Kelly McGonigal

In the quest for self-control, the usual weapons we wield against ourselves—guilt, stress, and shame—don’t work. People who have the greatest self-control aren’t waging self-war. They have learned to accept and integrate these competing selves.

Stress encourages you to focus on immediate, short-term goals and outcomes, but self-control requires keeping the big picture in mind. Learning how to better manage your stress is one of the most important things you can do to improve your willpower.

Meditation is not about getting rid of all your thoughts; it’s learning not to get so lost in them that you forget what your goal is. Don’t worry if your focus isn’t perfect when meditating. Just practice coming back to the breath, again and again.

We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today.

If we try to save our energy by becoming willpower couch potatoes, we will lose the strength we have. But if we try to run a willpower marathon every day, we set ourselves up for total collapse. Our challenge is to train like an intelligent athlete, pushing our limits but also pacing ourselves.

The next time you’re feeling stressed and about to reach for the promise of relief, consider trying a more effective stress reliever instead.

When you’re trying to make a big change or transform an old habit, look for a small way to practice self-control that strengthens your willpower, but doesn’t overwhelm it completely.

We are driven to chase pleasure, but often at the cost of our well-being.

Take a twenty-four-hour break from TV news, talk radio, magazines, or websites that profit from your fear. If the world doesn’t end without you watching every private and global crisis unfold (prediction: It won’t), consider cutting out mindless consumption of these media.

If you tell yourself that you are too tired or don’t have the time to exercise, start thinking of exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy and willpower.

I wrote this book with that specific purpose in mind: to help you discover your own strength, courage, and compassion. Seeing the upside of stress is not about deciding whether stress is either all good or all bad. It’s about how choosing to see the good in stress can help you meet the challenges in your life.

If you believe that the demands of the situation exceed your resources, you will have a threat response. But if you believe you have the resources to succeed, you will have a challenge response.

Despite most people’s belief that some adrenalin improves performance, but too much impairs performance, the evidence suggests otherwise. When it comes to performing under pressure, being stressed is better than being relaxed.

If you struggle with avoidance, self-doubt, or feeling overwhelmed, helping others is one of the most powerful motivation boosters that you can find.

This research doesn’t suggest that the most helpful mindset is a Pollyanish insistence on turning everything bad into something good. Rather, it’s the ability to notice the good as you cope with things that are difficult. In fact, being able to see *both* the good and the bad is associated with better long-term outcomes than focusing purely on the upside.

The Wharton researchers summarized their findings with this advice: ‘When individuals feel time constrained, they should become more generous with their time—despite their inclination to be less so.’

The science tells us that stress is most likely to be harmful when three things are true: 1. You feel inadequate to it; 2. It isolates you from others; 3. It feels utterly meaningless and against your will. As we’ve seen, how you think about stress feeds into each one of these factors.

After that big stretch, it became easier to imagine something I had never really let myself believe. Not just that I could ring a cowbell fifty feet off the ground, but something even more reassuring. That when I found myself in a situation I didn’t know how to get through on my own, an assemblage of family, friends, and even strangers might rally around me.

In The Lure of Long Distances, Robin Harvie notes that the word athlete derives from a Greek word for ‘I struggle, I suffer.’

One study tracked the daily movements and mood of over 20,000 adults, using the GPS on their smartphones. After collecting over a million data points, the researchers concluded that people are happier in natural environments. And yet typical Americans spend 93 percent of their time indoors, creating what some call a nature deficit.

Their experiences paint a portrait of how humans maintain hope and momentum in the darkest moments. We endure by taking it one step at a time, by making space for suffering and joy to coexist, and with the help of others.

A meta-analysis of twenty-five randomized clinical trials concluded that exercise has a large and significant antidepressant effect among people diagnosed with major depressive disorder.

In 1825, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, ‘Hope without an object cannot live.’ Modern scientists have come to a similar conclusion: Humans crave concrete goals and thrive when pursuing specific aims.