Get Out of My Head by M. Andrew McConnell

Author:M. Andrew McConnell [McConnell, M. Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637740767
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

For Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, accepting and learning from events and occurrences was not enough. Limiting the “suffering” to the event itself was not even enough. To make the most of life’s challenges, to really be Stoic in the face of adversity, required taking it one step further and being thankful for things others would lament.

Nearly two millennia after Marcus Aurelius’s rule, the Austrian physician and psychiatrist Alfred Adler explained why this approach works. “Meanings are not determined by situations,” he wrote, “but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.”34 A situation is not “good” or “bad” in and of itself. These labels only come, can only come, through the meaning we give them. As Shakespeare said through Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

We can remain a mind tenant and let the meaning of a situation be defined for us, or we can be mind owners, proactively dictating what meaning we choose to give it. If we do this correctly, and not only accept what comes but actually go so far as to be thankful for it, we have a newfound superpower. A negative outlook leads us to a more negative mindset. A neutral outlook leads to a neutral one. But a positive view? One of gratitude? That will actually make us happier, and there is science to prove it.

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