Transcription
The amount of success one sees in life has a direct correlation with their level of sensitivity. If you are someone who gets bothered by every little obstacle that pops up, then you're gonna spend a lot of mental energy on these things, which ends up distracting you from the bigger things that you should actually be doing. You'll also find yourself plagued with negative emotions that drain your energy, preventing you from taking action.
This is why today I want to go over three practical things that you can do to decrease your level of sensitivity.
Starting off at number one, you can adopt an anti-fragility mindset. Something that is anti-fragile gets stronger the more it's damaged or placed under pressure. A great example of this is the mythical hydra. Every time you cut off one head, two grow back in its place. A person that has an anti-fragility mindset is essentially someone who becomes stronger the more mistakes he or she makes. And if you think about it, this is actually pretty accurate because one of the most powerful ways to learn something is by making a painful mistake. The pain brands the lesson in your mind for the rest of your life, making your instinct sharper and your decision making wiser. Those that have the opposite of this, those that have the fragility mindset, end up moving throughout life so carefully to the point where they will self-sabotage themselves from succeeding because they are so scared of making a mistake along the way and being labeled as a failure. What they don't understand is that it's good to fail. It only makes you stronger, which means the faster you fail, the faster you eventually succeed. In order to cultivate this belief, you can simply repeat something like, "Messing up only makes me stronger," every time you make a mistake. And over time, with enough repetitions, you will start to believe it, and everything will become a win-win situation.
The second thing you can do to become less sensitive is to build up a habit of meditation. Very few people can honestly say that nothing ever bothers them. However, the intensity of the negative emotions that you feel and the duration of how long you feel them is definitely something that you can change. And this all depends on how much control you have over your own thoughts. When something bad happens to us, we usually start thinking about it, replaying and reliving it in our heads dozens of times over, often over-exaggerating just how bad we did. And this causes us to feel worse and worse over time. But if you manage to build up a habit of meditation, you will gain the ability to step back and distance yourself from such thoughts. Over time, you will even be able to manually insert thoughts into your thinking, such as the anti-fragility ones. Imagine being embarrassed about what you said to someone and worrying about it all day, but then being able to step back and say, "Wait, it's good that I made this mistake." All of a sudden, you've transformed an evening of worry and self-pity into an evening of hope where you feel like you learned a valuable lesson. That's the power of meditation. If you like to learn more about it, I'll include a link in the description box below to a playlist that teaches you about the other benefits and also how to meditate.
And finally, the third way to become less sensitive is by zooming out. Most of you are currently zoomed in. You're looking at your life through a microscope. You might be focusing in on your school, your work, or even your home environment. It doesn't really matter because as long as you are looking at things through this microscope, problems that appear in these environments will always seem big. Little drama between who dislikes who, or he said, she said, end up becoming huge issues in your life, taking up 25 to 50% of your daily mental energy because when you're that zoomed in, they literally take up that much space. To counter this, you must zoom out. And the easiest way to do this is by spending time thinking about how small you are in the grand scheme of things. I like to envision myself as a teeny tiny ant on a planet in a universe of trillions and trillions of stars. I also like to think about how many people there are on this planet and how each of them have their own lives and their own problems, many of which are much more serious than mine. The more you think about things like this, the more you start to realize how small and insignificant you are compared to everything else. You start to realize, "Wow, all of these things that I used to worry about all day, they are nothing in the big scheme of things." Try to zoom out as much as possible, and you will become less sensitive.
Which is why this episode was brought to you with the help of the guys at CuriosityStream. One of the best ways to zoom out is to watch documentaries about how vast the universe really is. CuriosityStream is like the documentary version of Netflix. They have thousands of streamable documentaries and non-fiction TV shows on topics like history, nature, science, food, travel, and much, much more. I often go on their platform and watch documentaries about the universe, and it's amazing how much peace doing so gives me. It really lets me zoom out and realize just how small my problems are in the grand scheme of things. Go to www.curiositystream.com/pill to sign up for just $14.99 for the entire year. That's right, it's not just $14.99 per month, it's $14.99 for the whole year, which means that you're paying close to just a dollar per month to gain access to thousands of high-quality documentaries. I highly recommend you to check it out if you want to zoom out and become less sensitive. Besides that, guys, stay tuned.