7 Key Principles That Can Change How You Think, Make You Happy and Cure Mental Illness

Broken patterns of thinking, not genetics, society, or “the way the world is” are responsible for the vast majority of unhappiness and mental illness. Let me repeat that. Broken patterns of thinking, not genetics, society, or “the way the world is” are responsible for the vast majority of unhappiness and mental illness.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Forwarded this email? [Subscribe here]() for more [7 Key Principles That Can Change How You Think, Make You Happy and Cure Mental Illness]( [John Hawkins]( Oct 27   [READ IN APP](   Broken patterns of thinking, not genetics, society, or “the way the world is” are responsible for the vast majority of unhappiness and mental illness. Let me repeat that. Broken patterns of thinking, not genetics, society, or “the way the world is” are responsible for the vast majority of unhappiness and mental illness. Now, it’s worth noting, that I did not say that “broken patterns of thinking” are responsible for ALL unhappiness and mental illness. They’re not the norm, but there really are genetic conditions and sometimes PTSD trauma that can cause people to spin mentally out of control. In other words, there really are some people that need to stay on their meds or else. That being said, even some of these people can learn to control their problems given time, which is why a certain percentage of people with severe mental problems seem to get a much better handle on them later in life, even without drugs. As to happiness, there are genetic components there too, and certainly circumstances can play a role, albeit usually temporarily. You wouldn’t expect someone to be happy right after their dog died, their parents got divorced, or 5 minutes after a truck hit them and broke their leg. That being said, most “circumstantial” reasons people are unhappy turn out to be bullsh*t because there are usually enormous numbers of people in exactly the same situation who are very happy. “Oh, I’m unhappy because I’m poor,” “because of the patriarchy,” or “because who could possibly be happy living in a pesthole like Seattle” (Okay, maybe there is some validity to that one… I kid… a little). This kind of thinking is almost entirely bunk. So, what causes unhappiness and mental illness? Again, it’s mostly just “broken patterns of thinking.” By that, I mean that there is a structure to everything, including the way people think, and that structure impacts how well our minds work. If you do certain things systemically wrong, it’s going to create a lot of problems in your life. Now, there are a lot of these little “mental rules” that can make a huge difference over time, so many that it occurs to me that I could write a book about them, but here are some of the most important ones. If you embrace just these 7 concepts, it will make you happier and more stable than 90% of the people you’re going to run across. 1) What you spend your time thinking about dominates your life: What do you spend your time thinking about? What questions do you ask yourself? What reoccurring thoughts repeat in your head? These are not small matters. It makes an ENORMOUS DIFFERENCE in the quality of your life whether you are thinking, “I always find a way to win” or “Why am I such a loser? How am I going to screw it up this time?” Your negative experiences can convince you that you always fail or that you’ve learned what not to do, so you can succeed this time. You can fixate on something awful that happened a decade ago and let it cast a permanent shadow over your life or spend your time building yourself up and preparing to succeed. With a little discipline, you can control what you think about and make it serve you, instead of letting it pull you down. 2) You are your habits: Everyone has good habits and bad habits. Usually, quite a few of them. This matters because, in a very real sense, your entire life is little more than an accumulation of the things you do over and over. Hitting the snooze button every morning is a habit. So is never eating after 8 PM, doing 10 push-ups every time you walk into your office, or getting up early and working out. So is not brushing your teeth, smoking weed every night, and sleeping with a guy who doesn’t want to be seen with you in public because you’re lonely. There is a lot of truth to what Naval Ravikant said: "Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve." I don’t know what your habits are, but I do know that people with a lot of healthy habits are orders of magnitude more likely to be mentally healthy and happy than people with a lot of unhealthy habits. 3) Never allow fear to guide your life: Yes, there is such a thing as “rational fear.” Don’t play Russian Roulette, stick your arm into the lion cage at the zoo, or pass out drunk at a frat party. But, if you find yourself scared to drive a car, talk to a girl, look someone in the eye, or do anything else you need to do, you have to refuse to accept that. You simply cannot allow unreasonable fears to limit your options in life. That may mean that you need to deliberately expose yourself to what you’re afraid of. It may mean working up to it. For example, if you’re scared to talk to girls, start by having innocuous conversations with women who are near you while you’re waiting in line to check out at the grocery store. Do it enough and then talking to pretty girls will be no big deal either. Get to the point where if you’re afraid to do something, you mentally have to do it. Once you get to that point and conquer your fears enough times, guess what? You’ll overcome your fears so often that you’ll find that you’re not afraid of anything anymore. 4) Get in tune with reality: One thing you will see an awful lot in life, in general, and in politics, in particular, is people who get upset about the way life is and try to change the way the whole world works instead of adapting to it. Certainly, that has been successfully done before, but it doesn’t work very often, and it usually takes an extraordinarily long time to happen when it does. Alternately, a lot of people fail because they buy into a distorted version of reality and refuse to test any of their assumptions or even listen to alternative viewpoints. This is a huge problem because life is orders of magnitude easier if you are in sync with reality, as opposed to fighting it every step of the way. If you go through life believing that you can change your gender, “all women are b*tches” or that the government is going to fix your problems, you are going to have a bumpy ride. Don’t be afraid to challenge your assumptions or change your mind. The truth is always your friend. 5) You have a lot more control over your emotions than you think: Tony Robbins tells a wonderful story to illustrate this point in his book, “[Awaken the Giant Within]( When I used to conduct private therapies, people would come to see me, sit down in my office, and begin to tell me what their problem was. They'd say, "My problem is ..." and then they'd burst into tears, out of control. As soon as this happened, I would stand up and shout, "EXCUSE ME!" This would jolt them, and then I'd follow up with, "We haven't started yet!" Usually, they responded, "Oh, I'm so sorry." And they'd immediately change their emotional states and regain control. It was hysterical to watch! These people who felt they had no control over their lives would immediately prove that they already knew exactly how to change how they felt! I’m not sure anyone has perfect control over their emotions, but all of us have much more control over our emotions than we realize. Again, as Tony Robbins likes to say: How you frame things that happen to you can have an ENORMOUS impact on how you feel about them. You can feel a tremendous sense of loss when you lose someone OR a sense of gratitude that you got to spend so much of your life with them. You can be crushed when you lose a job OR be happy to have an opportunity to find something better. You can crumble in the face of some great challenge OR decide that you’re happy to have the challenge so you can prove to yourself and the world what kind of person you are under pressure. You shouldn’t fear negative emotions, but you should absolutely refuse to accept the idea that you are regularly going to live in any kind of negative emotional state. Like any skill, the more you work on changing your emotions, the better you will get at it. 6) Copy what works, not what doesn’t: One of the weirder quirks of modern society is that instead of learning from people who have what they want in life, so many Americans RESENT THOSE PEOPLE instead. Meanwhile, legions are lining up to learn from perpetually aggrieved, offended, unhappy, and unstable people. Why copy people who are failing at life and then be surprised when your life turns out to be just as miserable as theirs? It’s doubly ironic because never in all of recorded history has there been more information readily available about what makes people happy, successful, and mentally sound than there is today. As a very small, personal example, I’m working on my bench press right now, trying to get it up to 300 pounds. I have a personal trainer watching my form, telling me how to do it better. I watch YouTube videos that cover every detail of how the movement should work. I’ve even read sections of books about the topic. You can do that with pretty much anything you want to do these days and it will take you much further than blindly following aggrieved people, loud-mouthed influencers, and activists who have nothing to teach you, but how to fail. 7) You are responsible for your life: We all know that we don’t have true control over what happens to our lives. I could go to sleep tonight, a plane could drop out of the sky, hit my house, and kill me as dead as Bob Hope. The Sun could explode tomorrow and wipe out life on Earth. There’s always some weird, unpredictable, 1-in-a-billion “Black Swan” no one can prepare for that can turn your life upside down. This is reality. However, does this really describe most of life? Let me give a synopsis of a terrible story that I once read about long ago in a book written by a cop describing cases he dealt with. There was a woman who was jogging through a park and a man grabbed her, dragged her into the bushes, threatened her into compliance, and then raped her. Afterward, she reported it to the police, but years later, they had still never caught the guy. Meanwhile, she took some self-defense courses and spent years in therapy working her way through the trauma. Well, bizarrely, while jogging through the park again, 3 years later, the SAME RAPIST grabbed her and tried to drag her into the bushes. Instead of complying, she went berserk, scratched, bit, and fought like a demon until she got loose and ran away from him. Fortunately, the dirtbag was caught, so he didn’t get an opportunity to try that kind of thing again. In other words, something terrible happened to her, she changed how she behaved because of it, and for that reason, it didn’t happen to her a second time. Of course, this is an extreme story, but the principle is sound. If your relationship ends, you should be asking yourself what you can learn from it to make the next relationship work better. If someone breaks into your house, you should be asking yourself what you can do to make it less likely that it will happen again. If you lose a fight, you should be thinking about what you need to do to be able to win the next one. This is the way of the world if we allow it to be. If we learn from our mistakes or even just from bad things that happen to us, we will find that Nietzsche was mostly right: Bad things happen to all of us. We can blame other people, curse our “bad luck,” and let that break us down or we can learn from it, make adjustments, and become better, stronger, and more capable. The latter path will make your life much better. --------------------------------------------------------------- [Upgrade to paid]( [Share]( [Leave a comment]( [101 Things All Young Adults Should Know]( You're currently a free subscriber to [Culturcidal by John Hawkins](. For the full experience, [upgrade your subscription.]( [Upgrade to paid](   [Like]( [Comment]( [Restack](   © 2023 John Hawkins 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 [Unsubscribe]() [Get the app]( writing]()