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101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think by Brianna Wiest |
Many of the struggles we face in life don’t come from external obstacles but from subconscious behaviors that hold us back. Often, we believe success is about setting goals and chasing them, but our minds are wired in ways that distort our perceptions of happiness, progress, and fulfillment. In 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, Brianna Wiest highlights the hidden mental patterns that keep us from truly living. Below are some of the key subconscious behaviors that may be preventing you from having the life you want.
Subconscious Behaviors That Are Keeping You from Having the Life You Want:
01 - Your brain misinterprets unfamiliar success as failure
You believe that creating your best life is a matter of deciding what you want and then going after it, but in reality, you are psychologically incapable of being able to predict what will make you happy. Your brain can only perceive what it’s known, so when you choose what you want for the future, you’re actually just recreating a solution or an ideal of the past. When things don’t work out the way you want them to, you think you’ve failed only because you didn’t re-create something you perceived as desirable. In reality, you likely created something better, but foreign, and your brain misinterpreted it as “bad” because of that.
02 - You believe success is a destination
You extrapolate the present moment because you believe that success is somewhere you “arrive,” so you are constantly trying to take a snapshot of your life and see if you can be happy yet. You convince yourself that any given moment is representative of your life as a whole. Because we’re wired to believe that success is somewhere we get to—when goals are accomplished and things are completed—we’re constantly measuring our present moments by how “finished” they are, how good the story sounds, how someone else would judge the elevator speech. We find ourselves thinking: “Is this all there is?” because we forget that everything is transitory, and no one single instance can summarize the whole. There is nowhere to “arrive” to. The only thing you’re rushing toward is death. Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.
03 - You assume fear and pain are always bad
You assume that when it comes to following your “gut instincts,” happiness is “good” and fear and pain are “bad.” When you consider doing something that you truly love and are invested in, you are going to feel an influx of fear and pain, mostly because it will involve being vulnerable. Bad feelings should not always be interpreted as deterrents. They are also indicators that you are doing something frightening and worthwhile. Not wanting to do something would make you feel indifferent about it.
Fear = interest.
04 - You create problems to avoid actually living your life
You needlessly create problems and crises in your life because you’re afraid of actually living it.The pattern of unnecessarily creating crises in your life is actually an avoidance technique. It distracts you from actually having to be vulnerable or held accountable for whatever it is you’re afraid of. You’re never upset for the reason you think you are: At the core of your desire to create a problem is simply the fear of being who you are and living the life you want.
05 - You think beliefs change by thinking, rather than experiencing
You think that to change your beliefs, you have to adopt a new line of thinking, rather than seek experiences that make that thinking self-evident.
A belief is what you know to be true because experience has made it evident to you. If you want to change your life, change your beliefs. If you want to change your beliefs, go out and have experiences that make them real to you. Not the opposite way around.
The subconscious behaviors we engage in daily shape our reality more than we realize. By recognizing and challenging these patterns—whether it’s fearing unfamiliar success, creating problems to avoid vulnerability, or believing that success is a final destination—we can free ourselves from mental traps that hold us back. Growth comes from experience, from embracing discomfort, and from shifting our perceptions of fear, failure, and happiness. The life you want isn’t something to chase; it’s something to experience fully in the present.