It’s a simple fact that life’s full of problems and challenges that you’d rather avoid, such as dealing with irritating people or having a job you don’t enjoy. If you’re like most people, you probably assume that these experiences are to blame for negative feelings—and that the only way to make yourself feel better is to avoid such experiences.
But what if you’re going about this the wrong way? In 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, bestselling author and poet Brianna Wiest argues that unwanted experiences aren’t to blame for your bad feelings, only your thoughts about these experiences are. Therefore, there’s only one solution to make yourself feel better: Change the way you think.
This guide presents Wiest’s ideas in four parts:
Wiest argues that the only way to change the way you feel about the people and things that make you feel bad is to change the way you think about them. To understand her argument, you first need to grasp one key idea: There’s no such thing as an objective experience—meaning that there’s no one “right” way to interpret your experiences.
Wiest explains that no experience has inherent qualities of its own—such as being good, bad, right, or wrong. You only assign these values to them because of the way you think about and interpret them. Therefore, it’s not your experiences that determine how you feel, but your thoughts about these experiences.
Your Thoughts Create Your Experiences
While many self-help authors mirror Wiest’s view that your thoughts determine how you interpret experiences, Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking) takes this idea one step further. He claims that your thoughts aren’t only a response to your experiences, but are also the cause of your experiences. He explains that your thoughts during an experience determine how you react to it. This reaction shapes how subsequent experiences play out.
For example, consider how your thoughts during a heated discussion shape what happens next. When you think the other person is trying to upset you, you feel wronged and react defensively or aggressively—the discussion then turns to conflict. On the other hand, when you think the other person is simply expressing their opinion, you don’t take their words personally and find it easier to respond rationally. This helps ease the tension and keep you and the other person on friendly terms.
Additionally, Wiest argues that it’s difficult to change the way you think and feel about what happens to you. This is because your thinking patterns lock you into a feedback loop that reinforces the way you interpret your experiences.
The following five-step process illustrates how feedback loops reinforce your thoughts and feelings:
How Unconscious Biases Reinforce Feedback Loops
Psychological research expands upon Wiest’s description of the interpretation process by explaining that your habitual thoughts and feelings are influenced and reinforced by cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are the result of your brain’s attempt to make quick judgments based on your past experiences, and they shape the way you think about and perceive your environment.
There are many different types of cognitive biases, and each of them influences your perception in different ways. The most common forms are confirmation bias, the tendency to pay more attention to the information that confirms and reinforces your opinion, and negativity bias, the tendency to notice and dwell on the negative aspects of your experience.
The example in the five-step process above demonstrates how both of these biases reinforce how you feel, what you think, and your state of mind: The confirmation bias influences you to only notice and interpret experiences that reinforce your feelings of anxiety. Likewise, the negativity bias keeps you focused on what you dislike or fear about your experiences. As a result, you find it difficult to disentangle yourself from your stressful state of mind, think differently, and ease your feelings of anxiety.
Wiest claims that this process of interpretation isn’t limited to the present moment. Your thoughts also impact the way you experience memories of the past or expectations for the future—because you project your current state of mind onto whatever you think about. This explains why your feelings about the past or future often fluctuate depending on your current mood.
(Shortform note: The psychological term “mood-congruency” explains why memories and expectations change according to your mood. You rely on your imagination to construct your memories and expectations. However, your emotions and imagination are inextricably linked—meaning that your current emotions determine the emotional content of your recollections or expectations.)
Since everything you experience is simply a reflection of the way you think, it follows then, that to experience things differently, you just need to change your thoughts. However, Wiest argues, before you can change your thoughts, you first need to become conscious of them and understand why you currently think the way that you do. In this second part of the guide, we’ll explain why you don’t have complete autonomy over the way you think and how this impacts the way you interpret your experiences, how you experience happiness, and how you judge yourself.
(Shortform note: Many self-help practitioners agree that understanding why you think the way that you do is the key to changing your thoughts. Without this understanding, you’re more likely to believe that your thoughts are entirely rational (because your experiences justify your thoughts), and you won’t feel motivated to change the way that you think about or interpret your experiences.)
While you might believe that you consciously control your thoughts, Wiest claims that you’re often not conscious of your thoughts or why you think them. This is because you never consciously chose the thoughts you habitually think or the beliefs that reinforce them. Rather, you subconsciously adopted the thoughts and beliefs of your family, your friends, and your culture.
According to Wiest, these adopted thoughts and beliefs influence your entire worldview—how you judge the world, your place in it, and the circumstances you face. In other words, everything you’ve ever thought of as good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful, or ugly has simply been a reflection of the way other people have influenced you.
Why would you adopt the thoughts of those around you? According to Wiest, you likely found early on in life that it was the only way you could experience comfort and happiness. She explains that, as a child, your comfort and happiness depended on conforming to the expectations of other people:
(Shortform note: Researchers confirm that we unconsciously internalize the unspoken rules and biases of our social groups so that we can instinctively cooperate with others. Our inherent need to feel connected to others and to avoid punishment motivates us to adopt these rules. In addition, this need for connection encourages us to spend time with people who are similar to us—the feeling of sameness enhances our sense of belonging. However, being around like-minded people makes it difficult to think differently—because surrounding ourselves with people who believe the same things we’ve been conditioned to believe reinforces our thinking patterns.)
Wiest claims that your early experiences conditioned you to believe that you could only ever be comfortable and happy as long as you acted in a way that conformed to what other people wanted and expected from you—in other words, you could only be happy if you made other people happy.
And, to successfully act out your part, you learned to think and interpret the world in the same way that the people you relied on for your comfort and happiness did. The following example illustrates how you were conditioned to adopt other people’s thoughts and interpretations:
Your Conditioning Is a Result of What You Believe to Be True
The author of Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz, validates Wiest’s argument that you’ve been conditioned to adopt the thoughts and beliefs of those around you. He argues that, as a child, you unconsciously adopted the opinions and beliefs of others as truths, regardless of whether or not these opinions were based on facts.
Why did your mind accept what you heard, saw, and experienced as truth? Because your nervous system can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality—it can only respond to what you think or imagine to be true. When you were young, you were less able to question what was going on around you and form your own rational conclusions. As a result, you simply absorbed everything you experienced, and your mind accepted these experiences as truths.
Further, Maltz suggests that the conditioning process isn’t as simple as Wiest makes it out to be. He argues that you didn’t automatically adopt the thoughts that helped you to conform to other people’s expectations. Rather, the way that you identified with your experiences determined the way you thought about and interpreted similar experiences.
For example, if your teacher gave you a gold star and a smile in front of all of your peers, you could have identified with this experience in multiple ways: If you were a confident child, you could have felt proud of yourself and your achievement (happy). If you lacked confidence, you could have felt embarrassed about being the center of attention (unhappy). If you wanted to impress a peer who took pride in being a delinquent, you could have felt disappointment about looking like a geek (unhappy). Though your teacher was obviously happy with you, only the way you identified with the experience defined how happy you felt about it.
As an adult, you can decide what you choose to believe but, according to Maltz, the “truths” you accepted as a child continue to live in your mind and inform your thoughts and feelings. He suggests that you take control of these outdated truths and replace them with what you choose to believe by regularly visualizing yourself acting in ways that align with your authentic self (who you are beneath the conditioning). Maltz claims that, with constant practice, your mind will gradually become accustomed to accepting your new thoughts and beliefs as truth and will let go of the old, conditioned beliefs.
In addition to influencing how you think about the world, social conditioning also influences the way you think and feel about yourself. According to Wiest, your feelings of comfort and happiness are so inextricably linked to how other people react to you that you feel compelled to think about yourself according to how you imagine other people perceive you. She explains it as follows:
How Seeking External Validation Impacts Your Self-Esteem
While it’s clear that seeking external validation impacts your self-esteem, research on self-identity indicates that the feedback you receive from others is just one of four interrelated components that inform the way you think about yourself:
Self-image: how you see yourself
Ideal self: how you would like to be seen by others
Real self: the feedback you receive from others that shows you who you really are.
Looking-glass self: how you perceive the way others perceive you and compare it to the way you see yourself.
Further, the research shows that you’re more likely to have a healthy sense of self-esteem (how much you like and accept yourself) if your beliefs in each of the four components align with and complement each other.
In other words, the more your beliefs in each component clash with each other, the more likely you are to suffer from low self-esteem. For example, you see yourself as boring (your self-image) but you want others to see you as interesting (your ideal self). This gap between your self-image and your ideal self creates internal conflict and undermines your self-esteem.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the beliefs that inform your opinion of yourself in each of these areas. However, there are a number of tests you can take to discover what you really think about yourself—and to what extent external validation influences this opinion—such as The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale or The Flourishing Scale.
Wiest argues that this preoccupation with others’ perception of you makes it impossible for you to ever feel comfortable and happy with yourself—because it compels you to second-guess everything you do and to negatively judge yourself whenever you get unwanted feedback.
She argues that attempting to please or impress others never makes you feel truly happy for two reasons: First, different people want different things, so it’s impossible for you to please everyone. Second, you can never really know what people think about you—the best you can do is make a guess and hope that you’ll manage to elicit the feedback you crave.
Inevitably then, you often fail to receive the feedback you want. And, each time you fail, you assume that it’s because you’re inadequate in some way—if other people don’t feel you deserve their positive feedback, then you won’t believe you deserve it.
You then strive to resolve this by attempting to fix what’s “wrong” with you—hoping that this fix will invite positive feedback. The following example demonstrates how this plays out:
How Seeking External Validation Affects Self-Judgment and Behavior
Research in the area of authenticity confirms Wiest’s claim that many people base their self-judgment and happiness on how they think others perceive them. And psychologists agree that acting inauthentically—projecting an image that conforms to what you think others want from you—makes you feel inadequate and unhappy.
Further, the research concludes that feelings of discomfort and inauthentic behavior go hand-in-hand. Consequently, you can figure out if you base your happiness on others’ opinions of you by considering how often you feel:
Embarrassed by things you’ve done or said
Awkward and self-conscious in daily interactions
Resentful and misunderstood
Afraid of what others think of you
Rejected and unheard
These feelings both reflect and encourage inauthentic behavior and feelings of unhappiness. For example, sometimes shy people come across as loud and overbearing. This is because their discomfort around others leads them to overact to compensate for their shyness. As a result, they find themselves projecting a (false) gregarious persona to mask their shyness. This leads them to question whether people like them for who they are or for the act they put on. As a result, they feel more uncomfortable about interacting with others and this compels them to continue projecting an altered image of themselves.
We’ve just explained how the mental associations you unconsciously formed as a child compel you to engage in two unhealthy thought patterns:
According to Wiest, relying on positive feedback to feel happy creates a breeding ground for unwanted experiences and negative feelings. This is because seeking validation compels you to engage in two habits that disconnect you from your true needs and make you feel powerless to change your emotions: suppressing your feelings and pursuing the wrong goals.
Let’s explore how these two habits contribute to unwanted experiences and feelings of powerlessness in more detail.
According to Wiest, your conditioning inadvertently taught you to believe that some feelings are unacceptable or bad. As a result, you feel ashamed each time these feelings come up, pretend that you don’t feel them, and try to avoid people and situations that might trigger them. You also judge other people who express these feelings as “bad” or “wrong.”
However, these suppressed feelings continue to live on inside you, get stronger the more you try to deny them, and morph into irrational thought patterns and emotional reactions that stifle your capacity to feel positive emotions.
You used to get punished for having tantrums as a child. Your tantrums were your way of expressing disagreement with something that you were expected to do. Therefore, you unconsciously associated expressing disagreement with punishment and labeled disagreement as “bad” or “wrong” in your mind.
Though unconscious, this mental association now shapes the way you think about and react to various situations and contributes to many of your unwanted feelings. This is because it leads to a number of unhealthy behaviors and thought patterns, such as:
You pretend to agree with others: Because you want to get along with others and receive positive feedback, you avoid disagreeing with them—either by pretending to take their side or staying quiet. However, the more you avoid expressing your true opinions, the more insecure you feel in your relationships—you never know if people like you for who you are or because you’re validating their opinions.
You agree to things that you don’t want to do: Even though this approach garners positive feedback, doing things you don’t want to do often makes you feel angry and resentful. However, because you’re unable to acknowledge how your own thought patterns created these unwanted situations, you mistakenly assume that other people are making you do things that you don’t want to do. This leads you to conclude that other people are to blame for your negative feelings. As a result, you don’t feel accountable for your role in these unwanted situations and you believe that you’re powerless to change them.
You judge people who do express their disagreement: Because you believe that expressing disagreement is “bad” or “wrong,” you automatically dislike or feel uncomfortable around people who do express their disagreement. Instead of questioning why you feel this way, you assume that your opinion is valid and that they should change the way they act to make you feel better.
Suppressing Your Feelings Creates Emotional Discomfort
Suppressing your feelings can have consequences beyond making you agree to things you’d rather not do or judging those who do express such feelings. Tony Robbins, (Awaken the Giant Within) offers additional insights into how suppressing your emotions exacerbates emotional discomfort and feelings of unhappiness. He claims that suppressing your emotions disempowers you because it leads you to engage in two irrational behaviors:
1) You avoid situations that risk triggering your suppressed emotions: The problem with this is that you miss out on experiencing the positive emotions these situations might elicit.
For example, you’ve suppressed your need for affection, so you avoid relationships or pretend not to need affection in a relationship. As a result, you miss out on positive experiences that spring from meaningful relationships, such as love and intimacy. This makes you feel lonely and increases your unfulfilled desire for affection—and your shame for wanting it.
2) You disassociate from your emotions by pretending not to feel them: The problem with this is that these emotions become increasingly intense and eventually lead to irrational outbursts.
For example, even though you pretend not to need affection, you feel hurt every time your partner fails to give it to you. These negative feelings escalate until you’re ready to explode from frustration. However, instead of honestly expressing your hurt to release this frustration, you avoid addressing your suppressed need for affection and find a different reason to start a fight. As a result, you create conflict in your relationship and fail to resolve the real cause of your distress. This makes you feel misunderstood and increases your desire for affection—and your fear that you won’t get it.
According to Robbins, the reason you’re suppressing your emotions is that you find them unpleasant. But avoiding or dissociating from your emotions exacerbates the discomfort you feel. He suggests that you can process your suppressed feelings and relieve your discomfort by identifying your emotions, acknowledging and accepting them (instead of labeling them as bad or wrong), and considering what you can learn from them.
Wiest argues that your reliance on positive feedback compels you to focus more on how you’re perceived by others and less on how you really feel. She explains that your preoccupation with appealing to others makes you unhappy due to the following reasons:
(Shortform note: One way to judge if your goals align with your needs is to consider your motivations. Some experts believe that all behavior is driven by the need to fulfill one of two motivation types: intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within: You accept your needs and feel comfortable expressing them by engaging in activities that make you happy. For example, you choose a career you enjoy and aren’t worried about how others judge you. Extrinsic motivation comes from your environment: You ignore your needs in favor of seeking acceptance from others by engaging in activities that encourage external rewards. For example, you choose a career you don’t enjoy because it garners admiration and positive feedback.)
Why would you make decisions and choose goals that waste your energy and make you unhappy? According to Wiest, it’s because you believe that happiness comes from having a life that appears perfect to others—and you make decisions and set goals to achieve your vision of this ideal life.
However, Wiest argues, your vision of an ideal life is simply a response to the way that you’ve been conditioned to please others. Unfortunately, conforming to what others want rarely satisfies your true emotional needs. Instead, it leaves you unhappy and unfulfilled and puts you in a never-ending cycle of “improving” and changing yourself to please those around you.
Further, because this conditioning is so deeply ingrained in you, you fail to question why your achievements aren’t making you happy. Instead, you assume that you just haven’t done enough to deserve happiness and that you need to be, do, or acquire something more—for example, by making yourself more attractive, acquiring more possessions, or achieving a higher status.
The Desire for Positive External Feedback Motivates Status Goals
The Tao Te Ching, one of the ancient foundational texts of Taoism, clarifies how seeking positive feedback influences your goals and leads to a never-ending cycle of dissatisfaction. It explains that a desire to receive positive feedback influences you to choose status-based goals, such as wealth and power, so that you can appear successful and prove your worth to others. However, status-based goals—such as more money or higher status—have no upper limit and are therefore impossible to “achieve” and drive you to always seek more. This pursuit for more prevents you from feeling happy with what you already have.
Your desire to fulfill this never-ending goal and receive the feedback you crave consumes you and surpasses your desire to feel happy now. As a result, instead of tending to your emotional needs, you direct all your energy toward pursuing increasingly ambitious goals. Your assumption that achieving your goals will lead to positive feedback and happiness compels you to engage in behaviors that leave you feeling dissatisfied—such as ignoring your emotional and physical health, engaging in competitive or controlling behaviors, or acting inauthentically.
Wiest argues that suppressing your feelings and pursuing the wrong goals makes you believe that you’re powerless to change the way you feel about your experiences. As we’ve already explored, you’ve been conditioned to put your thoughts and emotions at the mercy of things outside of your control. When other people don’t give you the feedback you depend on to feel happy, or your experiences fail to live up to your ideal vision of happiness, you feel disappointed and unhappy.
Because you’ve given these external factors so much power over your happiness, you mistakenly assume that they are responsible for your happiness. And, since you've ceded so much responsibility for your happiness to forces you believe to be outside your control, you feel you are powerless and without agency to take responsibility for how you think and feel.
(Shortform note: Psychologists explain that ceding responsibility for your happiness makes you feel powerless because it contributes to a victim mentality—the belief that bad things happen to you through no fault of your own. A victim mentality creates feelings of apathy because feeling like external factors are thwarting you diminishes your motivation to take accountability for your feelings. Instead, people with a victim mentality often magnify their problems and their perceived injustices in an attempt to gain attention (comfort, sympathy, reinforcement of their beliefs) from others. The attention they receive from others validates their powerlessness and keeps them from changing the way they think about and respond to their experiences.)
We’ve just discussed how social conditioning influences you to think and behave in ways that leave you feeling unhappy and powerless to change your feelings. In this final part of the guide, we’ll explore ways to become more conscious of your thoughts so that you can take better control of them and improve the way you feel.
Wiest argues that, though your conditioning is pervasive, you can overcome it, learn to think for yourself, and feel better about yourself and your experiences. She suggests four methods to help you achieve this.
According to Wiest, before you can effectively take control of your thoughts and emotions, you first need to acknowledge that you’re the only one responsible for them. Recognizing this fact encourages you to:
Change Your Self-Image Before Attempting to Change Your Thoughts
Wiest seems to imply that you can change your thoughts and emotions simply by deciding to take responsibility for them. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds: While you may attempt to change your thoughts when you’re aware of them, the majority of your thoughts take place beneath your awareness—in your subconscious mind.
In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz explains that your subconscious mind learns from your habitual thoughts and feelings to create your self-image. It then influences you to think and behave in ways that reflect this self-image and actively discourages you from thinking or behaving in ways that are inconsistent with it. Maltz goes so far as to say that your subconscious mind sabotages your conscious attempts to change your habitual thoughts.
For example, if you habitually think that people are out to get you, you’ve trained your subconscious mind to include perpetual distrust as a part of your self-image. As a result, your subconscious mind influences you to automatically think and act in ways that keep you focused on all the ways people could harm you. It might influence you to think paranoid thoughts or encourage you to act defensively. Additionally, it may sabotage any attempt you make to trust others—for example, influencing you to interpret innocent remarks as insults.
Unlike Wiest, Maltz argues that you can’t rely on your thoughts to change your feelings unless you consciously change your self-image and retrain your subconscious mind. He suggests that you can achieve this by regularly visualizing yourself behaving in ways that align with what you want and who you want to be.
According to Wiest, thinking for yourself requires getting to know yourself. This involves paying constant attention to how you feel so that you can discover who you are and what you need to feel happy. Wiest explains that the more aware you are of your feelings, the easier you find it to challenge and replace the thoughts and behaviors that contribute to your unwanted feelings.
How can you develop an awareness of how your thoughts create your feelings? Wiest suggests that being mindful will help you to shift your focus from the external (other people, your circumstances) to the internal (your feelings). This, in turn, will help you separate how you feel about yourself from how you imagine other people think about you. As a result, you’ll be able to think more clearly about what’s important to you and what you need to feel happy.
(Shortform note: Mental health practitioners confirm that practicing mindfulness increases self-awareness, encourages positive thoughts about yourself, your circumstances, and others, and improves your mental well-being. In Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana recommends establishing a schedule to turn your mindfulness practice into a habit. Begin by setting aside 10 to 20 minutes each morning or evening to practice quieting your mind, lengthening your time as you get more comfortable with the process.)
According to Wiest, an important step in learning to think for yourself is assessing whether your current opinions and beliefs align with who you really are, or if they only exist to please or impress others. She suggests that you can dissect each of your opinions and beliefs by asking yourself the following four questions:
Use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Challenge Your Opinions and Beliefs
Like Wiest, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) practitioners argue that the more you question the validity of your thoughts and beliefs, the less likely you are to accept other people’s opinions as your own. However, the CBT method provides more specific questions to help you objectively examine your opinions and beliefs from multiple perspectives. Therefore, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of your beliefs if you answer the following questions in addition to Wiest’s four questions.
Facts
What evidence is there to support your thoughts about this?
What evidence disproves or contradicts your thoughts about this?
Are your opinions getting in the way of the facts?
Are there any facts that you’ve ignored or overlooked?
Other explanations
Can you think about this differently?
Is your mood impacting the way you’re thinking about this?
Have you ever felt differently about this?
Are you likely to change your opinion about this over time?
Your feelings
How does believing in this idea make you feel good?
How does believing in this idea make you feel bad?
How will you feel if you continue to hold onto this belief?
In addition to exploring your opinions and beliefs, Wiest suggests that you should specifically explore your judgments about other people to identify your suppressed feelings. According to her, every negative feeling you have about someone else is simply a projection of the aspects of yourself that you dislike or feel ashamed of. Therefore, she suggests that you consider all of the things that you dislike about other people to uncover what parts of yourself you’ve been conditioned to believe are “wrong” or “bad.”
This exercise will reveal how you’re currently modifying your behaviors to please or impress others. It will also help you to accept and express the parts of yourself that you’ve been too ashamed to expose to others.
Use Affirmations to Process Your Suppressed Feelings
Like Wiest, many self-help practitioners claim that your negative judgments about others reflect what you dislike about yourself. However, Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life) takes this idea one step further. She claims that you subconsciously transmit your suppressed thoughts and feelings and influence other people to reflect these feelings back to you. Hay bases this on her interpretation of the law of attraction—the idea that the universe orchestrates your reality to mirror your subconscious thoughts and beliefs.
For example, even though you crave affection, you act aloof—because your conditioning taught you that acting needy is “bad.” However, while you might project a cool image of yourself, you’re subconsciously emitting emotional signals that reveal your true feelings—your desire for affection and your shame for feeling this desire. These emotional signals then attract experiences that trigger the emotions you’re trying to avoid—because people intuitively pick up on your feelings of neediness and feel compelled to reflect them back to you.
According to Hay, practicing self-acceptance and self-love affirmations helps you process and express your suppressed feelings. For example, to process your suppressed feelings regarding your need for affection, affirm, “I love and accept my need for affection” multiple times a day.
Once you’re able to accept and express your feelings, you’ll no longer judge them as negative. Further, Hay claims that accepting your feelings will change the emotional signals that you send out—meaning that other people will no longer feel influenced to display the behaviors you previously disliked.
According to Wiest, your wishful hopes and daydreams reveal exactly what type of feedback you’re subconsciously seeking from others to feel good about yourself. This is because they’re simply a projection of the things that you feel you most lack and are relying on others to fulfill. Recall: You feel like you’re missing something because you’re not fulfilling your own needs.
Therefore, Wiest suggests that you figure out exactly what feedback you’re craving from others by exploring how other people react to you in your daydreams. Once you’ve noted what types of reactions you’re craving from others, find a way to fulfill these needs for yourself.
Your Daydreams Point to Life Areas That Dissatisfy You
According to psychologists, your daydreams don’t only point to what feedback you’re craving, but also to what you need to feel satisfied with your life. You rely on daydreams to provide a therapeutic mental escape from reality: You’re more likely to get lost in them and rely on the comfort they provide when you feel dissatisfied with the real world and can’t see a way to fulfill your needs. For example, when you feel lonely, you’ll daydream about being surrounded by friends. Or, when you feel bored, you’ll daydream about doing something stimulating.
Therefore, as you work through Wiest’s method, pay attention to when you rely on daydreams—this will reveal the dissatisfying life areas that you’re trying to escape from. Then focus on ways to increase your satisfaction in these areas. For example, if you often daydream because you feel bored at work, increase your satisfaction by taking on interesting or challenging work projects that provide more mental stimulation.
Wiest argues that unwanted experiences aren’t to blame for your bad feelings, only your thoughts about these experiences are. Developing awareness of your thoughts will help you intentionally create more positive feelings.
Describe a situation that often makes you feel bad. (For example, every time you tell your mother about your relationship problems, she takes your partner’s side and implies that you’re in the wrong.)
What specific thoughts and feelings come up when you think about this situation? (For example, you resent your mother because she implies that you’re at fault for your relationship problems. You think she’s overly critical of you and this makes you feel defensive.)
Now that you understand how your need for positive feedback influences your perceptions, why do you think that you interpret the situation the way that you do? (For example, you jump to the conclusion that your mother’s criticizing you because she doesn’t approve of what you’re doing to improve your relationship.)
Think of at least one way you can think differently about this situation to improve the way you feel about it. (For example, instead of assuming that your mother’s criticizing you, you can let go of your defensiveness by looking for more positive ways to interpret your mother’s opinion. Alternatively, you might choose not to share your relationship problems with her in the future.)