This week’s article is titled Life Gets Easier Once You Realize These Five Simple Things.
If you’re a sports fan, you’ve probably experienced the thrill of a big win—maybe even a championship—but more often, you’ve endured disappointment along the way.
Even as a lifelong fan of an elite franchise like the Yankees, I’ve felt more frustration than celebration over the years. On the flip side, as a long-suffering Jets fan, I cherish their one Super Bowl victory!
As we get older, life’s ups and downs tend to shape a more balanced perspective: you win sometimes, you lose often, and things are rarely fair. While that might sound pessimistic, adopting a more stoic mindset can lead to greater happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment.
The article below offers a framework for recognizing and managing the reality that we can’t control everything that happens to us. Traditions like Buddhism, ancient Stoicism, and even modern mindfulness all emphasize a powerful idea: while we can’t control what happens, we can control how we respond. To me, this realization is empowering.
Some of you have already started exploring the summer learning options, which focus on helping elementary students develop a broader, long-term perspective on their learning. Two key takeaways—both from those readings and from the article—stand out. First, since stress and discomfort are unavoidable, learning how to handle disappointment is essential for a happy life. Second, learning—both in and out of school—is more about its process than final product.
For our students, one of the most important lessons from elementary school is developing the ability to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively. In other words, building the self-awareness to recognize emotions without being controlled by them.
I’m looking forward to our preplanning conversations around the themes in the summer reading selections.
Joe
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Through life experiences, most people learn that the ups and downs of life get easier once you realize the nature of life and dealing with stress. They have figured out what helps and what doesn’t.
As you mature, you realize life doesn’t always give you what you expect, and what you think is true sometimes isn’t true at all. The secret to happiness isn’t to resist these conundrums but to learn and adapt, so you can live a fulfilling life despite the inevitable stressors and downturns.
Realization 1: Stress Happens
Stress is a natural part of life. Whether it’s day-to-day stresses, like traffic and bills, or major life changes and upheavals, we all get our share of stress. Strive to be stress-proof. What that means is that you learn how to manage stress so it doesn’t derail you or permanently block you from your goals.
Research shows that having a growth mindset towards stress in which you see it as having a potential upside makes you a more active coper and helps you persist when things get difficult. That doesn’t mean you wanted the stressor to happen, but rather that you try to make the best of the situation when it does.
Research showed that people who are higher in a personal quality called hardiness can survive even major stressors.
Hardiness involves commitment, control, and challenge. Commitment means showing up and actively engaging, rather than avoiding. Control means perceiving some sense of control, even if things get difficult — perhaps exerting some control over your own reactions or perceptions. Challenge means viewing the situation as a challenge to master, rather than an overwhelming threat.
Take-Home Message: Try to find ways to view your stressors as manageable challenges, show up and contribute, control what you can, and let go of what you can’t.
Realization 2: There’s No Such Thing as a Happy Ending
We grow up with fairy tales in which the hero slays the dragon, rescues the beautiful princess, and the hero and princess fall in love, gain in wealth, and live happily ever after. In real life, things aren’t so simple.
We cannot attain a state in which we are guaranteed to be completely safe and to never experience any unhappiness, stress, or adversity. Even if we attain most of our life goals, we will inevitably face our aging, our parents' aging, our children leaving home, and health issues.
Mindfulness is an attitude toward living in which you learn to let go of clinging to positive experiences and moods and dreading negative ones. You learn to let go of attachment to things being a certain way, and you become more flexible and willing to adapt to what is.
Take-Home Message: Accept the inevitability of change and uncertainty in life. Stop thinking that the world needs to be a certain way (e.g., fair or kind) for you to be happy. Learn to go with the flow.
Realization 3: The Cover-Up is Worse Than the Crime
When it comes to emotions, the cover-up is worse than the crime. In other words, the things we do to suppress and not feel difficult emotions create greater difficulties for us in the long run than if we learned to tolerate the emotions.
Experiential avoidance--the desire not to feel uncomfortable mental states (e.g., thoughts and feelings)--is the source of many mental health problems. That’s because it doesn’t work to just shove down negative thoughts and emotions — they pop up again.
As a classic study shows, trying not to think of a white bear makes you more likely to think of white bears. You also may act in unhealthy ways in order not to feel difficult emotions — you may smoke, drink too much, eat unhealthy food, or zone out in front of the television for hours. All of these will negatively impact your health, mood, and/or ability to reach your life goals. Instead, you need to develop a “willingness to be uncomfortable” to move forward towards your goals.
When you face what you fear, especially if you do this regularly, your anxiety goes down because you get used to the situation. An example of habituation is if you live near the airport and, after a while, start automatically tuning out the plane sounds. The sounds are just as loud, but your brain and body can adapt.
Take-Home Message: Think about what role avoidance plays in your life and how it holds you back, and then think about how your life might change for the better by taking risks and putting yourself out there.
Realization 4: There’s No Magic Solution
Self-help authors tell us that they have the secret formula that will cure all of our emotional ills, help us overcome all of life’s roadblocks, and live happy, successful lives. While some advice can be helpful, no one answer fits everybody.
There are some universals, like it helps to be healthier, socially connected, and to manage your anxiety, but beyond this, one size doesn’t fit all. What works for your friend may not work for you, because you don’t have the personality to pull it off, it doesn’t feel authentic.
The essence of mental health is flexibility and integration. In other words, you use different coping strategies mindfully, finding the one that best fits the specific situation, and you find answers by integrating information from your head and your heart.
Take-Home Message: Find your own solutions and adapt strategies to suit your lifestyle and personality. Don’t compare yourself to others, and don’t look to others to solve your problems. While it’s good to reach out, you’re the only one who can take it to the finish line.
Realization 5: There’s No Elevator. You Have to Take the Stairs
Carol Dweck’s research on a growth mindset and Angela Duckworth’s research on grit show that you are much more likely to succeed if you put in sustained effort over long periods. Although the adult brain can change, this change is generally the result of sustaining new habits consistently over periods of months or years.
Malcolm Gladwell argues that in musical proficiency, success is the result of tens of thousands of hours of practice. While the amateurs practiced for about 2,000 hours on average over the course of their career, the professional pianists had practiced for 10,000 hours on average — five times as much. So, when it comes to musical proficiency and some other areas, it’s not about being a natural talent — It’s about working much longer and harder than your competitors.
Take-Home Message: To be successful requires a huge amount of hard work and perseverance; talent and potential alone are not enough.
