Tag: emotions

~ Mark

There’s no need for you to “decide” on one feeling. If we don’t allow ourselves multiple, confusing, even conflicting feelings, then how else do we learn to deal with people when the going gets gray?

Carolyn Hax.
~ Mark

Part of my drinking was so much about trying not to feel things, to not feel how I actually felt, and the terrible thing about being so hidden is if people tell you they love you… it kinda doesn’t sink in. You always think, if you’re hiding things, How could you know who I am? You don’t know who I am, so how could you love me? Saying who I am, and trying to be as candid as possible as part of practicing the principles, has permitted me to actually connect with people for the first time in my life.

Mary Karr.
~ Mark

Motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal.

Oliver Burkeman in The Antidote, the first 1/3 of which I can confirm is good. After the intro, he talks about Stoicism and the dangers of optimism; this came from a chapter on Buddhism, non-attachment, and mindfulness meditation.

Wehr in the World: Controlling your emotions

~ Mark

The important point is this: Evolution seems to have favored inaction over action. E.g., don’t get too close to those people — they might be dangerous! Don’t do that — they might laugh at me! Our limbic system — the emotional center responsible for an embarrassingly high percentage of our behavior — has yet to learn that in the industrial age with market economies and unprecedented levels of absolute wealth, people aren’t so dangerous.

Wehr in the World: Controlling your emotions