This reduced so much of my suffering. There is surrender involved. There is acceptance involved. But

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Okay, so I have to tell you a secret.

[00:00:02]This is something that I learned when I was just going through the throes of chronic anxiety, chronic pain, chronic symptoms. I had spent a really long time focusing on optimizing feeling good. And what I learned was this, you do not need to feel good in order to have a good day. My constant quest to feel good that I had been on for my whole life just cuz I felt bad so often was a big road block for me. If I always needed to feel good, then I was constantly monitoring myself for any ways that I felt bad. And when you have chronic symptoms and you have chronic anxiety and you have chronic pain and your goal is to feel good and you don't, it becomes this loop where you're so hyper vigilant about how you're feeling and you ruin your days. Like chronic pain and chronic symptoms are hard enough, but that hyper vigilance and that focus on I don't feel good, I want to feel good, if I don't feel good, that's not good. That is a loop. And so something I challenged myself to do pretty early on was to have good days even if I wasn't feeling good. And I just I don't think I knew that was possible before. I would have days where like in my body I felt so bad, but the day overall was good. And at a certain point you are going to have to start looking for ways that you are feeling good or that you are feeling comfort or that you are feeling joy even when you feel bad. Feeling bad doesn't mean the day is bad. Feeling bad doesn't mean your life is bad. And reframing like, yeah, I don't feel the way I would prefer to feel. I would prefer to feel better, but this is how I feel right now. I accept how I feel right now. Now, what's the plan for the day? This applied to my sleep, too. I would sleep terribly and then I would have a good day and I'd be like, I guess I don't need to sleep 8 and 1/2 hours and get 2 hours of REM sleep and 1 hour of deep sleep in order to function as a human being. Have you ever experienced this?

[00:01:50]Have you ever been like, okay, today was not that bad, but if I had focused so much on how I felt and how I didn't feel optimal or how I didn't feel great, I would have ruined this whole day for myself. We have far more power than we think we do.