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

Someone who was hurt as a child might later assume the identity of a victim, seeing himself as vulnerable to forces beyond his control. To feel whole, he might develop a drive to defeat anything that resembles the original threat; his identity creates a condition in which he must overcome such threats to validate his sense of self. The risk here is... See more

MEME: We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality

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.

You’re not “high iq”, your obsessive introspection is stopping you from being authentic and crippling you with a false sense of superiority that you’re too important to enjoy the small things in life, too esoteric for the smallfolk to understand, too proud tol on be happy, and in the end you win the prize of misery and loneliness—lonely not because... See more

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.

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

... the stance here is that we are the only ones with the power to make ourselves anxious and unhappy, and that we do it actively and repeatedly not because we like it and not because it works well for us, but because we anticipate and fear that it will happen. We anticipate it because we think it has to happen, because we don’t actually see that... 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