Category: Oversharing

I recently finished Ryan Holiday’s “The Obstacle Is the Way,” a very popular self-help book about modern stoicism, and I’m scratching my head. It’s a good book — I highlighted many passages that seemed written expressly for me — but I disagree with the premise.

The author seems to say that the path to success requires us to bypass emotions. In fact, he says, hardships should be greeted with a smile as they can always be turned into opportunities. 

“Obstacles make us emotional, but the only way we’ll survive or overcome them is by keeping those emotions in check — if we can keep steady no matter what happens, no matter how much external events may fluctuate.”

The Obstacle Is the Way

Have an emotional response? “So go ahead, feel it,” Holiday writes. “Just don’t lie to yourself by conflating emoting about a problem and dealing with it. Because they are as different as sleeping and waking.”

Good Ideas Aren’t Always Good Advice

Holiday makes useful observations, but I think, on the whole, stoicism is a terrible operating system. My concern is that stoicism is too simplistic to be applied in many situations. Emotions don’t have an on-and-off switch, and human struggles are not mathematical equations. Deciding on a course of action can be messy, and there are better tools than stoicism for moving forward in complicated circumstances.

In its absolute form, stoicism is a terrible operating system for people, with the possible exception of Vulcans. I’m sure that stoicism has some nuances — its defenders will most likely say it doesn’t dismiss emotion — but my takeaway from the book is that emotion is always on the back burner. And that burner is turned off. And it’s probably in a different kitchen. The point I’m trying to make is that emotion might be there, but not in any meaningful or helpful way.

I Think CBT Is a Better Framework

I think the techniques espoused by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) are healthier and more useful ways to approach life. CBT doesn’t tell people to turn off their emotions. Instead, it provides tools for defusing unhelpful thoughts and converting them into helpful ones.

Admittedly, the end result in some cases might be the same one reached through stoicism — but the journey to the destination is more realistic. And Holiday offers a few tips that are similar to CBT: “How we approach, view, and contextualize an obstacle, and what we tell ourselves it means, determines how daunting and trying it will be to overcome.”

I have written about CBT before, so there’s no need to repeat myself. The main difference between CBT and stoicism is that CBT tells us to acknowledge our emotions and reframe them in a helpful way. In contrast, stoicism essentially tells us to ignore our feelings. With CBT, you can reconceptualize thoughts and use them in your decision-making processes. That’s verboten in stoicism.

Holiday writes “Every obstacle is unique to each of us. But the responses they elicit are the same: Fear. Frustration. Confusion. Helplessness. Depression. Anger.”

The stoic approach is to tamp down these emotions. The CBT approach is to analyze these emotions and transform them into constructive, clearheaded ideas.

Life Can Suck

There are many things in life that just suck, for lack of a better word: Being thrown out of the house because you’re gay. Losing a family member. Losing a job and not being able to take care of your family. Processing our feelings at these inflection points lets us grow as individuals and develop our emotional intelligence. And not all emotions are negative — many are positive, helpful, and bring us happiness. Feelings, on the whole, are an asset, not a liability.¹

Nonetheless, There Are Things Learn from Stoicism

I don’t want to entirely dismiss “The Obstacle Is the Way.” As I said, some truly solid advice emerges as Holiday explores stoic ideas. One that stands out to me is this:

“The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher.”

The Obstacle Is the Way

I agree with this 100%, as there are times that I have taken the path of least resistance and learned nothing. This statement rings true, and Holiday gets an A+ for condensing such a complicated issue in such a succinct statement.

Other excerpts that resonated with me:

• “Think progress, not perfection.”
• “True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility.”
• “If you want momentum, you’ll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started.”

There are a lot of good takeaways like these from Holiday’s introduction to modern-world stoicism, but I’m not buying all of what he’s selling. There’s more to be gained from acknowledging your emotional thoughts and reassessing them than from compartmentalizing them and ignoring them.

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¹ Don’t take my word for it! Watch “Inside Out” on Disney+ to see emotions in action.

Today is the 500th day in a row that I’ve meditated. To celebrate, I’d like to share five hundred things I’ve learned:

1. There are infinite ways to meditate: I like guided mindfulness meditation, but there’s no end of things to try if you’re interested. 
   
2. It’s always useful, even when it feels like it isn’t: Some days are more productive than others. That’s true for everything in life, not just meditation.
   
3. You get distracted a lot: Even on the best of days, my thoughts will wander. I used think this was a failing, but it’s not. It’s just human nature. The trick is to smoothly shift back into the meditation as soon as you realize you’ve been blown off course.¹ 
   
4. Keep your expectations realistic: Since my goal is to be a bit more happy, kind, and calm, meditation works. If my goal were to reach nirvana, I’d have demanded my money back by now.
   
5. I need more stuff to achieve inner enlightenment: The space coyote told me so.

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¹ Noting and labeling are helpful when this happens.

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Header image: Mural by Subway Doodle on Troutman Street in Brooklyn, New York.

I don’t have a successful relationship with self-help books. When I pick one up, it’s either because the name catches my eye — “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” comes to mind — or I hear about it from a friend. If the book resonates with me, I’ll take it to heart for about a week and then forget everything. If it seems unrelatable — once again, looking at you, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck”¹ — I’ll abandon it and feel like I’ve wasted time that could have been spent watching reruns of the Simpsons.²

David Burns’ “Feeling Good” didn’t follow this pattern. It’s one of few self-help books that made a meaningful impact on my life. I’ve revisited it quite a few times. When I lost my copy, I bought a replacement because I felt it needed to be on my bookshelf.

“Feeling Good” was my introduction to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a transformational approach to psychology pioneered by Aaron Beck. I’m not overstating things when I say that Beck and CBT have had a profound, positive impact on my life. 

Beck died yesterday, which is why I was inspired to write this essay. The Washington Post summarizes his work this way:

Beck discovered that patients who learn to recognize the faulty logic of their negative automatic thoughts — such as, “I’ll always be a failure” or “No one likes me” — could learn to overcome their fears and think more rationally, which diminished their anxiety and improved their mood. He found that results endured long after therapy was finished, as patients learned to confront those thoughts on their own.

The Washington Post

I’m not a psychologist, but here’s how I would explain Beck’s principles of CBT:

• There’s a difference between what we feel and the way things actually are.
• We latch onto unhelpful thinking styles that reinforce negative feelings and make us blind to reality.
• To break these unhelpful thinking styles, we need to realize when we’re engaged in an unhelpful thought, diagnose it, and reinterpret it in an accurate way.
• Only by repeatedly recognizing and reframing distorted thoughts can we break the cycle of harmful thinking and recognize ourselves as we truly are.

What makes CBT useful is that Beck gives us the vocabulary to classify unhelpful thoughts. Attaching a label to these thoughts provides us with the power to understand how we’re misrepresenting reality.

Here are just three of the cognitive distortions I’m most susceptible to, along with some examples of how they used to play out in my head before I learned the fundamentals of CBT:

• Emotional reasoning: “I feel like a loser, so I’m a loser.”
• Magnifying negatives and minimizing positives: “That dumb remark I made in 1997 proves I’m stupid, while my bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees don’t really count.”
• “Should” statements: “I should be further along in my career, so there’s something wrong with me.”

Beck’s list of cognitive distortions is much longer than what I’ve described here. Off the top of my head, there’s overgeneralization, black-or-white thinking, labeling, and cognitive filtering.

When I was first introduced to CBT, I felt kind of resentful. My feelings are valid, I thought, so why should I listen to someone telling me that they’re not?

Some of Beck’s ideas must have seeped into my brain because, after a while, I noticed that I was starting to apply CBT labels to things I was thinking. I realized Beck wasn’t judging me for having feelings; he was proposing a framework for understanding them and preventing them from warping my sense of self. 

Going back to the three cognitive distortions I mentioned earlier, here’s how I try to interpret my feelings now:

• Emotional reasoning: “That thing I did makes me feel like a loser, but that was just one thing, and overall I’m certainly not a loser!”
• Magnifying negatives and minimizing positives: “Perhaps I’ve made a few stupid mistakes, but on the whole, I’m a very smart person who has learned a lot and can apply his knowledge to many different situations.”
• “Should” statements: “I’m going to acknowledge what I have achieved and not judge myself against expectations that may be unreasonable.”

CBT is difficult. That’s because cognitive distortions are automatic — they kick in without you even noticing them. With time and practice, it has become easier for me to notice when I’m having an unhelpful thought — but it’s impossible to prevent them from happening in the first place.

My goal is to recognize a cognitive distortion as quickly as possible. Only then can I dissect the thought, label any unhelpful thinking styles, and restate my ideas in an accurate and beneficial way.

I know I’m not the only person who has benefited from CBT. From The New York Times’ obituary:

The influence of C.B.T. on the treatment of mental disorders is hard to exaggerate. Researchers have adapted the approach — originally developed for depression — to manage panic attacks, addictions, eating disorders, social anxiety, insomnia and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Therapists teach a variation to help parents manage children’s outbursts at home, and some have used it, in combination with medication, to manage the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenia. Sports psychologists have made use of the principles for performance anxiety.

The New York Times

Rest in peace, Dr. Beck. 

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¹ A perfectly cromulent book. It just didn’t work for me. Your mileage may vary.
² Of course, Lisa gets it:

While Homer remains as oblivious as ever:

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Headline: quote from Hamlet
Header image: Banksy street art, San Francisco.

I tend to read two books at a time — one serious, one fun — because that’s just how I roll. A few weeks ago, I was delighted to discover that both books I was reading shared a similar, and important, message.

First, from “Hola Papi” by John Paul Brammer:

“We can’t change the events of our lives. They happened, and there they are. But the lines we draw to connect those events, the shapes we make and the conclusions we reach, those come from us. They are our own design.”

John Paul Brammer

Second, from “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:¹

“But these transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities. Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well. But the moment biological or social goals are frustrated — which in the long run is inevitable — a person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will waste his energies in inner turmoil.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The Brammer book is a funny memoir by a gay advice columnist; the subtitle is “How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons.” The Csikszentmihalyi book is academic and ponderous. It explores how people can achieve a state of flow — that’s what it’s called when you’re totally engrossed by an activity — and the implications for sports, academics, creative pursuits, parenthood, religion, and society at large.

So, yeah, two very different books. I don’t think Csikszentmihalyi brings up the subject of gay porn even once!² But notice how the two messages resonate on the same frequency. The authors say we may not be able to change things in the past, but we get to choose how we interpret them, define them, and what meaning to derive from them.

This is my takeaway: No matter what has happened, or what others have told us, or what expectations have been set for us, we can create our own narratives and forge a path forward that is fulfilling and makes us happy. And it’s up to us to take action and make that happen.

That’s a message that bears repeating, rewriting, and rereading as much as possible.

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¹ He recently passed away. Check out my flowbituary.
² An unforgivable oversight on Csikszentmihalyi’s part.