89 How your emotional habits are eating you alive
No. 89 – 18 Aug 2024
Welcome to the 89th edition of the True Progress Newsletter, a weekly newsletter on mastering fear and anxiety for optimal performance.
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INSIGHTS
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Just like you train yourself to develop good habits like waking up early or eating healthy, you’re also unknowingly training your mind to fall into emotional traps. You create habits of tunnel vision, over-generalizing, and exaggerating, which distort reality and lead to constant misinterpretations and emotional overreactions.
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You will end up misjudging situations or misunderstanding your colleagues' intentions. This could make you more risk-averse, as your fear of failure and worry about what others think grows. You may also start overthinking and jumping to conclusions a lot, leading you to avoid social or work opportunities because you’re afraid of being judged or rejected.
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“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
— Carl Jung
CHALLENGE
When was the last time you experienced a setback where you felt anger, sadness, depression, defeat?
Look at the setback and by process of elimination, ask:
Are you seeing the setback only from just one angle (aka tunnel vision)?
Are you falling victim to confirmation bias (ignoring facts that don’t fit your beliefs)?
Are you over-generalizing, mind-reading, or jumping to conclusions?
⌾ Reply to this email and let us know how it went.
SYSTEMS
Jerry Seinfeld credits much of his success to his daily visual habit system. Habits become your values and your values become your identity.
Here's how it works:
Make a list of your key daily habits that move you closer to an important achievement or help you become the person you want to be.
Consider picking a specific time to complete your habit each day and scheduling it.
Get a calendar, notebook, or habit-tracking app and mark each day you complete the habit.
Keep the chain of days unbroken. When scheduling new tasks or accepting new invitations, always consider whether this will cause you to break your chain.
Till next week,
— Carlos & Stef
