, unworthy of happiness. But that... See more

Q: Isn't unhappiness sometimes useful as a motivator? Don't we need fear, guilt and shame to keep us in line and make sure we do the right thing?

This is a very common belief, but it's exactly backwards. Unhappiness is a terrible motivator. It saps your energy, distorts your thinking and narrows your possibilities. Happiness energizes you, inspires... See more

Step-by-Step Instructions

In practice, the Option Method is a technique you can do for yourself. Here's a simple step-by-step process you can use to apply it to any situation where you feel unhappy or upset:

Identify the specific situation or event that triggered your unhappiness. Example: Your partner snaps at you impatiently when you ask them a... See more

By rigorously questioning the beliefs underlying your unhappiness, you can literally change your mind and change your life. You stop being a helpless victim of circumstances, or of other people's opinions and behavior, and start being the creator of your own emotional reality.

When an upsetting event happens—let's say your partner criticizes you—and you feel unhappy, it's not their words that are directly causing your distress. It's an emotional belief that being criticized means you must feel bad about yourself. Said differently, the words themselves only carry weight in so much as they are attached to meaning that you... See more

The foundational principle of the Option Method is that your emotional state in any given moment is the result of your beliefs and attitudes, not what is happening "out there."

This is a radical idea. We're deeply conditioned by society, culture, family and our own experience to believe that happiness depends on things going a certain way. If I get... See more