Author: Brad Stulberg
Info: Copyright 2023: Harper One
Rating (on a scale of 1-4 stars): ✮✮✮✮
Where Acquired: Library check out.
Category (ies) - Recommended reads: My pastor recommended this book to us.
Synopsis: As much as humans are creatures of habit, change is inevitable. Using scientific and anecdotal research and examples, Stulberg pulls the reader from constantly seeking homeostasis (reestablishing the old order) to walking through the steps of allostasis (establishing a new order).
Select Favorite Quotes:
Pursuits that align with your core values and shrink a big, unwieldy, and overwhelming world is to make it feel smaller and more manageable and useful for integrating significant changes into your life and walking confidently into the unknown. – p. 32
That life is full of things that are difficult to face was true in the Buddha’s era 2,500 years ago and remains true today. Examples include personal injury or illness, climate change, threats to democracy, a global pandemic, and age-related decline, to name just a few. In the face of all this dukkha, two attitudes tend to prevail. Some people choose to bury their heads in the sand, delude themselves, or express a toxic positivity. Others choose to be excessively pessimistic or despairing. Both of these attitudes are easy to adopt because they absolve you of doing anything. The former denies that anything is wrong; And if nothing is wrong, there is nothing to worry about, nothing to change. The latter takes such a grim stance that it basically says any action would be pointless, so why bother--it is a fast track to helplessness and nihilism. Neither of these attitudes are particularly helpful. But somewhere in between exists at third way, an approach that is a natural extension of tragic optimism: committing to wise hope and wise action. - p. 60.
For all the things in life that you cannot control, there is at least one that you can: your core values, which represent your fundamental beliefs and guiding principles. They are the attributes and qualities that matter to you most. – p. 103.
Anxiety wants you to avoid change and uncertainty, and thus it almost always has a limiting effect on someone’s life. But if you can know and trust in your own values, essentially knowing and trusting in the deepest parts of yourself, then you can courageously walk forward into the unknown. – pp. 105-106.
When we are making plans, problem solving, or deliberating working toward a challenge, it is nearly impossible to be raging and filled with anger at the same time. The brain is incapable of responding and reacting in parallel and by enjoying the future that makes up the former, we prevent ourselves from operating in the later. - p. 135.
The Positive:
- The juxtaposition of allostasis vs. homeostasis was what drew me to the volume. This concept of handling change as order, disorder, reorder rather than the normal manner of order, disorder, order (trying to get back to the original order) was briefly mentioned by my pastor and I wanted to know more.
The author does not hide behind his credentials, nor are his experiences and suggestions formulaic. I've seen other authors do this to gloss over or avoid sharing any of their real stories. However, Stulberg is refreshingly honest about his struggles. For example, he admits to having briefly dealt with OCD. Upon meeting his therapist, he immediately goes "beast mode" with trying to find meaning for his pain and a quick exit out of it. The words of his therapist floored me. She said, "Not everything has to be meaningful and you don't have to grow from it. Why does what you are experiencing right now need to have some greater purpose? Why can't it just suck?" (p. 155) Oh, that all counselors could be that honest! I get that she was not coming from any type of religious context in her statements, but admittedly while both religious and non-religious based counseling and therapy does go quickly to steering clients towards meaning and thankfulness, "Christian" counselors are the worst about doing that. It's as if they are trying to avoid bad feelings to "fix" the client as quickly as possible so they can move to the next appointment. Don't get me wrong, gratitude and trying to find meaning are good things in their proper context and at the appropriate time. However, it would be nice to sometimes allow things to simply suck. Personally, I've never learned to simply sit with feelings and let them be. I've been trained to think of that as wallowing or having a "negative confession." So, no, I must have some ready strategy--good or bad--for dealing with, going through, and moving past feelings as quickly and non-obtrusive as possible..
The Negative:
- I think the author misses the mark when he says that the reader should let his environment dictate his identity--what he called "having a fluid sense of self" in chapter three. Many environments need change and in turn, they need agents of change. Agents of change are not people who do not know who they are or have to change who they are to fit the environment. That kind of chameleon living is inauthentic and tiring. How does one have true relationships when living that way?
- This book is not a faith-based book (that's not the negative part), though the author does pull elements from different religions and philosophies (that's not the negative part either). However, Stulberg's description of tragic optimism--a combination of wise hope and wise action--did not set well with me. I even took the his suggestion of reading Victor Frankl's "The Case for Tragic Optimism," a postscript to his book Man's Search for Meaning, for further explanation of the concept. It didn't help. I still have several questions. How does this wise hope and wise action fit into the life of any religious person--Christian or not? How does someone who has hope in a power much greater than themselves operate like this? Is the author’s admonition to drop resistance a call to passivity, or does he mean a type of denial? He doesn't seem to clarify this at all.
- This wasn't a deal breaker, but the book occasionally went too political for my taste. Although I agreed with many of Sulberg's statements, it just felt unnecessary. Sorry, but politics was the last thing on my mind when I picked up this book.
Conclusion/Takeaway:
I mentioned in my First Line Friday post on this book that I was suffering from "change fatigue." I have employed some of the strategies in this book to lighten my mental load. For me, the takeaway is that no matter how I wish it were true, change cannot be successfully navigated alone. Although I took copious notes, I'm seriously considering purchasing a copy of the book for immediate reference.
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