Making A Crisis Out Of Everything

It is comforting to know that other people have wrestled with the same questions we're facing, and have left us their best wisdom.

• The Mahayana branch of Buddhism includes the idea of a bodhisattva - a person who's is willing to postpone their own ultimate well-being in order to help others along the path to their well-being. Ask yourself if you're willing to suffer a bit more.
• The Buddhist teaching of the Middle Way warns against both extremes of self-denial and self-indulgence.

Guilt is often counterproductive. It makes us feel paralyzed. However, when we are in this state, we are not helping anyone.

One Buddhist teaching could be helpful as one wrestles with this problem. It's found in a discourse called the Sallatha Sutta, known as "The Arrow." When someone has a painful experience, like a physical illness or witnessing suffering, it's as if the world has shot an arrow into the person. The pain is normal. When one tries to make up a story around the pain, you shoot a second arrow into yourself.

Decisions are a cost-benefit analysis of risking something small for the opportunity to gain something big.

• Good decisions can be: Exercising, meditating for 10 minutes daily, finding the courage and striking up a conversation with someone, applying for jobs that you may or may not get.
• Bad decisions can be: lying or pretending to someone, driving unsafely, sending angry text messages, or staying up late drinking before an important meeting or exam in the morning.

Trade-offs are not something as simple as flipping a coin. Our values guide us towards what we want in life, and it is not the same for all. Example: Buying a house has a trade-off of mortgage for the next ten or more years. This is subjective and depends on what we value in life.

Indecisive people suffer because they don’t know their inner values and what they care about.

Ask people to explain it to you a few times. Keep asking questions to really get to the root of the problem. 

Then go ahead and explain the problem to someone else, just to make sure you really understand it. Often times, simply formulating the problem and explaining it to others can help you understand it better. And that is the first crucial step to solving a problem.

No matter how awful your situation may be, rest assured that someone else has been through the same thing. 

It is important to realize how your situation compares to the rest of what you are doing, and how bad it really is compared to all the good things in your life. 

It is a stoic practice in which one deliberately imagines how things could be really bad, much worse than they are now. It is a visualization of one’s biggest fears. It is a kind of psychological trick that lowers your expectations and makes reality look better.

According to the Roman philosopher Seneca, apart from embracing the negative emotions, one needs to maximize the positive outlook and learn how to feel real joy.

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing."

Whenever you find yourself in an unpleasant or difficult situation, try to see what you can take away from this very experience.

Try to perceive your experiences as lessons and to understand them, so you can feel at ease with the others and with yourself. 

Whenever you deal with difficult people, take into account two aspects: you should not let their actions affect your life in a negative way and you may want to try first to understand them, rather than just to judge them. 

After all, they might be fighting a battle you know nothing about.

What you're going through is just a chapter of your life. The rest of the story is still unwritten. Once you emerge from a difficult period, a blank page will await you to change the record.

At the moment, everything feels confusing, but hindsight will be 20/20 vision. 

Define your success. It is critical in order to know yourself. Success could be your health, career, friendships, being a good spouse or parent.

Difficult times in life require us to redefine our objective, to modify them to fit our new situations. What does betterment look like to you? Is it better health, better grades, healthy relationships? Write down your priorities and work towards them daily.

With stress, the mind and the body are intrinsically linked. You can view stress as something that is wreaking havoc on your body (and it can) or as something that is giving you the strength and energy to overcome adversity.

Regular exposure to stress in small quantities can prepare us to handle a big stressful event in our lives. Prepare yourself for stress by self-education about the stressful event, by doing some physically stressful activities like completing a marathon, or something you dread, like giving a speech.

Repeated exposure to mildly stressful conditions can alter your body’s biological response to stress, making you manage stress in a better way.

People who volunteer are likely to have higher self-esteem, psychological well-being, and happiness.

Help someone else out who really needs it.

Regularly eating foods that are filled with nutrients can help you feel more positive and energetic. You will feel better mentally too.

The Narrative Fallacy makes us to see events as stories, with logical chains of cause and effect. When it comes to success, do not fall for the ‘narrative’ fallacy’ and think that great people became successful due to what happened to them, and if we emulate that, we will achieve the same result.

We need to do something extraordinary and exceptional to achieve great success, and that makes any successful person an exception, someone who did what few others were willing to do. Instead of googling for success, find what you want to do to change the world!

• Very few of us went through childhood without getting any emotional scars.
• Be it home or school, we suffered many problems when our impressionable mind wasn’t mature enough to handle them the way we can as an adult.
• Our worldview becomes skewed, and we start to build upon the mutated version of the world around us, messing up with our lives.
• Success by itself is not about money or fame or power, but our upbringing programs us to think about success in a certain way.