Supritha S

It’s enough to simply recognize this basic relationship between stress and stories. Virtually every time you experience stress, it’s a response to a narrative in the mind, a story about something you feel you need to have happen or prevent from happening.

Leaving something unfinished works best when you’re executing downhill. The nuance, then, is to only use this trick when you’re sure of success.

But why? What’s so wrong with trying to learn new things? Here’s what Maya Angelou — herself a polymath (poet, journalist, dancer) — has to say about the saying:“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Angelou said to the Smithsonian. “I think you can be a jack-of-all-trades and a mistress-of-all-trades. If you study it, and you put reasonable... See more

We are mostly blind to the remarkable interconnectedness of things. This is important to understand because in a complex world it is hard to see which forces are working for you as well as which forces are working against you. Similar to buying a toaster, we tend to focus on the final product and fail to recognize the many processes leading up to... See more

These stories are just a natural by-product of the human mind’s amazing ability to make connections between similar thoughts, but they reliably generate real stress. This free-association ability isn’t wholly a bad thing, and is in fact necessary for making plans and learning from our mistakes. But most of the time it is completely useless idle... See more

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

The boot camp principle, inspired by military basic training programs, makes sense. Run new recruits through unrelenting challenges they are completely unprepared for, day after day, for a handful of weeks, and they come out strong and resilient.

Those major mood dips don’t happen to me very often anymore, thanks to two godsends: meditation, and friends who are willing to talk about how shitty they (or you) feel. Most people don’t seem to want talk about feeling awful, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because they also believe they need a reason to feel bad.

I have no problem waiting five or ten minutes for menus, or even longer. I’m not desperate to eat, I’m desperate to be free of the existential limbo of not knowing whether we’ve been completely overlooked. Human needs are strange—I could fast for twelve hours with little discomfort, yet sometimes it’s amazingly difficult to bear a tiny uncertainty... See more