“You will never find peace standing in the ruins of what you used to be. You can only move on if you start building something new.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 139)
Quotes from The Mountain Is You
“Mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 127)
“We often think of big achievements as a ‘get out of life easier’ card. They rarely are that. In fact, the opposite tends to happen. They level us up, force us into greater responsibilities, to think more deeply about big issues, to question ourselves and what we previously knew to be true. Big achievements actually pressure us to become increasingly better versions of ourselves. This is a net positive for our lives but can be just as uncomfortable as struggling was, if not more so.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 119)
“We often resist most deeply the things that we want most.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 118)
“The truth about your psyche is this: Anything that is new, even if it is good, will feel uncomfortable until it is also familiar. Our brain works the opposite way, too, in that whatever is familiar is what we perceive to be good and comfortable, even if those behaviors, habits, or relationships are actually toxic or destructive.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 116)
“Making big, sweeping changes is not difficult because we are flawed, incompetent beings. It’s difficult because we are not meant to live outside of our comfort zones. If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 112)
“If you’re stuck in life, it’s probably because you’re waiting for the big bang, the breakthrough moment in which all your fears dissolve and you’re overcome with clarity. The work that needs to happen happens effortlessly. Your personal transformation rips you from complacency, and you wake up to an entirely new existence. That moment will never come. Breakthroughs do not happen spontaneously. They are tipping points.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 110)
“If you want to master your life, you have to learn to organize your feelings. By becoming aware of them, you can trace them back to the thought process that prompted them, and from there you can decide whether or not the idea is an actual threat or concern, or a fabrication of your reptilian mind just trying to keep you alive.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 95)
“Feelings do not inform you of the right decisions to make. Right decisions create the right feelings. Your feelings are not intended to guide you throughout life; that is what your mind is for. If you were to honestly follow your every impulse, you would be completely stuck, complacent, and possibly dead or at the very least in severe trouble. You aren’t, because your brain is able to intervene and instruct you on how to make choices that reflect what you want to be experiencing long-term.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 94)
“Being mean to yourself first will not make it hurt less if other people judge or reject you, though that is why you are using this defense mechanism. Thinking the worst of yourself is a way of trying to numb yourself to what you really fear, which is that someone else could say those things about you. What you don’t realize is that you’re acting as your own bully and enemy by doing it to yourself. What could someone else’s judgment realistically do to your life? Honestly, it could stop you from pursuing your dreams, ambitions, and personal happiness. And that’s exactly what you’re doing when you stay fixated on those damaging ideas. It’s time to get out of your own way.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 88)
“The truth is that most people regret what they did not do more than they ever regret what they did. This isn’t a coincidence. Regret isn’t actually trying to just make us feel bad that we didn’t live up to our own expectations. It is trying to motivate us to live up to them going forward. It is trying to show us what it is absolutely imperative to change in the future and what we really care about experiencing before we die.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 78)
“When we are faced with resentment, what we instead must do is reinvent our image of those around us or those we have perceived as having wronged us. Other people are not here to love us perfectly; they are here to teach us lessons to show us how to love them—and ourselves—better.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 77)
“If you want to know what you truly want out of life, look at the people who you are jealous of. No, you may not want exactly what they have, but the feeling that you are experiencing is anger that they are allowing themselves to pursue it while you are not.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 76)
“It is healthy to be angry, and anger can also show us important aspects of who we are and what we care about. For example, anger shows us where our boundaries are. Anger also helps us identify what we find to be unjust.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 73)
“You may feel as though you cannot take action, when you most certainly can. You simply do not feel willing, because you are not used to it.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 69)
“We are not held back in life because we are incapable of making change. We are held back because we don’t feel like making change, and so we don’t.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 68)
“If you are doing ‘everything you are supposed to be doing’ and yet you feel empty and depressed at the end of the day, the issue is probably that you’re not really doing what you want to be doing; you’ve just adopted someone else’s script for happiness.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 60)
“Being busy communicates importance; it often makes you seem a little untouchable to others. It also overwhelms the body so that it can only focus on the tasks at hand. Being busy is the ultimate way to distract ourselves from what’s really wrong.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 54)
“People who are constantly ‘busy’ are running from themselves.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 53)
“If we feel bad about not being as successful as another person, we might try to find something negative about them to make ourselves feel better. If we do that every time we come across a person who is more successful than we are, we begin to associate that level of success with being disliked. When it comes time for us to take action to move our lives forward, we’re going to resist doing it, because becoming more successful will create a breach in our self-concept.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 45)