Dr. Maya Shankar

See your situation with more objectivity, given the hormonal fog you might have surrounding it.

And you can do a quick version of this where if you're coaching yourself, rather than talking to yourself in the first person, like, oh, I just need to get a grip.

You say something like, Maya, you need to get a grip.

And that slight tweak, it sounds like such a funny little gimmicky thing, has been shown to be so powerful across a range of negative emotions in a wide set of domains.

And so again, all of these techniques are meant to just help you breed some space between you and the challenge that you're experiencing.

God, I'm getting anxious just hearing about this.

I totally have never done that.

Yes, we do want closure.

We do want clarity.

Our brains desire black and white answers.

And the reality is that when we climb out of the rubble of a negative change, all there is is gray space around us, right?

And that lack of clarity, not having clear definitive answers can really crush us.

So one woman that I wrote about in the book experienced heartbreak out of nowhere.

Her husband of decades had an affair and decided he wanted to get divorced, even though she wanted to make it work.

And she was just so grief stricken and she was desperate to find answers.

So she went on this solo canoe trip and she was playing through every single scenario that they had been through.

And she was vacillating between extremes, like it's all his fault.

No, it's all my fault.

And it turns out that her quest for closure actually just led her into a worse mental state than before.

Guess what did help?