• You must learn to let your conscious decisions dictate your day—not your fears or impulses. An untamed mind is a minefield. With no regulation, focus, base or self-control, anything can persuade you into thinking you want something that you don’t actually.
• When you regulate your daily actions, you deactivate your “fight or flight” instincts because you’re no longer confronting the unknown.
• They don’t complain (too much). When people complain, it’s because they want others to recognize and validate their pain; even if it’s not the real problem, it’s still a form of affirmation.
• They do not draw their own generalized conclusions about the human race based on the small percentage of the world that they experience each day.
• Consistently consuming soundbites of people’s lives leads us to piece together a particular idea of reality—one that is far from the truth.
• We develop such anxiety surrounding social media (and whether or not we’re really living up to the standards expected of us) that we begin to prioritize screen time over real-life face time. As beings who require human intimacy (romantic and not) to survive, it’s becoming a more and more detrimental force in our culture.
• How you judge other people. What you first reach to insult someone with—especially when it’s physical—says infinitely more of you than them.
• We begin to subconsciously adopt the collective mindset of the group of people we hang out with most.
• Each day, write down one thing your body allowed you to do. Whether it was watching your favorite show or listening to the sounds on the street on the way to work or being able to see a computer screen or hug someone you love, focus on what your body does more than what it looks like doing it.
• Objectively, you have everything you could ever want or need, yet your unhappiness simply comes from a lack of appreciation (which is a cultivated trait, if not a practice).