“One of the hardest things to do in life is to say ‘No.’ To invitations, to requests, to obligations, to the stuff that everyone else is doing. Even harder is saying no to certain time-consuming emotions: anger, excitement, distraction, obsession, lust. None of these impulses feels like a big deal by itself, but run amok, they become a commitment like anything else.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 11)
Beyond the Quote (Day 371)
How many time commitments do you have that you don’t even realize you have? I just recently started tracking my screen time on my iPhone and was shocked to see the results. Imagine if your mind had a “use-time” breakdown and showed you in a pie chart how much time you spent thinking about all of the things you think about every day. Would you be just as shocked as I was when I saw my screen time? I suspect even more so.
Learning how to “say no” to time-consuming emotions, as Holiday puts it above, is one of the great challenges in every human life. I can’t imagine there being even a single person who doesn’t have to learn how to deal with and better control their emotions. Firstly, because I don’t think any person is ever born in perfect emotional balance. But, secondly, because it certainly is the case that everyone around us isn’t born in perfect emotional balance and the imbalanced emotional world will undoubtedly affect and challenge us.
I also don’t think we’ll ever get it perfectly right. Imperfect, after all, is the human condition. But, I do think we can learn to not let our emotions “run amok.” We can learn how to better control them. We can learn how to proactively nip negative emotions in the bud and redirect that energy before it gets out of our control. And we can invest time into understanding ourselves so we don’t end up saying “yes” to incredibly time-consuming emotions that will unapologetically drain all of the life from our days.
In a Tweet:
Read Next: Simone Biles Quote on Work Ethic and How Greatness Requires More Of You (Day 370)
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