Hello everyone. Welcome to the Resilience Course. Look, we all have to deal with pain, loss due to difficulties, and simply, you know, the crap of day-to-day life throughout our lives. And while our first impulse is to avoid all the nonsense, to distance ourselves from our problems. The fact is that there is no life without problems. There is no such thing as just being happy and lucky, and everything working out the best way, all the damn time. If you are going to move forward in this life, you have to deal with the problems. In fact, I would say that life itself is a process of dealing with problems or improving our problems from really bad problems to slightly better problems. Therefore, one could say that the quality of our lives largely depends on our ability to handle problems. This course is about teaching you strategies, techniques, ideas, concepts that will help you deal with various amounts of pain in your life, how to overcome problems, how to deal with grief and loss. Basically, how to be a more resilient person. Now, I would like to start the course by teaching you two different metaphors that I believe will be helpful, and we will come back to them time and time again throughout the course. The first metaphor comes from Buddhism, and I talk about it in my book Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. Now, the Buddha had this beautiful metaphor about pain. He said that pain is like being

The first blow is the actual physical blow, the pain of the arrow piercing your skin and making you bleed and all. But the second pain is the meaning we create around the arrow blow. It's the person who was hit by the arrow saying, Why me? Why do I deserve this? I am a good person. That person is an idiot. Screw him. I shouldn't have to deal with this. It's the psychological pain that comes along with being hit by the physical pain. Now, throughout the course, I would like to refer to these types of pain as Type 1 pain, the physical pain. And Type 2 pain, the psychological pain. For example, let's say a family member has cancer and passes away. Obviously, the loss of that family member is fundamentally painful. That is a type of Type 1 pain. If your mother dies of cancer, that is terribly painful, no matter who you are or what you do, Type 1 pain. But what tends to happen with most of us is that we sit and say, Oh my God, what could I have done differently? Why does she deserve this? I could have been a better son. I could have done this. This is not fair. The doctors are terrible. I bet they messed something up. That is Type 2 pain. It's the narratives and the meaning we build around that inherently painful initial event. Now, the interesting thing about human psychology is that the more

Pain Type 1, the crazier our minds become with narratives, creating Type 2 pains. It's very proportional. I hit my toe, what did I do to deserve this God? You don't do that. You're like, screw the table. And you just move on with your life. But if an earthquake happens and you lose your house and thousands of your neighbors die, and your dog gets lost. Then you start thinking about all these different narratives of where you are in the world, and what is the cosmic meaning? And damn, my dog didn't deserve this. He deserved to come back Phyto. I miss you. It's this constant brain function that often makes us suffer more. And this was ultimately the Buddhist point. Often, long after the physical pain of the arrow has passed. We still suffer from Type 2 pain. We cling to Type 2 pain for years and years. We create these narratives of injustice and suffering and victimization and all these horrible things, which often come to define us or define our identity for a long time. So, this course will deal with both types of pain. We will talk about how you can better endure Type 1 pain. But this won't surprise you, most of the course will be dedicated to Type 2 pain. Because ultimately, that is the most significant amount of pain we feel in our lives. And it's also what we have the most control over. You will never be able to

But surely you can afford to create stupid narratives that make you suffer more. Now, the second metaphor I want to use throughout this course is just to help us understand the nature of pain in our lives. I am going to use the metaphor of a muscle, which is essentially that a certain amount of pain is actually good for us, in the same way, if you never exercise your muscles, if you never stress them, if you never like to sweat and run or lift something heavy, your body deteriorates and begins to crumble. But at the same time, if you try to lift 500 pounds on your first day at the gym, you will completely destroy yourself. There is a kind of Goldilocks pain zone that is actually healthy for us. If we are simply addicted to television and everything is always comfortable, we actually deteriorate. We become lazy, compulsive, demanding, delirious, and all those horrible things. There is a certain amount of stress in our lives that actually keeps us connected to reality and improves mental health outcomes. But if you follow that curve of pain, eventually, there comes a turning point where adding more pain or stress begins to harm our health. And it damages our ability to function well, both physically and mentally. So, ultimately, our goal here in our lives is not to get rid of pain. It is simply to maintain a manageable level of stress and pain in our lives. We want to be regularly challenged. We want to have

In the work we are doing. It is that sense of sacrifice or that sense of overcoming that gives us a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. If you have nothing to overcome, if you don't have challenges, if nothing pushes you, your mind starts to go crazy and looks for small things to become neurotic and compulsive. Now, if you go overboard and go too far, your body starts to break down. Again, it's like, if you go to the gym and lift a moderate amount of weights and gradually push yourself each time you go, you get stronger. You will be healthier. You will be able to do more and more each time you go. But if you go to the gym and try to do squats with 500 pounds, you will break your back. And that breaking of your back is essentially what trauma is. There is a certain breaking point, with pain and stress, where your mind just gives up. and as it loses it's like it withdraws. And it's like, screw this crap. I'm out of here. To extend the metaphor even further, let's say you go to the gym, do a good workout, and feel sore the next day. Well, there are ways to treat that pain, you know, rest a little more, maybe put on an ice pack, take a sauna, drink a protein shake. All these things will help your body recover, but a protein shake and a sauna.

They won't help a broken back. A broken back needs a completely different level of treatment and therapy, you know, basically, you need to go to the hospital. And spend months and months and months going through intense recovery and physiotherapy. The same is true with trauma, right? If I'm just having a very stressful year in my career, that's like going to the gym five times a week and being sore and exhausted all the time. You can handle it, you can recover from it, at some point, you will need a lot of rest to recover from that amount of stress and tension, but you'll be fine. And in fact, you will come out the other side, much stronger for it. But let's say you have a car accident. You're in a van with a group of five of your coworkers, and you were driving, and it kills everyone, but yes, you will need a lot of time to overcome that. It's like another process. And then, I want to mention this metaphor for a couple of reasons. The first is that this course is less about managing trauma. Trauma is a complete topic in itself, and there are many aspects that, honestly, I or almost anyone else on the internet that I would buy a course from is not really qualified to address. For example, if you are experiencing trauma or PTSD symptoms, yes, many of these concepts can help and can be useful as tools, but you should work with

Most of the pain we experience is psychological. And much of what determines whether we are trying to do squats with 500 pounds or not is also mental. It's type 2 pain. We have started to see this much more often lately, where if you define something traumatic for yourself, like if you decide that Amazon losing the delivery of your iPhone is a traumatic experience, your brain will actually believe that. Your brain will actually say, yes, that's trauma. Let's have a traumatic reaction to that. So, you have to be very careful in terms of the definitions of pain and the meaning you subscribe to, in terms of the different pains you are experiencing, because an event can happen in your life. That is, it's actually like a 30-pound dumbbell, but in your mind, it's a 500-pound squat. You're going to break your damn back. Still, it's important to be careful with the narratives you build around your experiences, the meaning you assign to the two different events that happen. Ultimately, many of these things are also very personal, right? Something that might feel like a 30-pound dumbbell to me, might feel like a 500-pound squat to you and vice versa. Just to use an example from my own life, while I was writing my, in subtle art, my first girlfriend cheated on me and left me. And obviously, that's a horrible experience. It sucked. But, millions and millions and millions

Many people have had that experience. So, it's not a particularly unusual experience in the human condition. But because I came from an emotionally dysfunctional family environment, and I came from an environment where I had been largely deprived of intimacy and trust for most of my young life, I was particularly sensitive to that event. So, you know, it may not have broken most people's backs, it would certainly hurt, but it really messed up mine pretty good. And it took me years and years to overcome that and overcome that, you know, obviously a different pain throughout our lives. It can compound each other. As you can, to continue with this damn gym metaphor. You can hurt your back by putting too much weight on squats when you're like nine years old, you know, because let's say your dad did something really messed up. And then, when you're 25, something very similar happens and it breaks your back. And you have a traumatic response to that. There is a lot of complexity involved in what is really experienced. That's just a kind of pain or loss or grief and what is really experienced is this trauma. But the goal of all this is that this course focuses on type 2 pain because that's the type of pain we have more control over. Although we will also talk about managing type 1 pain. And this course is very focused on that process of lifting weights to strengthen mentally. Dealing with the usual challenges of life.

What we should improve is our resilience, enhance our sense of identity, improve our ability to cope with adversity. We will focus less on trauma. Again, many of the tools and concepts in this course can be useful for people experiencing PTSD or traumatic reactions, but that is not what this course is designed for. So, this is just a disclaimer. You might take something from it. Many people with PTSD and similar issues read my work and say it was very helpful, but it is not intended for that. So, I just want to make that clear and be very, very specific about what we are going to work on here. So, I often joke that I am an expert in dealing with first-world problems. If you have a degenerative condition and will never walk again, I don't know how good I am at that. But if your damn boyfriend leaves you, and you drop out of school, and you don't know what to do with your life, well, then I'm your guy. These life challenges that we all have to deal with from time to time or even the stress of everyday life, you know, being overloaded with work, having a crappy boss, being stuck in a toxic relationship, or having a parent who treats you like crap. These are the things we are here for, and the tools and techniques in this course are designed to help. With that, let's start with our first exercise. There is a workbook available for download. You can print it

You can also simply create a Word document and write it yourself. Start. I want you to write about a particular struggle or problem, or a source of pain in your life right now. If you feel you need some help dealing with, you know, this course will work much better. If you come up with a specific problem in mind that you would like to improve. To begin, just write down that problem or that source of struggle you are experiencing. And after that, I want you to ask yourself two things. One, is this a type 1 pain, or type 2, or is it likely to be both. But jot down which aspects of it are Type 1, you know, I have a boss who is a total jerk. Obviously, that sucks. There's nothing you can do to control that, it's a type 1 pain. But I've decided that, you know, this is a horrible workplace and I'll never make it in this career. And, damn, I'm going to have to lose my job or be miserable for the rest of my life. These are all types of type 2 pains. So write down which aspects of the problem you are experiencing are type 1 pain. And then, which aspects of the problem you are experiencing are type 2? And finally, just write how manageable this problem seems to you right now. Does it feel like a 22-pound dumbbell that will just give you a little nice b

Write it down now because, hopefully, throughout this course, we will review that assessment. And hopefully, in the end, you feel a little lighter about it. So, write those things, take your time with it. Be completely honest and open with yourself. And I'll see you in the next lesson. (upbeat music)

How to Deal With Any Life Problem

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