Jay Shetty

You don't have a motivation problem.

You picked up your phone before you picked up your life problem.

You don't have a motivation problem.

You gave your best energy to your screen problem.

You answered everyone else's agenda before your own problem.

You don't have a motivation problem.

You never protected the only thing everyone is stealing from you problem.

Remember that.

The fourth thing to say to yourself every morning is I will not solve problems that have not happened yet or don't exist yet.

This is why this works.

This targets the single most destructive mental habit human beings engage in, anticipatory rumination.

A landmark study from Harvard psychologist Dr. Matthew Killingsworth and Dr. Daniel Gilbert, published in Science, tracked thousands of people in real time and found that the human mind wanders 47% of the time.

And critically, that mind-wandering predicted unhappiness regardless of the activity.

But it gets more specific.

The brain does not distinguish between a vividly imagined scenario and one that is actually occurring.

Neuroimaging studies from the University of Colorado Boulder show that when you mentally rehearse a difficult conversation, your amygdala fires, your cortisol rises, and your body enters a low-grade stress response.

you are physiologically experiencing an event that is not happening.

Now, I want to make a caveat here.

This is good if you're rehearsing it on purpose, if you're preparing for a difficult conversation at work, if you're preparing for a difficult conversation with your partner, but not one that hasn't happened yet, not one that doesn't exist, not a problem that you've created, invented, imagined, right?

It's very different.