If you live your life only to achieve some desired future results, you are giving up present-day satisfaction for the sake of an uncertain outcome, because we live in a complex and volatile world. If you sacrificed your values or integrity or your relationships in anticipation of those results and then don’t get them, how would you feel? To make it

This is why many spiritual traditions practice mindfulness, the skill of being present with whatever is happening rather than interpreting events around us through the cage of our “shoulds.” I once read about an extreme version of presence where Zen Buddhist monks in training go out three times a day in the winter to dump buckets of ice water over

The constraint, of course, is time and attention. I can’t do it all because there’s only so many hours in the day. Each individual commitment feels attainable, but they far exceed my capacity in aggregate. So why do I have so many different ideas of what I should be doing? The answer: there is no single unified “me.”

Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s (2004) book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers similarly describes how, after animals in the wild go into fight-or-flight mode, they release their bodily tension and quickly return to their resting state once the threat has passed. But in our world of chronic stress, we stay in fight-or-flight mode. Our systems aren’t designed to

For your long-term health and sanity, you need to learn how to distinguish actual life-threatening situations from the activation of your unconscious parts.

The reality is I just can’t do it all. Neither can you. There is far too much to do, and no possible way to do all those things I “should” do. And yet I keep getting tripped up because I know the “right” thing to do in each area and feel like I “should” be able to do it.

So, when you see somebody else losing their temper after being triggered by something you said or did, it’s not about you. One of their parts is throwing a tantrum because the world is not acting as it “should,” in that you are not conforming to what it wants or its rules. Unfortunately, what often happens is that the anger of the other person’s

Either way, they are more likely to listen if I communicate with their context and interests in mind.

When you are under threat, your body switches into fight-or-flight mode, also known as the sympathetic nervous system. This floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline so that you can respond quickly to danger by fighting or escaping. Another effect of these chemicals is that they narrow your attention—you become highly attuned to what is directly