Resiliency & Change

How to Break Dependence on the Phone

By Leo Babauta On average, people spend more than 3 hours on their phones each day, picking up their phones nearly 60 times a day … with some people spending closer to 4 hours. These numbers aren’t meant to be judgments — it’s not a bad thing to look at your phone — but instead […]
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How to Address What’s Really Causing Your Avoidance

By Leo Babauta When we are procrastinating, avoiding exercise or some other habit we want to create, or avoiding taking on a difficult project … the underlying cause is rarely what we think it is. We think that all we need to do is do the thing we’re avoiding, and stop procrastinating. Simple! But then […]
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How to Stick to Long-Term Changes

By Leo Babauta If you’re trying to lose weight or gain muscle, you can work really hard at it for a week … and see no change. The same goes for learning music or a language, or creating meaningful change in the world. It’s hard to stick to long-term changes when you don’t get very […]
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5 Ways to Reduce Your Stress Levels

By Leo Babauta Stress is a part of life, and eliminating it is a fool’s errand. If you ever succeeded in eliminating all of stress, your life would be boring and you’d have removed yourself from anything meaningful. That said … too much stress can be toxic. It can negatively affect our sleep, our health, […]
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We’re Mostly Trying to Escape This Moment

By Leo Babauta Much of our days, we’re trying to escape. In fact, you might call this the primary occupation of the human animal. What are we trying to escape? What’s happening in this moment, right now. Most people will outright reject that idea, but I know this to be true of myself, and it’s […]
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The Joy of Small Comforts

By Leo Babauta Some days, I’m in need of some comfort. I’m tired, emotionally drained, or just feeling besieged by the world. On these days, I try to recognize my physical, mental and emotional state, and I ask myself what I need. Just noticing is a big step for most of us. We often don’t […]
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Changing Habits: How to Let Go of Sacred Cows

By Leo Babauta To change a habit — whether you’re starting a new habit or quitting an old one — you have to let go of something really important to you. This is why most people struggle with habit change — it’s not easy to let go of your sacred cows. Let’s take a few […]
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Embarrassment is an Integral Part of the Growth Process

By Leo Babauta A well-known climbing coach said that the biggest obstacle in the way of people’s growth as climbers is, basically, fear of embarrassment. When people want to get better at climbing, they try to do it privately, so that no one can see them doing things badly. They’ll go to the climbing gym […]
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Simplify Habits: Get to the True Heart of Change

By Leo Babauta Creating a new habit like meditation, journaling or exercise isn’t incredibly complicated — at the most basic level, you tie the habit to a trigger that’s already in your life, start small, and find ways to encourage yourself to remember it and actually do it. But it becomes a much more complicated […]
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The Practice of Letting Go of Mental Constructs

By Leo Babauta Everything we believe about ourselves and others is an idea, an image constructed in our heads. And these mental constructs can be some of our biggest obstacles and struggles. Letting go of our mental constructs — our ideas about ourselves and others — can be one of the most liberating things possible. […]
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We Make Everything Harder

By Leo Babauta It sometimes amazes me how we make everything harder for ourselves than it needs to be — myself included. That’s not a bad thing — it’s simply human. Harder is not worse. We learn from harder. So there’s a beauty and a sense to it. That said, once we see how much […]
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Seeing the Gift

By Leo Babauta There are a number of common blockers for creating powerful change in your life: Each of these can derail your efforts to create something new. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with any of these — they’re wonderfully human traits. But to create powerful change, we have to learn to work […]
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A Mindfulness Practice for Holiday Stress

By Leo Babauta The holidays can be stressful, with shopping, travel, family gatherings, extra busyness, winter storms, and more. The chaos of our lives plays out in sometimes heightened form over the season. In this post, I’m going to share the practice I’ve been using to deal with whatever stress has been arising in my […]
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How the Feeling of Pointlessness Can Derail Us

By Leo Babauta Something I’ve noticed that derails a lot of people’s goals or attempts to form habits is the feeling that it’s pointless to even try. If it feels like it won’t matter if you do anything … why would you try? And so when people feel this, they will usually give up, understandably. […]
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The Counterintuitive Way to Create Change in Your Life

By Leo Babauta A lot of us want to make changes in our lives — whether it’s changing a bad habit like smoking or overeating, creating a new habit like meditation, or simply being less distracted or reactive during the day. Whatever the change, you’re likely to face internal resistance. There is a part of […]
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What to Do When You’re Feeling Drained

By Leo Babauta Lately I’ve noticed a lot of people are feeling drained by life — the challenges they’re facing, their workloads, the anxiety of the world around them, and more. Someday soon I’ll write a longer guide to how to get yourself to a place of renewed resilience … but for today, I’d like […]
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Being Balanced in Chaos

By Leo Babauta When we’re hit with uncertainty either suddenly or in large amounts, it can throw us off. We can get frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed, discouraged. This is normal and there’s nothing wrong with it. However, it’s my belief that we can train ourselves to stay more balanced when things get chaotic, stay level-headed and […]
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Use Story to Change Your Life

By Leo Babauta Most of us don’t realize how powerful stories are in our lives, because we don’t even notice that we’re telling ourselves a story. But stories shape everything. For example, the stories you tell yourself is the reason you feel: Resentment toward a loved one or coworker Guilty about what you haven’t done […]
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Become Your New Habit

By Leo Babauta Quitting an old habit or forming a new habit is fairly simple when it comes to the steps to doing it: find your trigger and do a new habit at that trigger over and over. Remind yourself to do it. Make it rewarding. The simplicity is deceptive, though: there are some physical […]
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Destroy What You Know

By Leo Babauta We are held back from creating the life we want, from our highest purpose, from our greatest growth and learning … by what we know. Destroy what you know. Once we feel like we’re a little good at something, we cling to that. We cling to wanting others to think we know […]
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Why Perfectionism Stops Us from Creating New Habits

By Leo Babauta When we decide to create a new habit — exercise, healthy eating, meditation, writing — we can get excited and optimistic, and have an idea of how it will go perfectly. This is such a hopeful time! Unfortunately, reality has other plans. Our perfect idea of how our new habit will go […]
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Using the Pandemic as Mental Training Ground

By Leo Babauta This neverending pandemic hasn’t been the best mental health environment for many people — it has created raised levels of uncertainty, anxiety, loneliness, unhappiness, procrastination and feelings of dreariness for large numbers of people. That’s understandable, and I feel tremendous compassion for everyone who is suffering right now. I strongly believe that this […]
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Energy Depletion & the Practice of Relaxing Our Threat Detector

By Leo Babauta I’ve been working with a large number of people who are very often exhausted, not just from sleep problems but from their daily activities. A lot of us are drained by being around other people, doing video meetings, going out in public … and so we start to avoid those activities to […]
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Expanding Our Capacity to Be With Chaos

By Leo Babauta We don’t like chaos. It is uncertainty, overwhelm, a feeling of groundlessness, being unmoored, out to sea without a compass. And it usually triggers a shut-down response in us: hide, avoid, procrastinate, try to get control, anxiety, or wanting to give up. Or not wanting to even start in the first place, […]
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Practice: Grounding Yourself When Life is Chaotic

By Leo Babauta Lately my life has felt pretty chaotic: lots of projects, calls, and creation, along with helping loved ones with things, and preparing to move once again to a new home. Chaos can be beautiful! And I’m embracing it. But it can be hard to embrace chaos when we’re feeling scattered, lost, confused, stressed. […]
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