**The SKILL Of Not Becoming Bitter: 10 Strategies For Reclaiming Hope After Hardship — Transcript & Summary | SozAI**
Source: https://sozai.app/transcript/skill-not-becoming-bitter-strategies-reclaiming-hope-hardship/

Heidi Priebe shares 10 strategies to retrain thinking away from cynicism and bitterness, starting with localizing and vulnerably mourning specific hurts rather than generalizing about the world.

## Key Takeaways

- Bitterness is a learned thinking pattern that can be retrained, not just a fixed personality trait.
- Honest, specific, vulnerable acknowledgment of pain prevents hardening into global cynicism.
- Attention and information diet shape worldview, so deliberately seeking good, beautiful, and true examples counters negativity.
- Openness to people, luck, and gratitude are practical antidotes to bitterness.

## What the video covers

- Heidi Priebe notices that cynicism grew in her own thinking after hardship and asks whether thought patterns trained into bitterness can be trained out.
- Strategy 1: Localize the wound, mourning specific losses vulnerably rather than making vengeful global statements about groups or the world.
- Digital environments reward outrage and confirmation bias, making cynical thinking easy to feed.
- Unresolved pain shapes attention, causing repetitive thought loops; guided breathing and somatic awareness can help break them.
- Practice radical gratitude and being present with the life one has rather than comparing to alternate lives.
- Mutual sense-making in communities can shift worldviews, so consciously choosing influences matters.
- Set boundaries from the adult self to protect the young, hopeful, open part of oneself.
- Stay open to luck and opportunity; cutting oneself off from new people and experiences fuels bitterness.
- Seek out good stories and evidence of goodness, such as asking people for their best experiences, rather than scanning only for threats.
- Avoid conditional thinking that life must meet certain requirements before one participates; practice intentional acts of kindness that brighten the world.

## Chapters

1. 00:00 Introduction: Changing Thought Patterns
2. 02:24 Strategy 1: Localizing the Wound and Vulnerable Mourning
3. 07:07 Headspace Sponsor Segment and Breaking Thought Loops
4. 11:08 Radical Gratitude and Being Present
5. 19:00 Mutual Sense-Making and Influences
6. 24:57 Boundaries from the Adult Self
7. 30:00 Staying Open to Luck and New People
8. 38:20 Seeking Good Stories and Evidence of Goodness
9. 45:00 Releasing Conditional Thinking and Acts of Kindness

Answers

## Questions about this video

What is the first strategy Heidi Priebe recommends for avoiding bitterness?

She recommends learning to mourn losses specifically and vulnerably rather than vengefully and globally. This means naming who hurt you and how, instead of making sweeping generalizations about groups of people or the world.

Why does Heidi say cynicism is easy to fall into today?

She argues that digital platforms reward outrage and panic, and people's confirmation biases lead them to seek out content and conversations that confirm cynical views. This makes it easy to train the brain into cynical patterns.

How does Heidi suggest handling repetitive painful thought loops?

She describes using a short guided breathing and somatic awareness exercise to shift attention out of the loop and into bodily sensations and the underlying emotion. This allowed her to relate differently to the stressor rather than remaining stuck in mental problem-solving.

## Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:00

Speaker A

Hey guys, I'm Heidi Priebe. Welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here. This season on this channel, we have been talking about change. And today in particular, I want to talk about changing our own thought patterns.

00:14

Speaker A

So, the reason I wanted to make this video is because for the majority of my life, there was this assumption I had that people who were more positive and optimistic, which was a camp that I included myself in in my early years,

00:26

Speaker A

were just that way because they had certain personality predispositions that allowed them to think that way. And then people who were more cynical or easily became bitter at the world had a different set of dispositions.

00:37

Speaker A

And while that might absolutely be true, I started kind of questioning this over the last couple of years when I went through a series of challenges and noticed my own thinking turning more cynical and more bitter than it had at

00:50

Speaker A

any previous point in my life. And it was really easy to do things like find people to talk to who confirmed my cynical opinions or go online and find 10 really disparaging and discouraging pieces of content for everyone that

01:05

Speaker A

empowered me to think about things in a more possibility-oriented way. And so I started thinking about how at this point in time, it's pretty easy to feed our confirmation biases in the direction of cynicism because we live in

01:18

Speaker A

a digital world where outrage and panic tends to sell. But what I also started to wonder was if we can train our brains accidentally into these patterns of cynical thinking, can we also train them out of it?

01:32

Speaker A

And so over the course of this video, I want to talk about 10 strategies and practices I found to help retrain my brain from one that was really focused on what was liable to go wrong and what was feeling hopeless about the world to

01:45

Speaker A

one that was more tuned to the patterns of what is good, beautiful, and true in the world. So, we're going to go over 10 concrete strategies and practices you can use that I personally have found really helpful over the years To start

01:58

Speaker A

kind of re-wiring the algorithm that exists inside of your brain when it comes to what it is noticing and picking up on.

02:05

Speaker A

And this is definitely not about being toxically positive. In fact, the first strategy that we're going to talk about today for not developing a bitter worldview is learn to mourn the losses in your life specifically and vulnerably rather than vengefully and globally.

02:24

Speaker A

So, one of the biggest differences that I've noticed over time between people who get really hardened by the pain that they go through and people who are able to find a way to metabolize it is that the former group of people are often

02:37

Speaker A

hiding from their own vulnerability behind some sort of story about how the world is.

02:43

Speaker A

Whereas the latter group of people go directly to the core of their vulnerability by being honest with themselves about who or what specifically hurt them and what impact it had on them. So, this is the practice of localizing the pain

02:58

Speaker A

that we go through rather than allowing it to turn into a story about how the world is. So, quick example of this, when I was living in Toronto, there were these conversation salons that I used to regularly go to where every week there

03:10

Speaker A

would be a new topic of the salon and we would get into small groups and discuss that topic usually through a kind of philosophical lens.

03:17

Speaker A

And there was one week where the topic was heartbreak. And everyone was sitting there originally trying to give their coast kind of sophisticated and intelligent takes on heartbreak. And then one guy in the group went, "Hey, what if we went around in a circle and

03:30

Speaker A

we all said the first name of the person who broke our hearts the worst in life?" And it was amazing how much the mood just immediately shifted because everyone was dropping out of that kind of highbrow philosophical reasoning and

03:46

Speaker A

directly into the part of themselves that felt. And I realized in that moment it is really hard to stay in the realm of generalities and theory when we are deeply connected to and sharing about something specific that has happened

04:01

Speaker A

that has hurt us. And so, the first practice that I recommend taking on to combat bitterness specifically when life has dealt us a lot of pain or suffering is the practice of localizing the wound.

04:15

Speaker A

So, anytime you catch yourself making a general statement about the way that men are or the way that women are or the way that people are or the world is, try replacing that statement with I am still hurting about blank.

04:32

Speaker A

This specific person, write their name down, at one point in time said this specific thing to me. And make this not general, okay? Try to remember as accurately as you can what specific words God said.

04:47

Speaker A

And that had this impact on me. When I pull that memory up, this is specifically what happens inside of my body or my system.

04:58

Speaker A

This is the act of keeping the wound local and specific rather than global and vengeful.

05:06

Speaker A

There's this joke that you sometimes see getting thrown around online when someone is ranting really frustrated at a particular group of people and someone will just reply with, "Whoa, who hurt you?" And this is the art of making that

05:18

Speaker A

question non-retorical. All of us have been hurt in incredibly specific ways that have had a real impact on us. Being able to name these things is the opposite of creating an invulnerable story about how this entire group of people or this entire area of

05:35

Speaker A

life is terrible. Right? Being able to recognize I am capable of being hurt. That's that vulnerability piece. Here is how I've been hurt. And here is what did it.

05:47

Speaker A

Allows us to stay connected to the core of our experience rather than staying perpetually one step away from it by telling ourselves a story about how the world is. Now, before we get into the next point, I want to take a quick

06:00

Speaker A

minute to thank the very relevant sponsor of today's video, Headspace. So, one of the things that I've noticed about unresolved pain is that it doesn't just affect how we feel, it also starts affecting what we are noticing and

06:14

Speaker A

putting our attention on in the world around us. So, when I'm going through something painful, I can sometimes literally notice my brain starting to kind of compulsively loop over the same three to five repetitive thoughts that can totally take my attention away from

06:29

Speaker A

whatever is happening in my body, what is happening in my emotional system, and what is happening in my environment. So, a couple of days ago, I was noticing myself kind of looping around this particular thought that I was really

06:41

Speaker A

stressed out about, and it was kind of like no matter what I did, my attention was just automatically snapping back to that same set of thoughts. And so, instead of continuing to feed that spiral, I opened up Headspace, and I

06:54

Speaker A

just did one of their short guided breathing exercises that focused on somatic awareness. I'm just going to take the next few minutes to gently scan down through the body.

07:08

Speaker A

And what I noticed afterwards was that, of course, the thing that I was stressed out about still existed, but I was able to have a different relationship to it.

07:17

Speaker A

So, I could feel into the underlying emotion that had triggered the thought loop in the first place and be present with that state rather than staying stuck in that kind of compulsive mental problem-solving mode. And there's actually very clear research behind why

07:31

Speaker A

this works. So, just 5 minutes of Headspace a day has been shown to reduce stress, and 3 days of using Headspace has been proven to improve focus.

07:40

Speaker A

So, if you have been feeling overwhelmed, emotionally stuck in some way, or trapped in any sort of internal painful loop, I really recommend that you try out Headspace completely free for 60 days using the link in the description of this video, or by

07:55

Speaker A

scanning the QR code that's on screen. And by the way, guys, this is actually 6 weeks more that you get for free than if you sign up directly on Headspace's website. So, this is a really good deal that if you've been wanting to try

08:07

Speaker A

Headspace out, you should definitely go take advantage of. All right, back to our conversations about the skill of not becoming bitter. Strategy number two is practice time-bound periods of gratitude. So, this particular practice came to me totally accidentally when I

08:23

Speaker A

was in my freshman year of university doing my undergrad, and I was feeling kind of tortured at that point in my life by alternate life paths that I could have taken. So, I was finding myself doing a lot of second-guessing

08:34

Speaker A

about did I choose the right school? Did I make the right choice by coming to university instead of taking a gap year?

08:41

Speaker A

And it was like my focus was always on these alternate lives that I could have been living as opposed to the one that I had.

08:48

Speaker A

Until I made a decision for myself, which was, I'm going to give myself one semester of not entertaining any of these alternate lives, and if I am still unhappy at the end of it, then I will drop out and I will figure out a new

09:02

Speaker A

life plan for myself. And so, I took this whiteboard that I had hanging up in my room, and I wrote, "This is it." on the whiteboard to remind myself every single morning when I woke up that I was not going to be

09:14

Speaker A

cheating on my current life with any alternate lives inside of my head. I was just going to be present with the life that I had. And what was fascinating was that this opened me up to radical gratitude, completely accidentally. Like

09:29

Speaker A

as soon as I gave myself the option to just be where I was with the knowledge that I could bail on my whole life if I wanted to at the end of this experiment.

09:38

Speaker A

All I started noticing was what was beautiful about my life. What was really wonderful about the friends that I was making and the community that I was forming and the school that I was going to.

09:49

Speaker A

And what's interesting about this is that I believe we cannot live in radical gratitude all of the time.

09:54

Speaker A

Because we need to have that discerning part of our minds online that goes is this the right choice? What should I design for my future? And ask those questions that do naturally lead to forms of comparison.

10:06

Speaker A

In moderation, this is a wonderful thing. But if and when we find ourselves stuck in patterns of regret or patterns of what if thinking, I still love to use this practice for short periods of time.

10:19

Speaker A

So I call it the temporary visitor exercise. And I like to kind of imagine my life as though it's an Airbnb that I can just check into and stay at for a week or two at a time.

10:29

Speaker A

And I imagine that I've no obligation after the week or two-week period is over to keep inhabiting this life or to keep moving it forward. And so I just put my attention on what is really beautiful about this space. What is

10:42

Speaker A

notable or pleasurable about the way that I'm living right now? Who are the most beautiful people in it and what do I appreciate about them? If I knew that I had to leave this life behind in two weeks, what would I miss the most about

10:55

Speaker A

it? What would I really appreciate about my opportunity to engage with it now? What this exercise does is it naturally starts placing our attention on what is abnormally beautiful and good about the lives that we're living.

11:09

Speaker A

All right, strategy number three for combating bitter thought patterns. Be intentional about having new experiences that break your current frames of reference.

11:19

Speaker A

So there's a few communities that I've frequented over the years that love to use the term sense-making. So when people are getting together and talking about their worldviews or their systems of meaning, they call it mutual sense-making.

11:30

Speaker A

And one day I went to an event where a woman said, "I think it's time for us to do sense breaking." So, for us to start challenging each other's systems of meaning and systems of understanding the world. And I just got so delighted by

11:43

Speaker A

that phrase, sense breaking. And I think that it's incredibly important to know when it is time to actually start challenging our frames of reference, particularly when they are starting to cause a lot of suffering. Because our attention has narrowed really far on

11:58

Speaker A

something that is causing us to lose hope. So, this is the very simple practice of doing intentional pattern interrupts with our own lives. So, being around people who have completely different perspectives, world views, ways that they organize themselves

12:13

Speaker A

psychologically, and allowing ourselves to really be open to and impacted by other people's way of perceiving the world when we have gotten kind of stuck in our own. So, a particular practice we can do here is one that I call worldview

12:27

Speaker A

tourism. So, once a month or once a week, if you really need it at a certain point in your life, spend at least half a day immersed inside of a world that is totally different than the one that you

12:38

Speaker A

normally inhabit. So, if this does not violate your moral code, you could try going to a church service of a religion that you are not a part of.

12:46

Speaker A

And just start getting a sense of how are these people making sense of the world, finding meaning in their lives, and relating to each other from the basis of this religion.

12:56

Speaker A

Try going to an improv class, a martial arts group. Try going bird watching on a Saturday morning. I've heard that there are very enthusiastic groups of bird watchers. Try going to a new political group or a dance community or a startup

13:09

Speaker A

event if you're not in the startup world. Or go to a 12-step group or a Burning Man community group. Anything that essentially is not what you would normally do with your time and with your thinking.

13:21

Speaker A

Simply getting into the pattern of breaking your own frame of reference and interacting with people who have different psychological organizing principles than you can be an incredible practice in reminding ourselves that there are so many ways to live a life.

13:36

Speaker A

There are so many people I could be influenced by, so many groups I could become a part of, and so many ways that my own thinking and meaning making could change if I ever wanted to.

13:48

Speaker A

And I think that a kind of subtle reason why this is often powerful is because different people who are organizing themselves in different ways have different nervous system patterns. And so if we are putting ourselves around people whose nervous systems function

14:02

Speaker A

very differently than ours, we are naturally going to start responding to that in our own bodies. Sometimes for worse, but sometimes for better.

14:10

Speaker A

And so this can be a really cool act of noticing, okay, around this particular group, I actually like how my nervous system feels, and I wasn't expecting that. Even if their core philosophy or the way that they're making sense of the

14:23

Speaker A

world, I don't 100% agree with, I'm getting a different experience of myself in this space. And that in and of itself can be a really hopeful thing to be in touch with. Bitterness thrives inside of closed systems.

14:37

Speaker A

Right? Where it seals off the exits and goes, this is the way the world is and there's nothing else to think about.

14:43

Speaker A

Wonder and awe thrive in exposure. So simply exposing ourselves intentionally to different ways of being can go a very long way. Fourth strategy for combating bitterness, stay protective over your own innocence.

15:00

Speaker A

And when I say protective, I don't mean close yourself down. I mean quite the opposite, actually. This is sort of a personal story. But the last time I was going through a breakup, I woke up in the middle of the night one night aware

15:13

Speaker A

that I had just had a very vivid dream that I could still remember. Where there was this little tiny baby monkey trapped in this room reaching its arms out, and just waiting desperately for someone to come and hold it.

15:28

Speaker A

And I was standing outside of this room, and I kept trying to instruct the monkey how to exit it. As kind of like, "Hey, buddy, like there's no one in this room.

15:36

Speaker A

You're alone in there. Here's how you exit. You can climb over the wall. Here are all of the ways that you can get yourself out of this situation." But what was interesting was the monkey had no interest in exiting the room, and

15:49

Speaker A

it was very clear on that. It was like, "I want to sit right here with my arms stretched out." And I woke up, and I was like, "Huh, that was kind of a sad dream." And then I walked into my kitchen, and I opened

16:00

Speaker A

my kitchen cupboard, and I saw this mug sitting there that had a picture on it of a mother monkey hugging a little baby monkey. And I realized that baby monkey was the exact one in my dream, which was

16:13

Speaker A

notable because that particular mug was one that my ex had given me. We'd had this kind of running joke that inside of all of us, there's a little clingy monkey that just needs love. And on the days when I was particularly stressed

16:25

Speaker A

out or needing some extra support, he would often make me a coffee or a tea in that mug and bring it to me when I was working or just getting up in the morning to remind me, "Hey, I'm here.

16:34

Speaker A

I've got your back." And I realized that that little monkey I was picturing in my dream was the part of myself that was just purely and innocently reaching out for connection and attachment. And the reason it didn't want to leave that room was because that

16:50

Speaker A

monkey knew it was doing nothing wrong. There is nothing wrong with the parts of ourselves that love, that attach to people, that hope for better things in life. But our job as responsible adults is to make sure that we are caring for

17:06

Speaker A

those parts of ourselves and protecting them. So, putting the right boundaries in place in our lives, so the parts of us that know how to attach and love from a pure place do not get hurt over and over

17:20

Speaker A

and over again. Right? Supporting the parts of ourselves that are innocent and beautiful and pure to be in the right environments. There is a reason why in that dream, I was standing guard at the door for that room

17:34

Speaker A

with the little monkey in it. Right? Our adult selves are the bodyguards for the parts of ourselves that are innocent.

17:41

Speaker A

And so, if we want our lives to keep containing beauty, we have to learn to care for those parts of ourselves well.

17:48

Speaker A

And so, the practice that we're going to talk about next is serving as the security team for our own inner optimist.

17:55

Speaker A

So, if and when this is applicable, we're going to sit down and write three to five boundaries that we would need to have from the most adult part of ourselves that would serve to protect the very young, very optimistic, hopeful, loving,

18:11

Speaker A

and pure parts of ourselves so that those parts don't have to shut down. So, this kind of boundary might look like, I do not repeatedly pursue people who are uninterested in or ambivalent about me. That is going to keep hurting

18:26

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that part of me that is innocent and loving and attaching to people. Or, I'm going to leave any relationships, platonic or otherwise, where cruelty or contempt become a regular part of the equation.

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Because the only way to really stay okay inside of those scenarios is often shutting down or dissociating from the parts of ourselves that feel that pure innocent desire for connection.

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Or, I'm going to not share my dreams and my aspirations with people who've shown a pattern of mocking, diminishing, or pathologizing them.

19:01

Speaker A

Right? So, this is about getting clear on what boundaries we need in order to protect the innocent and hopeful parts of ourselves rather than continuously putting them in scenarios where they need to shut down. And a more kind of

19:14

Speaker A

hopeful way to do this exercise can also be looking at how to be the optimist security clearance.

19:20

Speaker A

So, writing down scenarios where it is perfectly safe and wonderful for that part of ourselves to come online.

19:27

Speaker A

So, I will keep investing in people who show me kindness and respect. I will keep putting myself in those types of rooms.

19:35

Speaker A

I will allow trust to build slowly over time in my relationships. I will keep putting myself in rooms or environments with people who are encouraging and inspiring to the part of me that hopes.

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Speaker A

Or who know how to challenge me without cruelty or without humiliating me. Right? We look for the right environments where those innocent parts of ourselves are free to do the exact thing that they are there to do, which

20:02

Speaker A

is reach out their arms to the world over and over and over again to welcome new things in with innocence and joy.

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Speaker A

And we do that. We keep those parts of ourselves functioning healthily by allowing our inner adults to take the reins on setting the right boundaries.

20:19

Speaker A

Strategy number five as an ongoing one for not becoming bitter is keeping our luck surface area wide. This is a term that I've brought up multiple times on this channel before. It came from somewhere on Twitter that I can't seem

20:32

Speaker A

to track down, but essentially the idea of a luck surface area is just how much we are exposing ourselves to events, to situations in life where luck might show up. And when we are feeling depressed, bitter, unenthusiastic about our lives,

20:47

Speaker A

very often what our attention starts to naturally do is focus in on one or two solutions that it thinks is going to solve our whole lives and spend the majority of our time and effort focused on those things at the expense of

21:01

Speaker A

going to social events, saying yes to social invitations, extending social invitations. essentially just keeping ourselves in circulation in the social world.

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Speaker A

And the reason why this is important is because in the short term, those things might not pay off in dividends, but in the long term, this allows us to stay open to happenstance.

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Speaker A

So, to ending up in the right room at the right time where the right person walks through the door who happens to have an opportunity that changes our lives.

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If this happens to us once every 2 years, it can have a major, major impact on the entire trajectory of our lives.

21:43

Speaker A

Right? When we look back over our lives, a lot of the people we meet who have changed the trajectory of it personally or professionally or whatever it is, are people that we did not engineer our way into meeting. We happened to meet them

21:56

Speaker A

through being in a room with other people who shared our interests or who cared about the same things as us.

22:02

Speaker A

And then luck happened. Right? But if we are cutting ourselves off from opportunities where luck could show up, over time, this is one of the fastest routes to becoming cynical and bitter about the world. So, the practice we're going to take on here is an

22:17

Speaker A

openness audit. So, if we're going through periods where we're starting to feel cynical and bitter, something I like to ask myself is, "How many new people did I meet this week?

22:28

Speaker A

How many rooms did I put myself in or places did I go where something unexpected might have happened?" It is really hard for our lives to take a different form if we are spending all of our time inside our living room.

22:41

Speaker A

Right? So, remember really starting to think about this when I was reading this book on dating that was written by, I think, Henry Cloud, this pastor that's called how to find a date worth keeping?

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Speaker A

But one of the exercises he puts forth right at the beginning of the book is, "At the end of every week, write down five eligible dating candidates that you you that week." And if you can't, chances are you're not putting yourself

23:05

Speaker A

in enough of the right contexts, and so it's no wonder you're not finding your soulmate.

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Speaker A

And so his philosophy was that we can get really focused on all of these things that are wrong with ourselves or other people or whatever it is that are leading to us staying single, but sometimes the problem is that we are

23:21

Speaker A

just not exposing ourselves to the right environments. So I like to do this exercise anytime I find myself becoming frustrated with life is asking myself, "Okay, if I really want, let's say, a new community, which five communities did I sample this week that might be

23:38

Speaker A

interesting?" And if the answer is none, well, now I know what my next logical move is.

23:44

Speaker A

Right? Or if you really want to find a partner, which five people did you meet this week who you might be interested in dating? And if the answer is nobody, then the attention has to go towards where could I start finding people who

23:57

Speaker A

are single and interesting to me? If we're really unhappy with our work, which five coffee dates did we go on this week that might lead to new work opportunities for us elsewhere? And if the answer is none, we can put our

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attention on where can I start meeting more people who could expose me to the types of opportunities that I want to be exposed to.

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Speaker A

Right? This places our attention on our own agency. Often a little bit of intentional focus and direction can go a long way towards combating bitterness because we realize it's not necessarily that the world is oriented against us, it's that we have not been acting in the

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direction of solving the problem. Six strategy for not falling into bitterness: Stay in an intimate connection with beauty, awe, and other activities that encourage self-forgetting.

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Speaker A

So there's a quote by Henry Miller that I just absolutely love that I know I've read multiple times on this channel before, but it goes, "Develop an interest in life as you see it. The people things literature music the

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Speaker A

world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.

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Bitterness is really good at making the world feel tiny, terrible, and like it is happening to us.

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Speaker A

Right? And so sometimes when we start feeling really acquainted with our own pain, one of the best practices we can do is simply forgetting about our own experience for a little bit. And finding a way to immerse ourselves in all of the

25:29

Speaker A

beautiful things that exist outside of ourselves. During one of the periods of my life where I was the most depleted, like just feeling absolutely spent and frustrated with every part of my life, I remember my therapist telling me, "You

25:42

Speaker A

might need some awe in your life." Like you might need a giant reminder that you are quite small actually inside of the scheme of this very big, very beautiful world.

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Speaker A

And they actually recommended going to visit somewhere that makes me feel tiny and filled with awe. And this is a practice that I still like to put into place anytime life is feeling too all-consuming or overwhelming. Can I go

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stand next to the ocean? Or can I go climb a mountain? Or if those things are not available to me, can I at least expose myself to the fact that this huge world outside of me exists?

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There was one winter where I was really depressed, but I was also really physically sick, like I couldn't get out of bed very much for a couple of weeks.

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And so I just started watching these documentaries on mountaineering. And it was so funny because it was like I was watching my brain chemistry rewire in real time. Just following the stories of people who were so invested in

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discovering and exploring planet Earth. And there was something that was just so beautiful about their determination and their love of nature to me, that I felt like it was kind of waking something up in me that had been asleep for a really

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long time. And so, finding ways, however small, however accessible and free that we can, of feeling in awe of the world around us in a way that has nothing to do with us, can be a really beautiful practice.

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And this doesn't have to be nature. This can be researching scientific developments that are really exciting, that people are out there discovering with absolutely no input from us. Maybe for you it looks like reading love stories or stories of human resilience.

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But essentially, just giving our bodies the reminder that we are not the center of the universe, and that's a great thing. We do not have to single-handedly fix the whole world for there to be beauty in it.

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Making a practice out of concretely reminding ourselves of that, beating our nervous systems proof that that is true, can go a really long way towards combating bitterness and resentment.

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Seventh strategy is a very straightforward one. Train your brain to be constantly scanning for new opportunities when your world has gotten small.

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So, this is one that I concretely use all of the time. I call it the 10 pieces of proof exercise.

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So, if I'm feeling lonely and like there will never be chances for me to connect with people meaningfully again, I go online and I find 10 Meetup groups or 10 events I could go to, or 10 invitations I've been ignoring, whatever it is, and

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I just write those opportunities down. I don't even necessarily have to do them. I just have to remind myself there are opportunities out there. And if I am feeling like there's not, it might be because I have gotten out of the habit

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of scanning for them. You can apply this to dating. If you believe that there are no good people left out there, go out and ask people for their most wonderful dating stories or the best thing that's ever happened

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to them in love, and write down 10 wonderful experiences that have happened to people, just to remind yourself there are things that could go right out there. This is actually a skill that comes originally from the world of

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cognitive behavioral therapy, which in recent years, understandably, has gotten a lot of slack, but still has wonderful, wonderful elements to it. This is about training our brain against whatever confirmation bias it has gotten stuck in by going out into the world and

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deliberately finding pieces of opposite information. Right? So, if we have some particular story that good things don't happen to someone like me in whatever category, go out and find 10 people who do fall into that category, who good things have been

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happening to. Right? This just trains our brains to remember that there are more possibilities out there than we might be believing that there are.

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Eighth strategy for combating bitterness, and I think that this is my personal favorite one, is be deliberate about seeking out laughter and absurdity.

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So, I remember the last time I was going through a really dark period, like I was having a bad, bitter time. One day I opened up my Instagram. I'm rarely on Instagram, but I saw this reel of this

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guy just giving inspirational advice while falling down a hill. Like, he would just start saying a really inspiring sentence and then trip and fall and then get back up and finish the sentence, and he did this over and over

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again. Some of you probably know this account. It has lots of followers. If not, I'll see if I can find it and link it below, but anyways, I digress. The point is, I saw this video and I remembered joy. Like,

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I was at the bottom of this emotional well and was like, right. Life can be funny.

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Even when it's terrible, even when objectively awful things are happening to us or in the world, there is still always going to be space to look at it from an angle that is absolutely absurd.

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And then I remembered this really old improv game from like high school that we would play, Where you would go on stage and play out a particular scene and then people in the audience would yell a genre of

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movie. So, they would go horror or romance and you would have to redo the exact same scene, but in the tone of a romantic comedy or in the tone of a horror movie.

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And sometimes this is still a practice that I like to default to when life is feeling really heavy. Is I look at the circumstances of my life and I go, "What would this look like if it were a comedy

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film and someone who is an expert at directing comedy was in charge of this scene?" And what I like about thinking that way is that it reminds me that no matter what the events of our lives are, there

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is always a degree of choice that we have over our relationship to the events of our life. I guess I'm just in the habit of media recommendations today, but there's this TV show called Please Like Me that I absolutely love that

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follows the story of this young man who has a severely mentally ill parent and a really complex and frankly in many ways terrible family dynamic, but the whole show is a comedy and despite the fact that these really really dark and

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serious and challenging things keep happening to this character, you watch him deal with all of it with this sense of levity and joyfulness and engagement with life and it just reminds me every time I watch it that no matter what is

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happening in our lives, it doesn't mean that joy has to be absent. Right? In fact, it can be a vehicle that moves us through the dark periods of our lives in a way that prevents us from getting lost in the darkness.

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Speaker A

Bitterness takes itself so seriously, right? That's one of its main traits, but humor is something that forces us to practice cognitive flexibility. And so, that practice of looking at our lives and going, "What would this look like as

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Speaker A

a comedy?" even if it's a very dark comedy, can often just give us a little bit more of that cognitive flexibility back. It trains our brains to start thinking about the different relationships that we could have to the

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circumstances of our lives, even in the instances where we can't change them. Strategy number nine for not becoming bitter in life is to learn to love imperfect things. Make a practice and a skill out of it.

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Speaker A

Okay, so one of the main kind of refrains of bitterness, what it likes to tell us over and over and over again, is that life has to meet a certain set of conditions before I am willing to participate in it.

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And to combat this, we often have to be intentional about reminding ourselves that A, not only does perfection not exist in most cases, but B, we can get a whole heck of a lot out of imperfect scenarios in life.

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So, I remember once reading this blog post that was talking about how when we fail, we often just look at what we didn't get or what end goal we didn't meet or what didn't work out. But a lot

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Speaker A

of the time when we fail at things, we are 85% of the way to getting them right.

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Right? And if we forget that, if we don't associate ourselves to what was I actually doing well in this process, what did I get out of this relationship or this job or whatever it is, even though it didn't work out in the long

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run. If we are forgetting to look for those things, it's going to be really easy to become perfectionistic.

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But perfectionism is often what keeps us away from excellence. From the thing that is 85% wonderful, even if the last 15% is unsalvageable.

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So, the practice that I like to use here is what I simply call in my head the 85% exercise. So, I'll think about something that didn't end the way I wanted it to, whether it was a relationship, a

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professional opportunity, just a period of time that has passed. And I'll list five things that I learned from that experience that is actually really helpful for my life now.

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Five ways that I grew through that experience or five ways that it changed me for the better. Five ways that it brought me joy while it was happening or expanded my worldview or opened me up to new ways of thinking or being in the

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world. And what I almost always find is that it's not that hard to find those gems if we go looking for them.

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And the goal here is not to pretend that things that were actually very challenging were uniformly good. Okay?

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The goal is to challenge that dichotomous thinking around the idea that something has to be perfect for it to be good or useful or meaningful to us. And that if it's not perfect, it's not worth engaging with. That is not

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only completely untrue and not how the world works, but it's also a thought pattern that is going to keep us stuck endlessly waiting for the perfect scenario that's probably never going to arrive while our real lives and the

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beautiful ways that we could engage with them are passing us by. So, a lot of people think of the opposite of bitterness as optimism and believing that actually things are going to turn out wonderfully and none of these bad

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things are going to happen, but I don't think that's true. I think that the opposite of bitterness is the capacity to realize that there's value in our lives even when things don't turn out well.

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Speaker A

That there's still beauty and connection that can be found through imperfection. Right? So, this is not again about being toxically optimistic or positive. It's about recognizing that we can get good stuff out of the rubble of our lives.

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The same way we can get good stuff out of the successes. And 10th and final strategy that we're going to talk about today for not becoming bitter is be intentional about trying to bring out the best in other people and the

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environments that you find yourself in. So, this goes all the way back to forgetting about yourself.

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Speaker A

Right? Using our own agency to make impact on the world is the opposite of thinking that the world is doomed and we are helpless about it.

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Speaker A

So, simply making a small practice during the times where we are struggling to feel good ourselves to see if we can impact someone else's day for the better or to see if we can make any environment we find ourselves in a little bit of a

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more beautiful place to be. So, I don't have a particular name that I use for this practice, but essentially just thinking about what are five tiny moves that I can make today that would make someone else's day a

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little bit brighter. And this can be as big as doing a giant favor for someone we care about or it can be as small as just thinking about something that we appreciate about a friend of ours and sending them a text letting them know or

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Speaker A

holding a door open for a stranger or doing some tiny act of kindness that reminds us, I have the power to impact my environments for the better.

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Speaker A

This sounds tiny, but the reason why it works so well is because when we are stuck in those patterns of bitter and cynical thinking what we're often not very attuned to is our own capacity to change things for the better.

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Speaker A

And sometimes the simplest way to do that is to start finding tiny ways in which we can have a positive influence over our environment. And the point of this is not a kind of give-to-get mentality, right? It's just a reconnect

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us to our own sense of agency and to remind ourselves that we are active and willing participants in our own lives and in this world that we are so concerned with. And there are concrete things we can do to start

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building that momentum back of contributing positively to the world rather than getting stuck in that pattern of thinking that it's always going to be terrible and there's nothing we can do.

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Speaker A

So, with all of this, the idea is not that we're fixing the world overnight, it's not that we're fixing our own lives overnight. It's that there are ways we can train our own thinking and our own behavior to rewire the way that we are

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perceiving reality to bring more beauty and goodness and truth into our awareness during the periods where it starts feeling dark.

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Speaker A

All right. I am going to leave it at that for today, but I am super curious.

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Speaker A

Do you guys have your own practices in this area? So, which activities or experiments or mindfulness practices do you pull out of your back pocket when you're going through periods where bitterness is threatening to come online?

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Speaker A

And before I let you go, I want to remind you once again that if you're looking for ways to start retraining your own thinking in real time, you do still have that 60-day free trial of Headspace, which is available to you in

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Speaker A

the link of the description of this video or by scanning the QR code on screen. And I really do recommend you guys check that out. It's a great product for just getting in there and starting to rewire some of those thought

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patterns that may have gotten a little sticky over the course of our lives. All right. That's all I'm going to say for today, but as always, I love you guys. I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other, and I will

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see you back here again really soon. [music]

Topics: bitterness cynicism hope resilience mental health thought patterns gratitude self-development Heidi Priebe healing from hardship

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