🌠 Sol Bites: The 7 Rules for Emotional Mastery

🧠 How to Build an Emotional Filter (Without Being a Bad Friend)

✨ Words of Wisdom

1. Never Complain

Complaining offers a brief ego boost but leads to gossip, rumination, and self-pity, which break down your self-esteem and trigger irritability, shame, and resentment. The solution is to set boundaries on your own unsavory habits, not just on other people’s complaining behavior.

2. Never Worry in Your Head 

There’s a crucial distinction between worries popping into your mind and choosing to dwell on them. When a worry appears, you should only give yourself two options: You can accept it, tolerate it, and refocus your attention elsewhere, or, you can pull out a notepad and write down what’s bothering you. Writing slows your thinking to the speed of your hand, which can reduce the intensity of your anxiety. During especially vulnerable periods, schedule specific times for worry.

3. Validate the Emotion, Then Control Your Attention

Just because an emotion feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad or that you need to fix it or cope with it. On the other hand, trying to or avoid or get rid of unpleasant emotions will only make things worse. Instead, first acknowledge the emotion and remind yourself that it's okay to feel whatever you're feeling. Then take control of your attention and consciously choose what to focus on rather than impulsively reacting to yucky feelings. 

4. Let Your Actions Define You (Not Your Circumstances)

Here's your new mantra: “It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.”

While it may feel validating to attribute your struggles to genetics, brain chemistry, or childhood trauma, doing so can create a sense of helplessness. The most productive way to get through emotional struggles is to focus almost exclusively on your own physical and mental actions because they’re the only things you have direct control over. You are not defined by your problems, but by how you respond to them.

5. Produce More Than You Consume

Being consistently productive is one of the best ways to bolster your emotional health. Healthy productivity means working hard to make or build things that are both meaningful and enjoyable for you while being helpful and interesting to others. 

6. Solve the Real Problem, Not the Fake One

The human mind has a wonderful capacity to create fake problems to avoid the emotional discomfort of tackling real problems. For example, thinking “I need to be [skinnier, prettier, dress better] to talk to people” avoids the real problem of learning to tolerate fear of rejection. Similarly, thinking something new is “too complicated to learn” avoids the real problem of being willing to feel not good enough”

7. Take Responsibility for What You Want

Most of our desires are mimetic: We want things because other people want them, not because we innately want them. This means you have far more control over your desires than you think, and with that control comes responsibility. Instead of resigning yourself to “I just don’t enjoy X,” consider whether you could cultivate a genuine desire for it. Changing how you desire requires suffering because nobody wants to let go of shallow desires, but the payoff may be worth it.

You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

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