Happy, Healthy Mind - The School of Life 🚧
https://annas-archive.gl/md5/cd79b7d141d1980344921fa1e9740ded
Introduction- Keeping your mind healthy
Keep mind healthy with:
- sleep
- diet
But the most important thing your mind needs to keep it healthy is good ideas. This means ideas that can make you less worried, that can make life more interesting, that can calm you down when something has gone wrong, and that can stop you feeling too upset about situations you might be facing.
There are lots of problems we’re already good at solving... But there are other problems that are harder to deal with. Often these are mind problems. They are to do with your thoughts and feelings about something or someone that is upsetting you.
Thinking things through calmly helps — a lot. When you think about explanations, often your fears go away, because you realise that the thing you fear couldn’t really happen. You learn a big lesson that many adults still try to keep in their minds: a fear is not a fact.
Ch. 1 Parents
Here’s a useful definition of a parent: a person who will always believe that their child is a baby, and needs as much looking after as a baby did… We’re not saying that this is sensible; it just seems to be the way it is. It’s best to accept it, as you would a rainy day.
If you know you’re the fastest runner at school, someone saying otherwise won’t bother you.
So here’s a new thought: we get upset when people pick up on our own doubts about ourselves. (It’s not just you: grown-ups do this all the time as well.) But if we can feel sure about ourselves, other people’s reactions don’t bother us so much.
Just reiterate the facts
You know you are big. Their fussing now is a little less annoying.
This is a general and big idea to help your mind: the more you know your truth — the truth about you — the less other people’s difficult or wrong ideas will matter, and the less you’ll be bothered if someone else believes something about you that you feel isn’t true. Changing people’s minds is always harder than working on our own minds, so concentrate on getting sure about who you are. It will make the wrong-headed ideas of others matter much less. They will wash over us like rain on a car windscreen.
Work on being sure about what you know is true about yourself
To say you are a failure is a claim. A claim must be justified with warranted reason and evidence, while responding to potential objections. Be rational. Also, know yourself. Know yourself rationally. Speaking truth is a basic universally agreed human duty. Speak the truth about others. Speak the truth about yourself.
Your parents are embarrassing
Your overfamiliarity with your parents makes them more embarrassing than other parents whom you do not know as well, although they do have their own embarrassing faults.
no one is normal
The thing that helps when people try to embarrass you is imagination. Your mind can make pictures of things you haven’t seen. You can imagine what other people’s lives might really be like even when they aren’t telling you. They might seem strong and confident, but you can imagine them getting angry or feeling worried… The next time someone tells you that your family is odd and suggests theirs is not, imagine the many ways in which their situation might be distinctive in its own way.
Parents don’t understand and don’t listen
This is a good general rule: whenever people seem evil, ask yourself a big question. Might this person be scared and worried instead? What might they be scared of or worried about? If you keep that thought in mind, it changes your life.
What parents forget is that your feelings, especially difficult feelings, are going to get better once they’ve been listened to properly.
Feelings get less strong, not more strong, as soon as they have been given an airing.
Make a list of what you will never do to your children. This will make the world better.
When someone says, ‘I am upset…’ rather than change the subject or say ‘No, you’re not,’ you can say, ‘Oh wow, tell me more…’ Or when they say: ‘That makes me so angry’, rather than say, ‘It’s bad to be angry’, say: ‘I can see you must be frustrated…’ (that calms people down very fast! Try it!).
You can try to grow into one of those valuable people who listen a lot.