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A few weeks ago, I started taking a boxing class with my friend Bela. I like it a lot. And now my forearm hurts.

This is the pattern lately. I’m at that age where it seems like every new activity brings some new bodily issue. I strength train more heavily, and my knees hurt. I walk a lot more, and my feet hurt. Boxing class, forearm. (And yes, the restless legs are still around. They get their own newsletters.)

Each time, I do the same thing. I take the ache and I freeze it. This is how my forearm is now. This is a thing I have. I stop experiencing a sensation that’s passing through and start managing a permanent condition, one I’ve diagnosed roughly four minutes after it showed up.

Ginny was listening to Joseph Goldstein, the Buddhist teacher, and she brought me a phrase of his. It comes from the Buddhist texts, and Goldstein says he loves it precisely because it’s a little odd in English: things are always becoming otherwise.

In every moment, things are becoming otherwise. He gives an example that could have been lifted from my week: he’s out for a walk, his knee starts to hurt, and his first thought is, “Oh—becoming otherwise.” It’s not a fix or a plan. Just a reminder that this is the nature of things. They’re unstable; they’re changing. And expecting them to be stable, he says, expecting them to stay the same, is a cause of suffering.

The Zen teacher Katherine Thanas said it another way: “Alternating is the reality of life.”

And I am constantly alternating. From tired to energetic. From sad to happy. From hungry to full and back again. Nothing about me holds still for long, and I know this because I’ve watched it happen for decades. But in any given moment, I forget it completely. I take one frame of the movie and treat it as the whole film.

My forearm hurts now becomes my forearm hurts, which quietly becomes my forearm is a problem, which, if I’m not careful, has me picking out my coffin.
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The ache is real. I’m not arguing with the ache. What I’m arguing with is the frozen frame, the insistence that this moment’s version of my body is the permanent one. The wanting it to be different is where most of my suffering actually lives. The forearm just hurts.

There can be great relief in this. “Everything is unstable” sounds like bad news, but it cuts both ways. The good moments don’t hold still, true. But neither do the bad ones. The tired becomes energetic. The sad becomes happy. The forearm, left to its own devices and maybe a little rest, becomes otherwise too. I don’t have to fix the moment. I mostly have to stop nailing it to the wall.

Try This

This week, when something shifts on you, your energy dips, your mood drops, some body part files a complaint, try borrowing Goldstein’s response. Say it to yourself, ideally with a little amusement: “Oh, becoming otherwise.” You’re not fixing anything or pretending it doesn’t hurt. You’re just declining to freeze the frame. See what happens to the moment when you let it keep moving.
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Reflect on This

What’s one thing in your life you’ve stamped as permanent that is really just today’s frame?

Hit reply and tell me. I’ll be over here icing my forearm.

Boy, that’s a dramatic-sounding title, and before you think that my equanimity has been replaced by homicidality, let me tell you what I mean.

In news that’s both happy and sad, Ginny and I are moving to Atlanta this fall.

We’ve been talking about leaving Columbus for years, and once our Columbus responsibilities were done, we’ve had the option to move, but haven’t been able to figure out where to go.

In a classic paradox of choice moment, we had endless options. And every place had its pros and cons, including Columbus and Atlanta.

But for a variety of reasons, we’ve decided it’s Atlanta.

In my recent conversation with Simone Stolzoff, he said that a Russian friend of his told him, “You make a choice, then you murder the alternatives.”

Another guest of the podcast, Ellen Langer, said it a little bit nicer: “Don’t try to make the right decision. Make the decision right.”

The essence of both, though, is that once you have decided, stop looking at any of the alternatives.

I could second-guess this decision 30 times a day if I let myself.

Did we consider Europe closely enough? I really do love Santa Fe. We could get so much more house in Columbus than Atlanta. What about Chattanooga? It’s close to Atlanta but more affordable.

On and on it can go.

But I’m following Simone’s Russian friend’s advice, and I am murdering the alternatives and putting all my effort into making the decision right.

Try This

Pick one decision you’ve already made but keep reopening. The job, the house, the couch, or where you went to dinner last Friday. This week, when the relitigating starts, take whatever energy that spiral was about to burn and spend it on the decision you made. One small act that makes it better. I’ll be looking up Atlanta neighborhoods, not Chattanooga real estate.
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Reflect on This

Which alternative are you keeping alive, and what is it costing you?

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?