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Well, the subject line makes it sound like the restless legs are gone. They are not, but the way I want to talk about them is changing.
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The blood panel came back, and there’s nothing in it to do anything about. Which is a bit of a disappointment because low iron would have been the easy fix. These results give me no indication of what direction to go. So I’ve made an appointment to see the specialist again.

For three weeks now I’ve been calling them snakes.
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“If you’ve never had restless legs, picture a few dozen snakes crawling around inside your legs, and the only way to quiet them is to move. So you move. And then you do it again. And it feels awful.”
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That’s the image I used. It’s also the thing I want to look at today.
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We think our language describes reality. And it does. But it also creates our reality.
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A snake isn’t unpleasant. A snake is a threat. A predator. Something that could hurt you. So when I call the feeling in my legs snakes, I’ve put something dangerous in the bed with me, something I need to get away from. And then I tell myself it’s awful, and now the whole night feels like an emergency.
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The legs would be the legs either way. But to use that script internally is to reinforce that what’s happening is fairly dire. Extreme language produces extreme emotions.
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This is the same thing I wrote about the first two weeks. The legs are here, and the blood panel didn’t give me a way out of them. The suffering I stack on top of them, though, that part I have a role in.
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And one of the biggest levers I’ve got is the words I choose.
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I can’t pick a smaller sensation. I can pick a smaller word.
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​Try this: this week, catch one extreme word you’re using on a hard thing. Awful. Disaster. Always. Never. Then try a smaller, truer one. “This is awful” becomes “this is a rough stretch.” As for me, I think I’m going to retire the snakes. It was a good image, and it was never quite telling the truth. They’re just restless legs. I can handle restless legs.
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​Reflect on this: what’s a hard thing you’ve been describing in its most extreme terms, and what would it cost you to say it smaller?

So, the snakes are still here.

Last week I wrote to you in the middle of a bad stretch of restless legs, and I’m sorry to report the legs have not read the newsletter. A lot of you wrote back with things to try, and I’m grateful. I’ve already known about many of them; there are a couple of new ideas to look at, and there’s a blood panel coming. I’m working on the problem.

And that’s where I want to start, because last week I think I made it sound like lowering resistance was the only lever we could pull.

We tend to file our hard things into two drawers. There’s the Serenity Prayer version of it: grant me the serenity to accept what I can’t change, the courage to change what I can. Useful. But it can leave you thinking everything sorts neatly into one drawer or the other. Accept it, or fix it.

My legs won’t go in either drawer. I’m doing everything I can, and I still have to get through tonight.

The truth is most hard things don’t sort cleanly. You do what you can about them. And then you still have to live with what’s left.

And what’s left is the part we talked about last week. It’s the suffering you build on top of the pain with your own mind. Last week I asked you to notice it. This week I want to give you a tool to turn it down.

It’s three questions. Let me run one of my own 3am thoughts through them.

The thought is this: I’m not sleeping, and poor sleep is supposed to raise your risk of Alzheimer’s, so I’m probably giving myself Alzheimer’s.

So the first question: What am I making this mean? This one catches my mind’s meaning-making machine in the act. I’m taking a few bad nights and a half-remembered headline and turning them into a failing brain. At 3am it felt true. Just naming what I was doing took some of the air out of it.

Then: What else could it mean? The “could” is the key. I’m not trying to force a happier story, just prove to myself that other potential meanings exist. It could mean exactly what it is: I’m having a rough stretch of a condition I’ve managed before and am working on again. It could mean a few bad nights are a few bad nights, not the first chapter of a long decline. People lose sleep all the time without losing their minds.

And last: What meaning is most useful? “I’m giving myself Alzheimer’s” keeps me awake, which is a pretty good way to actually hurt my sleep. “I’m having a rough stretch, and I’m taking steps,” lets me get up and take the next one. So why not choose the meaning that empowers me and reduces suffering?

Try this: This week, take a difficult situation and run it through all three questions. What am I making this mean? What else could it mean? And which of those meanings is the most useful to me right now?

Reflect on this: What’s something hard right now where you’ve settled on what it means, without ever stopping to ask if that’s true?

I can’t sleep, and when I can’t sleep, I start to worry.

Some of you have heard me talk about my restless leg challenges in the past. And they were, to a great degree, in the past, until recently. If you’ve never had them, picture a few dozen snakes crawling around inside your legs, and the only way to quiet them is to move. So you move. And then you do it again. And it feels awful. They happen for me at night, hence the not sleeping.

I’ve had it for decades, but about eight years ago it got particularly bad. I saw a doctor, got a medication, and it was almost a miracle cure. Over the years I’ve had to keep nudging the dose up as the symptoms break through, which is a fun little arms race to be in with your own legs. But it’s largely worked. Until now. And I don’t think more medication is the answer this time.

Not sleeping is a problem. It definitely makes me feel crappy. Makes me less effective at work. Makes me tired. But like many things in life, equally as bad as not sleeping is the stories that I start to tell myself about what not sleeping means.

I have an uncanny ability to take something bad and make it far worse by the way I respond to it.

I’ve joked that if you boil all of my work down to one line, it would be about how not to make things worse. Which is a hell of a marketing slogan.

But it’s true. We will hit ourselves in the head with a hammer to try to get rid of a headache. And once you see that clearly, you start to understand why simply not cracking your own skull is worth something.

So today I want to walk through a simple equation from my book​ that makes this clear.

It comes from the meditation teacher Shinzen Young, who was a guest on the show years ago. When I first heard him describe it, it was one of those ideas that changed how I see things.

It goes like this: suffering = pain x resistance.

Think of suffering as the total amount of ugh in any given situation: the combined mental, physical, and emotional weight of the thing.

Pain is the underlying condition. In this case, it’s the restless legs. The discomfort. The lost sleep. The tiredness I feel the next day.

Resistance is everything else, all the mental and emotional patterns we stack on top of the core experience. It’s THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING. WHY ME? It’s my brain at 3 a.m. saying this is bad, this is really bad, spinning out about Alzheimer’s and how I’ll possibly keep doing my job if I can’t sleep.

Imagine pain and resistance each sit on a scale of 1 to 10. Say my pain, the actual sensation, is at a 4. And my resistance is at a 5. That’s 4 × 5 = 20 units of suffering.

But if I can bring my resistance down from a 5 to a 3? Now it’s 4 × 3 = 12. I’ve cut my suffering by almost half, and I never changed the thing causing it. Which is great news, because most of the time, we can’t.

Now, over the next couple of weeks, I want to explore the different forms this resistance takes and how to turn it down. But not today.
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Try this: Today, all I want you to do is notice. The next time something difficult shows up: a bad night, a hard conversation, a piece of news that lands wrong. See if you can catch the moment your mind starts stacking stories on top of it. You don’t have to stop it. Just watch yourself do it.

See the resistance. We’ll get to turning it down soon enough.
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​Reflect on this: What’s something hard in your life right now where the pain is real, but a lot of the suffering is coming from the stories you’re telling yourself about it?

Every week, my inbox fills with a version of the same sentence. People tell me they’re doing okay. And then comes the word that gives the whole thing away.
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They’re doing okay despite the world being on fire.
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Despite. It means the verdict is already in. The fire isn’t up for debate anymore. It’s just the conditions now, what you wake up to. The only question left is how you’re holding up inside it.
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I see the verdict spelled out plainly, too. Not in those emails, but everywhere else:
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The world is a dumpster fire.
Life out there is a shit show.
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In my book, there’s a section called “Extreme Language Causes Extreme Emotions.” (Hat tip to Christian Conte for the phrase). The point is that the words we use don’t only report how we feel, they help build it. Tell yourself your sore back is killing you and a tight muscle starts to feel like a genuine threat. Tell yourself the world is a dumpster fire and you’ve decided, in three words, where you’re going to live.
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Last week, the New York Times ran an article on stress and perspective, and I was glad to be part of it. The writer, Jancee Dunn, opened with her father.
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When he visits her, he inspects the house. Then he delivers the findings. Last week, he came up from the basement looking grim and announced that there was mold down there. “Get that inspected, pronto,” he told her, “or it’s your funeral.”
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Her father isn’t a pessimist exactly. He’s something more recognizable than that. He’s the part of all of us that takes a real thing – a damp basement, a sore back, a rough week of news – and reaches for the most extreme frame on the shelf. Mold becomes a death sentence. A bad week becomes a dumpster fire. It feels like we are taking the threat seriously. But most of the time, it’s just the loudest word within arm’s reach, and we grab it because it’s loud.
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“Dumpster fire” describes something real, but the problem isn’t that it’s negative. The problem is that it’s a half pretending to be the whole.
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A well-known phrase in Eastern cosmology speaks of “the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows.” In this view, “ten thousand” stands in for everything, the full range of human experience. And the idea is that all those ups and downs are usually happening at the same time. Not in sequence. At once.
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We tend to lean toward the negative. We zoom in on what’s wrong and lose sight of everything that isn’t. One bad moment, a fight with your partner, a headline, can take over the whole mental landscape, and suddenly you don’t notice the beautiful day, the kind thing a coworker said, the lunch you actually enjoyed.
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In my book, I suggest a small fix for this, one magic word: and. My car is in the shop and my friend is nice enough to pick me up for lunch. My job is a struggle and my family is healthy. The country feels frightening to me right now and the dog and the little girl staring each other down in line at the coffee shop are the best thing I’ll see all day.
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We are aiming to see reality more clearly. The world is hard, and there is good in it. We don’t have to get rid of the bad things out there. We often can’t. But when “dumpster fire” is the only frame we’ve got, we’ve agreed not to see the rest.
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When you catch yourself reaching for the loudest word, it’s worth asking whether it’s also the most accurate one. Most of the time, the honest answer is bigger and more mixed than the word you chose.
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​Try This: For one week, notice when you describe the world, or your day, or your back, in its most extreme terms. Dumpster fire. Killing me. Disaster. When you catch one, don’t correct it for the sake of being positive. Just ask: Is this accurate? Is this the whole picture? Then try the sentence again with and in it. See what shows up on the other side of the word.
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​Reflect on This: What’s one hard thing that’s true for you right now, and what’s one good thing that’s also true, at the very same time?

What is your “AND” statement?

 On grief, attention, and appreciating what’s here while we can.

The last few months have been filled with a lot of loss in the One You Feed universe.

A good friend of mine lost his son shockingly and unexpectedly in a ski accident. Then my mom’s health declined precipitously, and she died two weeks ago. This weekend, my best friend Chris, co-founder and editor of the podcast, had his dog Penny die suddenly.

All of it makes me think of a scene from The Crown. The Queen and the Queen Mother are watching Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on TV after the assassination, and the Queen Mother says:

“Didn’t you say how unhappy she was in the marriage?”

Elizabeth replies:

“Yes. But that’s the thing about unhappiness. All it takes is for something worse to come along, and you realize it was actually happiness after all.”

Sometimes people will say to me, “Well, it can’t get any worse.” I will semi-jokingly say, “Do not tempt fate. It can always get worse.”

​Mark Nepo calls this “the terrible knowledge,” the awareness that we can be erased in a second. And so can anything we love.

So what do we do with all this? (In addition to grieving our losses.)

Should we live on guard, bracing ourselves for the inevitable hardships to come? I don’t think that works. It sucks the joy out of life as it is and does not take away the sting of loss.

The Stoics and the Buddhists recommend contemplating the reality of death regularly as a way to prepare and to appreciate the preciousness of life. This is a valuable practice, but sometimes hard to do.

I want to leave us with something that faces toward life, not away from it.
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Frank Turner (previous podcast guest, the person whose sharing of my book brought me the most joy, and, according to Spotify, my most-streamed artist of all time) says this at the end of his song Polaroid Picture:

“Let go of the little distractions
Hold close to the ones that you love
‘Cause we won’t all be here this time next year
So while you can, take a picture of us”

The thing that I find most valuable there is that there are two clear actions.

The first is to let go of the little distractions. What things are we worrying about, fretting about, or thinking about that matter little in the grand scheme of our lives?

And the second is to hold close to the people we love. Paying a little bit more attention to them, reaching out a little bit more often, making a bit more effort. Pausing to appreciate that they are in our lives.

None of that erases the losses or even prepares us for the next loss, but they do offer a way of living more meaningfully in the happiness that is present.
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Pause and Reflect: Spend five minutes today setting down whatever “little distractions” have your attention, and instead spend those five minutes connecting with someone you love.

​What is the current thing in your life that you are unhappy about that you would miss desperately if it were gone?

My internal weather has felt really gloomy over the past two months.

It started when I had sinus surgery back in March and it went on and on, and got worse and worse.

I have felt feelings of depression, hopelessness, low self worth/self esteem, grief, and anxiety – just to name a few. I’ve largely felt like I’ve been at war with myself internally…not liking what’s happening inside me and going to battle with myself for it.

Here are a couple of major contributing factors:

• My sinus surgery and our subsequent travel plans meant that I couldn’t work out for a month. I am continually blown away (not an exaggeration) at how much of a positive impact working out has on my sense of well being. Even beyond that, I got out of my morning routine and it turns out what I do to start my day really does matter.
• I have been in what our coach Charlie calls a “grief sludge” – missing my mom so deeply and realizing what her loss means to my life. I am homesick for a place that no longer exists – my mom and her home.

Two months is a long stretch for me to feel so shitty – I haven’t felt this heavy for this long in quite some time. I certainly have tough days or weeks but then I return to baseline … and that just wasn’t happening this time.

Part way through, I realized I was doing something that was really helping me continue on in the face of it all:

I was intentionally calling to mind things that I know to be true, but that I was doubting because life felt so hard.

These things are truths that I have experienced at a deep level. Though my low mood or dark mind might try and convince me otherwise, I can see through the illusion and know that it is still true, even if I don’t feel it at the moment. And doing so brings me real comfort.

For example, here are 4 truths I have been intentionally remembering:

1. Everything is constantly changing. Nothing lasts forever. This situation, these feelings WILL change.
2. I don’t have to believe my thoughts. They’re just thoughts and they come and go. The Buddha encouraged his followers to “not be bothered by their thoughts”. I can notice them and when needed, direct my attention elsewhere.
3. I am whole, worthy of love and belonging – just because I am a human being on the planet earth. I don’t have to hussle for my worthiness (as Brene Brown says). I am enough.
4. The reason life feels hard is because that’s just how life is sometimes. Like the Buddha taught – in life, there is suffering. We need not take it personally or be surprised when it happens. And we can know that we share this experience of difficulty with everyone in the human race who has ever lived. I’m not alone in that.

Remembering these truths in painful times feels like a lifeline to me. Like a buoy, they’re something I can hold on to and stay afloat until the waves settle down and the storm passes.

So, what do you know to be true that you might call to mind and intentionally remember when life feels hard?

I’ve found that it’s helpful to make a list of these things when life doesn’t feel hard. Start a note in your phone or a page in your journal. You can even write it like you’re writing a letter to yourself when life is hard. What does that version of you need to be reminded of – what is a truth that you know deep in your bones?

(As an aside, I used to do something similar back in my binge-eating cupcake days. I’d write down how awful I felt after ingesting that much sugar at once. The next time I was tempted to buy a dozen cupcakes and down them all, I’d go back and read what I had written, remembering the reality of how it actually made me feel. Doing so really helped me put a stop to this habit and move towards more mindful eating.)

I’m happy to report that I am feeling much better now. I’m so grateful to feel some lightness, capability and aliveness inside of me again. Thank goodness for truth #1!!