Research report 5 powerful rituals that will make you resilient

Research report 5 powerful rituals that will make you resilientResearch report 5 powerful rituals that will make you resilientEvery now and then, life punches below the belt. How can you be resilient when times get tough and you feel badeanstalt?There are all kinds of strategies for feeling happier and showing grit. But most of them are very conscious and deliberate. And the truth is, most of what we do every dayisnt all that conscious and deliberate.Ever since Freud, weve known that a lot of ur behavior is unconscious. If thats the case, shouldnt youleverage yurunconsciousmind to get through the tough times?Only makes sense, right?Now I dont know much about myunconscious mind. (I mean, its unconscious,right?) So I called an expert on the subject.Tim Wilson is a prof of psychology at the University of Virginia andauthor ofStrangers to Ourselves Discovering the Adaptive UnconsciousandRedirect Changing the Stories We Live By.Tim has some, well,mind-blowinginsights about how yur brain r eally works. Youre gonna learn a lot about how that grey matter functions, how to fix it when it cant cope, and youll even find out how to get to know yourself better to avoid future messes, how to stay happy when things suck, and even how to becomea better human being in the process. (Now howsthatfor value?)But I do need to make a disclaimer first Im gonna have to shake your confidence in yourself a bit before we fix it. We need to correct some myths - and some of the truths are a little disturbing. Hang with me. Well get you back to the Shire, Frodo.Alright, forget what you think you know about how your mind works.Youre wrong about a lot of stuff. In fact, youre wrong aboutyouYour conscious mind is an overconfident storytellerOkay, tough love time you dont know yourself as well as you think. Who you think you are, your rolleality traits, why you do thingsyour perception of yourself can bewayoff.Think your friends would agree with you on what youre really like? Actually, they woul d agree morawith each otheron your rolleality than you would agree with any one of them.FromStrangers to OurselvesFirst, the correspondence between peoples ratings of their own personality and other peoples ratings of their personality is leid very high. It depends somewhat on the trait for example, people tend to agree with others about how extroverted they are, but on most other personality traits the level of agreement is modest (correlations in the range of .40). Thus, Suzies judgment of how agreeable and conscientious she is correlates only modestly with how agreeable and conscientious her friends think she is. Furthermora, other people agree mora among themselves about what aleidher person is like than they agree with that persons own ratings.Some people would immediately push back on this,I know what Im really like I can see me from the inside Nobody else has that informationYes, you have a lot mora info about yourself than a stranger does but your conscious mindis kinda like the internet tons of great information and an awful lot ofinaccurateinformation as well.In some areas youd have more insight into yourself, but in others youd beway off.When you average it all out, the information you have about yourself is about as accurate as astrangersread on you.FromStrangers to OurselvesAveraging across several studies, there seems to be no net advantage to having privileged information about ourselves the amount of accuracy obtained by people about the causes of their responses is nearly identical with the amount of accuracy obtained by strangers.I know pretty shocking, isnt it?Why is it so shocking? Because your conscious mind is basicallyan overconfident storyteller.Your conscious mind doesnt have any direct access to everything going on in your unconscious mind.How do you determine what others are like? You watch and guess and make up a story. Well, your conscious mind does the same thing with your unconscious mind. Except your conscious mind is very overc onfident about its stories.FromStrangers to OurselvesThe analogy I favor is introspection as a personal narrative, whereby people construct stories about their lives, much as a biographer would. We weave what we can observe (our conscious thoughts, feelings, and memories, our own behavior, the reactions of other people to us) into a story that, with luck, captures at least a part what we canbedrngnis observe (our nonconscious personality traits, goals, and feelings).Think about it for a second. You lash out at someone. You say they deserved it. Then you have something to eat. And you feel much better. You realize they werent being awful, you were just cranky because you were hungry. We feel emotions and our conscious mind scrambles to figure out why. And sometimes its wrong.You think the voice in your head is in charge, that it makes every decision. But thats true a lot less often than you think. Ever been so wrapped up in your thoughts while driving that you barely remember the rid e home? You didnt crash the car. You made the decisions that allowed you to arrive safely without consciously thinking at all about them. In fact, youre on unconscious autopilot most of the day. But your conscious mind really loves taking credit for everything.Some people are gonna get freaked out at this realizationAHHH I cant trust myself Im leid in charge Why is my brain like this?Its okay. Your unconscious mind is totenstill you. But its not the you that is the voice in your head. To be fair, the voice in your head, your conscious mind, has areally reallytough job. Actually, it has two jobs - and theyre often at odds with one anotherJob 1 Provide as accurate a vision of yourself and the world as possible.Job 2 Keep you happy.You can compare this to giving advice to a friend about their bad behavior. You want to be accurate enough that you can help them course correct but you dont want to make them feel like a terrible person. It can be a tricky balancing act.Sometimes youneed t o hear,Youre right. Everyone else is wrong.Butother times you need to hear,You are being a jackass and shouldget your act together.Seeing yourself with rose-colored glasses - within limits - is agoodthing. Keeps your self-esteem up and depression away. But too rosy and you start saying things like, Ibet Im a naturalat skydiving I dont need lessonsYour conscious mind doesnt have perfect information about your unconscious mind, so it guesses. On top of that it also needs to try and keep you happy. So at times it comes up with very inaccurate stories about you and the world. Stories you often unquestioningly accept as truth. And thats why sometimes yougive its talesmore credence than your underlying feelings and end up in the kind of job you think you should love - but dont. Or you end up involved with the kind of person you think you should love - but dont.So what does all this have to do with resilience? (In fact, you may be feeling a lotlessresilient now that you realize the voi ce in your head cant always be trusted.)(To learn the 7-step morning ritual that will keep you happy all day, clickhere.)When life gets hard and youre feeling really bad, knowing how inaccurate your conscious mind can be isactually a big help.1)Its not that bad. Really.Tim and Harvard professor Dan Gilbert have done a lot of research on what they call affective forecasting. Thats a fancy term for predicting how youre going to feel in the future.Turns out, youre terrible at it. Feelingscome from your unconscious mind.But predictions come from that overconfident storyteller. Turns out that all of our storytellers have a tendency to exaggerate.Whats that mean? When times are tough, your storyteller says, WERE GOING TO FEEL BAD FOREVER THE PAIN WILL NEVER ENDDont believe your storyteller. Heres TimWe tend to exaggerate the impact of future events on our happiness and how lasting that impact will be. We tend to think that if something bad happens to us, that well feel terrible forever, o r at least for a very long time. The truth is, good things do make us feel good and bad things make us feel bad, but for not nearly as long as we think. Were very resilient creatures who recover as quick as we can from the pitfalls in life.Next time someone tells you youre overreacting to a bad situation, dont get angry with them. Theyre probably right. Your storyteller has a tendency to be way too creative - and way too confident as well.(To learn how 5 post-it notes can make you happy, confident and successful, clickhere.)Soknowing you havean unreliable narrator in your skull can be agoodthing. The pain isnt as bad as you think But theres still pain. Whats the first line of defense? Actually, its your unconscious mind. Like a superhero, it will come to save the day.How do you send up the Bat Signal to let it know youre in trouble? Heres some more good news you dont have to do anything at all.2) You have a psychological immune ordnungsprinzipYouve felt awful before. Your overconfi dent storyteller said the pain would never end. But it did. As the maximgoes, Time heals all wounds. Actually, thats not true your psychological immune system heals all wounds.Think about your body. You get the flu. But after a few daysyour immune system gets to work and knocks the hell out of the bug that infected you. Tims research shows that your unconscious mind actually does a similarthing when life throws you a curve ball.It will put things in perspective. It willhelp your conscious mind rationalize, and tell a happier story.Heres TimWhen something bad happens to us, we try tomake ourselves feel better. That happens, often, psychologically, behind the scenes. Just like theres a physical immune system that tries to ward off disease and cure us from physical ills, so there are a number of psychological processes we engage in to make us feel better about negative events. We might think in advance that if a romantic partner left us, that our hearts would be broken and it would tak e us years to get over it. But that psychological immune system kicks in sooner or later and we begin to have thoughts like, Well, maybe she wasnt the one for me. She did, after all, have these annoying habits. It enables us to recover more quickly than we think from negative outcomes.Have hope and hang in there. Your unconscious mind needs some time toget its emotional white blood cells going, but they will kick in.(To learn how to stop being lazy, clickhere.)Now I know what some people are thinkingWeeks have gone by. Months have gone by. I still feel awful. Im beginning to wonder if Im psychologically immunocompromised. Im not feelingbetter.Yes, some emotional problems, justlike some illnesses, dont heal on their own. A bad breakup. Losing a job. The death of a loved one. They can be devastating and difficult to bounce back from.Okay, enough relying on passive approaches. We need emotional antibiotics,stat3) Help your storytellerSo your overconfident storyteller isnt revising your story properly. The hurt is still there. So you need to help them get your newstory right.For four consecutive days, sit down and write about whats bothering you for 20 minutes straight. Your spelling can be atrocious. Thats okay. Nobody is going to read it. Evenyouarent going to read it. The magic is in the writing itself. Delete it or rip it up when youre done.Research byJames Pennebakershows this simple act can help you make sense of tragedy and set your mind at ease. Heres TimIf theres something troubling us, some traumatic event that weve had trouble moving past, take out a piece of paper and just write about our deepest feelings about this event. Typically for 20 minutes, four nights in a row. The reason it can be so beneficial is it forces us to view things from a different perspective. In fact, theres some research by others that suggests that one of the best ways to do this is to write in the third person, as an outside observer would, viewing our situation. That encourage s us to take an objective look at our situation and often to come up with a somewhat different interpretation of it that allows us to move on.(For more on how to do the writing exercise that can help you feel better, clickhere.)Alright, you arent believing your storytellers exaggeration of how bad things are and even if your psychological immune system doesnt kick in, you know you can write about the problem to feel better. But how about a longer term fix for the future?If your conscious mind doesnt understandyou very well and thats leading to bad decisions (No skydiving lessons for me), how can you really get to know yourself better so you dont end up in more rough spots?4) Actions speak louder than wordsSo why do other people often know us better than we know ourselves? Because they just look at ouractions.But when youre thinking aboutyou, youre focused on that not-so-accurate inside information only you know about yourself. The answer? Look at yourself the way others do. Just pay attention to your actions, not the overconfident storytellers tales. Heres TimHow can we better understand ourselves? One way is to take a step back and view ourselves like an outside observer to try to see what we actually do. Its also important to try to see ourselves through the eyes of others.Or if youve got brutally honest friends, ask them what youre like. That can be another great source of insight.(To learn the four rituals neuroscience says will make you happy, clickhere.)I need to put a warning label on the above the truth can hurt. Like we talked about, rose-colored glasses can be a good thing.You willfind out the inaccuracies in your personal story that are leading you to make bad decisions but you might also find out that the more accurate story isyoure a real jerk.Ouch. So how do you get accurate info about who you really are and the mistakes you make without ending up clinically depressed?5) Do good, be goodYou think youre an awesome person. You get accurate feedback and it turns out youre not.So now do you need to revise your personal story to say, Im a jerk? Nope.Do good things. Tims research shows that when your behavior changes, often your story changes too. Start doing volunteer work, for instance, and you will start to see yourself as the kind of person who does volunteer work a good person. Heres TimOften, if we want to change who we think we are, one of the best ways to do it is to change our behavior first. If we want to become a little more extroverted, then act that way for a while. Force ourselves to act in an extroverted way. If we want to become better, more pro-social, helpful people, well then go out and do some volunteer work. Often, the story follows the behavior change.(To learn the 6 things the most productive people do every day, clickhere.)Weve learned a lot. Lets round it all upSum upHeres what Tim Wilson says can help you be more resilientYourconscious mind isnt alwaysaccurateAnd this leads to problems.Youwill feel bette rBecause you dont know yourself all that well, youre terrible at predicting how youll feel in the future. Your storyteller exaggerates. Remember this.You have a psychological immune systemYou may feel lousynow but, with time, your mind will rewrite your story with a happier ending.Help that storyteller outYou can accelerate emotional recovery by writing about your problems.Actions speak louder than wordsIf you want to get to know yourself better so you can make smartdecisions and avoid future problems, pay attention toyour behavior, not your thoughts. But the truth can hurt.Do good, be goodYour story will follow your actions.Youre a bit of a mystery - even to yourself. Dont worry it keeps things interesting.When times get tough and you dont know how youre going to stay resilient, remember not to trust the doom and gloom coming from that voice in your head. The voice is an overconfident storyteller who exaggerates, not the truth.Your psychological immune system is slowly getting int o gear. And some scribbling can help it along. You can get to know yourself better by watching your behavior. And if you act like the kind of person you want to be, youll start telling yourself an accurateandpositive story about your life.Be careful though if you follow all of this advice you may end up becoming a really good person.Join more than 315,000 readers.Get a free weekly update via emailhere.Related postsNew Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You HappyNew Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More SuccessfulHow To Get People To Like You 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior ExpertThis article first appeared at Barking Up the Wrong Tree.Research report 5 powerful rituals that will make you resilientEvery now and then, life punches below the belt. How can you be resilient when times get tough and you feel bad?There are all kinds of strategies for feeling happier and showing grit. But most of them are very conscious and deliberate. And the truth is, most of what we do eve ry dayisnt all that conscious and deliberate.Ever since Freud, weve known that a lot of our behavior is unconscious. If thats the case, shouldnt youleverage yourunconsciousmind to get through the tough times?Only makes sense, right?Now I dont know much about myunconscious mind. (I mean, its unconscious,right?) So I called an expert on the subject.Tim Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia andauthor ofStrangers to Ourselves Discovering the Adaptive UnconsciousandRedirect Changing the Stories We Live By.Tim has some, well,mind-blowinginsights about how your brain really works. Youre gonna learn a lot about how that grey matter functions, how to fix it when it cant cope, and youll even find out how to get to know yourself better to avoid future messes, how to stay happy when things suck, and even how to becomea better human being in the process. (Now howsthatfor value?)But I do need to make a disclaimer first Im gonna have to shake your confidence in yourself a bit before we fix it. We need to correct some myths - and some of the truths are a little disturbing. Hang with me. Well get you back to the Shire, Frodo.Alright, forget what you think you know about how your mind works.Youre wrong about a lot of stuff. In fact, youre wrong aboutyouYour conscious mind is an overconfident storytellerOkay, tough love time you dont know yourself as well as you think. Who you think you are, your personality traits, why you do thingsyour perception of yourself can bewayoff.Think your friends would agree with you on what youre really like? Actually, they would agree morewith each otheron your personality than you would agree with any one of them.FromStrangers to OurselvesFirst, the correspondence between peoples ratings of their own personality and other peoples ratings of their personality is not very high. It depends somewhat on the trait for example, people tend to agree with others about how extroverted they are, but on most other personality trai ts the level of agreement is modest (correlations in the range of .40). Thus, Suzies judgment of how agreeable and conscientious she is correlates only modestly with how agreeable and conscientious her friends think she is. Furthermore, other people agree more among themselves about what another person is like than they agree with that persons own ratings.Some people would immediately push back on this,I know what Im really like I can see me from the inside Nobody else has that informationYes, you have a lot more info about yourself than a stranger does but your conscious mindis kinda like the internet tons of great information and an awful lot ofinaccurateinformation as well.In some areas youd have more insight into yourself, but in others youd beway off.When you average it all out, the information you have about yourself is about as accurate as astrangersread on you.FromStrangers to OurselvesAveraging across several studies, there seems to be no net advantage to having privileged information about ourselves the amount of accuracy obtained by people about the causes of their responses is nearly identical with the amount of accuracy obtained by strangers.I know pretty shocking, isnt it?Why is it so shocking? Because your conscious mind is basicallyan overconfident storyteller.Your conscious mind doesnt have any direct access to everything going on in your unconscious mind.How do you determine what others are like? You watch and guess and make up a story. Well, your conscious mind does the same thing with your unconscious mind. Except your conscious mind is very overconfident about its stories.FromStrangers to OurselvesThe analogy I favor is introspection as a personal narrative, whereby people construct stories about their lives, much as a biographer would. We weave what we can observe (our conscious thoughts, feelings, and memories, our own behavior, the reactions of other people to us) into a story that, with luck, captures at least a part what we cannot obs erve (our nonconscious personality traits, goals, and feelings).Think about it for a second. You lash out at someone. You say they deserved it. Then you have something to eat. And you feel much better. You realize they werent being awful, you were just cranky because you were hungry. We feel emotions and our conscious mind scrambles to figure out why. And sometimes its wrong.You think the voice in your head is in charge, that it makes every decision. But thats true a lot less often than you think. Ever been so wrapped up in your thoughts while driving that you barely remember the ride home? You didnt crash the car. You made the decisions that allowed you to arrive safely without consciously thinking at all about them. In fact, youre on unconscious autopilot most of the day. But your conscious mind really loves taking credit for everything.Some people are gonna get freaked out at this realizationAHHH I cant trust myself Im not in charge Why is my brain like this?Its okay. Your uncons cious mind is still you. But its not the you that is the voice in your head. To be fair, the voice in your head, your conscious mind, has areally reallytough job. Actually, it has two jobs - and theyre often at odds with one anotherJob 1 Provide as accurate a vision of yourself and the world as possible.Job 2 Keep you happy.You can compare this to giving advice to a friend about their bad behavior. You want to be accurate enough that you can help them course correct but you dont want to make them feel like a terrible person. It can be a tricky balancing act.Sometimes youneed to hear,Youre right. Everyone else is wrong.Butother times you need to hear,You are being a jackass and shouldget your act together.Seeing yourself with rose-colored glasses - within limits - is agoodthing. Keeps your self-esteem up and depression away. But too rosy and you start saying things like, Ibet Im a naturalat skydiving I dont need lessonsYour conscious mind doesnt have perfect information about your unconscious mind, so it guesses. On top of that it also needs to try and keep you happy. So at times it comes up with very inaccurate stories about you and the world. Stories you often unquestioningly accept as truth. And thats why sometimes yougive its talesmore credence than your underlying feelings and end up in the kind of job you think you should love - but dont. Or you end up involved with the kind of person you think you should love - but dont.So what does all this have to do with resilience? (In fact, you may be feeling a lotlessresilient now that you realize the voice in your head cant always be trusted.)(To learn the 7-step morning ritual that will keep you happy all day, clickhere.)When life gets hard and youre feeling really bad, knowing how inaccurate your conscious mind can be isactually a big help.1)Its not that bad. Really.Tim and Harvard professor Dan Gilbert have done a lot of research on what they call affective forecasting. Thats a fancy term for predicting ho w youre going to feel in the future.Turns out, youre terrible at it. Feelingscome from your unconscious mind.But predictions come from that overconfident storyteller. Turns out that all of our storytellers have a tendency to exaggerate.Whats that mean? When times are tough, your storyteller says, WERE GOING TO FEEL BAD FOREVER THE PAIN WILL NEVER ENDDont believe your storyteller. Heres TimWe tend to exaggerate the impact of future events on our happiness and how lasting that impact will be. We tend to think that if something bad happens to us, that well feel terrible forever, or at least for a very long time. The truth is, good things do make us feel good and bad things make us feel bad, but for not nearly as long as we think. Were very resilient creatures who recover as quick as we can from the pitfalls in life.Next time someone tells you youre overreacting to a bad situation, dont get angry with them. Theyre probably right. Your storyteller has a tendency to be way too creative - and way too confident as well.(To learn how 5 post-it notes can make you happy, confident and successful, clickhere.)Soknowing you havean unreliable narrator in your skull can be agoodthing. The pain isnt as bad as you think But theres still pain. Whats the first line of defense? Actually, its your unconscious mind. Like a superhero, it will come to save the day.How do you send up the Bat Signal to let it know youre in trouble? Heres some more good news you dont have to do anything at all.2) You have a psychological immune systemYouve felt awful before. Your overconfident storyteller said the pain would never end. But it did. As the maximgoes, Time heals all wounds. Actually, thats not true your psychological immune system heals all wounds.Think about your body. You get the flu. But after a few daysyour immune system gets to work and knocks the hell out of the bug that infected you. Tims research shows that your unconscious mind actually does a similarthing when life throws you a c urve ball.It will put things in perspective. It willhelp your conscious mind rationalize, and tell a happier story.Heres TimWhen something bad happens to us, we try tomake ourselves feel better. That happens, often, psychologically, behind the scenes. Just like theres a physical immune system that tries to ward off disease and cure us from physical ills, so there are a number of psychological processes we engage in to make us feel better about negative events. We might think in advance that if a romantic partner left us, that our hearts would be broken and it would take us years to get over it. But that psychological immune system kicks in sooner or later and we begin to have thoughts like, Well, maybe she wasnt the one for me. She did, after all, have these annoying habits. It enables us to recover more quickly than we think from negative outcomes.Have hope and hang in there. Your unconscious mind needs some time toget its emotional white blood cells going, but they will kick in.(T o learn how to stop being lazy, clickhere.)Now I know what some people are thinkingWeeks have gone by. Months have gone by. I still feel awful. Im beginning to wonder if Im psychologically immunocompromised. Im not feelingbetter.Yes, some emotional problems, justlike some illnesses, dont heal on their own. A bad breakup. Losing a job. The death of a loved one. They can be devastating and difficult to bounce back from.Okay, enough relying on passive approaches. We need emotional antibiotics,stat3) Help your storytellerSo your overconfident storyteller isnt revising your story properly. The hurt is still there. So you need to help them get your newstory right.For four consecutive days, sit down and write about whats bothering you for 20 minutes straight. Your spelling can be atrocious. Thats okay. Nobody is going to read it. Evenyouarent going to read it. The magic is in the writing itself. Delete it or rip it up when youre done.Research byJames Pennebakershows this simple act can hel p you make sense of tragedy and set your mind at ease. Heres TimIf theres something troubling us, some traumatic event that weve had trouble moving past, take out a piece of paper and just write about our deepest feelings about this event. Typically for 20 minutes, four nights in a row. The reason it can be so beneficial is it forces us to view things from a different perspective. In fact, theres some research by others that suggests that one of the best ways to do this is to write in the third person, as an outside observer would, viewing our situation. That encourages us to take an objective look at our situation and often to come up with a somewhat different interpretation of it that allows us to move on.(For more on how to do the writing exercise that can help you feel better, clickhere.)Alright, you arent believing your storytellers exaggeration of how bad things are and even if your psychological immune system doesnt kick in, you know you can write about the problem to feel be tter. But how about a longer term fix for the future?If your conscious mind doesnt understandyou very well and thats leading to bad decisions (No skydiving lessons for me), how can you really get to know yourself better so you dont end up in more rough spots?4) Actions speak louder than wordsSo why do other people often know us better than we know ourselves? Because they just look at ouractions.But when youre thinking aboutyou, youre focused on that not-so-accurate inside information only you know about yourself. The answer? Look at yourself the way others do. Just pay attention to your actions, not the overconfident storytellers tales. Heres TimHow can we better understand ourselves? One way is to take a step back and view ourselves like an outside observer to try to see what we actually do. Its also important to try to see ourselves through the eyes of others.Or if youve got brutally honest friends, ask them what youre like. That can be another great source of insight.(To learn th e four rituals neuroscience says will make you happy, clickhere.)I need to put a warning label on the above the truth can hurt. Like we talked about, rose-colored glasses can be a good thing.You willfind out the inaccuracies in your personal story that are leading you to make bad decisions but you might also find out that the more accurate story isyoure a real jerk.Ouch. So how do you get accurate info about who you really are and the mistakes you make without ending up clinically depressed?5) Do good, be goodYou think youre an awesome person. You get accurate feedback and it turns out youre not.So now do you need to revise your personal story to say, Im a jerk? Nope.Do good things. Tims research shows that when your behavior changes, often your story changes too. Start doing volunteer work, for instance, and you will start to see yourself as the kind of person who does volunteer work a good person. Heres TimOften, if we want to change who we think we are, one of the best ways to do it is to change our behavior first. If we want to become a little more extroverted, then act that way for a while. Force ourselves to act in an extroverted way. If we want to become better, more pro-social, helpful people, well then go out and do some volunteer work. Often, the story follows the behavior change.(To learn the 6 things the most productive people do every day, clickhere.)Weve learned a lot. Lets round it all upSum upHeres what Tim Wilson says can help you be more resilientYourconscious mind isnt alwaysaccurateAnd this leads to problems.Youwill feel betterBecause you dont know yourself all that well, youre terrible at predicting how youll feel in the future. Your storyteller exaggerates. Remember this.You have a psychological immune systemYou may feel lousynow but, with time, your mind will rewrite your story with a happier ending.Help that storyteller outYou can accelerate emotional recovery by writing about your problems.Actions speak louder than wordsIf you want to get to know yourself better so you can make smartdecisions and avoid future problems, pay attention toyour behavior, not your thoughts. But the truth can hurt.Do good, be goodYour story will follow your actions.Youre a bit of a mystery - even to yourself. Dont worry it keeps things interesting.When times get tough and you dont know how youre going to stay resilient, remember not to trust the doom and gloom coming from that voice in your head. The voice is an overconfident storyteller who exaggerates, not the truth.Your psychological immune system is slowly getting into gear. And some scribbling can help it along. You can get to know yourself better by watching your behavior. And if you act like the kind of person you want to be, youll start telling yourself an accurateandpositive story about your life.Be careful though if you follow all of this advice you may end up becoming a really good person.Join more than 315,000 readers.Get a free weekly update via emailhere.Related postsNew Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You HappyNew Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More SuccessfulHow To Get People To Like You 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior ExpertThis article first appeared at Barking Up the Wrong Tree.