PsycHacks

In the course of your life, you are bound to encounter new and unexpected problems that you've never seen before. How can you respond confidently to a difficulty that you have no experience overcoming. In this podcast, I talk about two tricks for dealing successfully with just such a situation: looking at others and refocusing on your ability.

Some people carry the wounds and scars of past sufferings with them for the remainder of their lives. As a result of their pain, their lives have been irrevocably altered, and certain dreams may now no longer come to pass. How do these people turn this significant potential liability into a personal asset? The suffering of our past is redeemed through loving participation in our present.

One of the many ways people's minds can prove to be their own worst enemies is when they engage in fantasy narratives around important decisions in their lives. This is what I call "playing dress-up." This tendency is generally rooted in a lack of clarity about one's real desires -- which, in turn, is based on a dearth of accurate self-knowledge. Fit the opportunity to you -- not the other way around.

Why do you have bad habits? If a behavior is causing you significant distress, why can it still be so difficult to change despite the obvious pain that it causes? The answer to this question lies in an analysis of the function a given behavior performs in the context of your life. Most likely, on some level, you believe that the habit's persistence is still a net positive. To really change a behavior, you need to find other, more adaptive ways to perform the same function as your bad habit.

The hard truth about relationships is that everyone is entirely unique and completely replaceable. However, the key to making yourself (almost) irreplaceable in the context of any particular relationship is to prioritize how over what. This means that -- provided you continue to perform the duties associated with your role -- the way in which you show up is more important than what exactly you're doing when you arrive. After all: there's always another rodeo in town.

In any given sport, the one playing the game is not simultaneously the one enforcing the rulebook. Yet in our lives, we all too often decide not to make the attempt if our efforts might run afoul of the (usually unwritten) rules. Let the referees referee. If you're playing the game, focus on playing the game, and learn to foul appropriately. If no one is blowing the whistle, then there's a good chance you're still in bounds.

A paradoxical truth lies at the heart of all human relationships, namely: everyone you know is both entirely unique and completely replaceable. Success in life depends on your ability to keep both of these facts in your mind at the same time. When you do this, relationships become their proper size: neither too big nor too small.

Setting effective boundaries with difficult or toxic people in order to safeguard your peace of mind is an essential life skill. Unfortunately, too many people operate under the false impression that boundary-setting is about controlling the other to prevent future abusive behavior. In reality, setting boundaries is about controlling yourself to respond to the target behavior in such a way as to disincentivize its recurrence by changing the operant reinforcement contingency.