Sam Harris Life Advice Will Change Your Future (MUST WATCH)

[Music] most of what people care about can be thought of as a skill right well-being is a skill not suffering unnecessarily is a skill regulating noticing your emotional life and regulating negative emotion is a skill [Music] the moment you begin practicing mindfulness which is just just learning to pay close attention to the nature of your experience you don't add in anything to your experience you're just noticing what it's like to be you a moment a moment but in a way that is not reactive you're not grasping at what's pleasant or pushing what's unpleasant away you're just do to make this concrete I mean let's say you have a fear of public speaking right so you've got to go down out on stage and you feel anxiety the default state of someone who doesn't want to have that experience is one to you know in advance worry about that experience when the anxiety is kindled just by the mere thought of what you have to do then once you feel the butterflies you are at war with them right you contract your mind contracts around date like I see people do this all the time they're they're relaxed I'm unhappy you know when am i and you're talking to yourself you're not noticing it because you're the thoughts just come up from behind you as fast as they can and they seem to be you right you're identified with each thought that emerges in consciousness and most people live their lives as though there's no alternative we're not given a rulebook for how to operate a human mind right and there's no place in a normal education where we're what's even indicated that there's an alternative here and so we get we kind of stumble out into adulthood more or less assuming that we have will always have the minds we have and that really there's a we the only thing we can do to really upgrade our firmware is to just add new content you know we can read books we can we can develop interest but there's nothing at the sort of root level of our emotional and cognitive life that can change and so mindfulness is a way of come dropping a little bit lower and realizing so in this case if you're feeling anxiety there's actually a place from which you can just feel it right and and be actually indifferent to it or anything else you could be feeling at me just just notice that there's even an unpleasant sensation my first even knows that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant it's so close to excitement and it's actual physiology there really the difference between excitement and anxiety is more or less just that the frame it's just the story you're telling yourself you know if you felt these these tingles and this you know is slightly a gentle eyes response right before you know you're about to go on a roller coaster that's part of why you're going on the roller coaster you like that experience right but the fact that you feel that way when you're about to have an interview or you're about to walk out on stage that's intolerable right so just dropping back and realizing the the power of the framing is again this is a skill that is fairly esoteric one but now you know many people are learning it you know the secret's out and it has immense utility because then you can realize that the the half-life of negative emotions is incredibly short may one you could you can actually be psychologically free even in their presence right your freedom and your well-being isn't even predicated on getting rid of the physiology right you can still be there but if you're not continually thinking about all the reasons why you should be anxious the physiology dissipates very very quickly and that's true for anger is true for anything that that is classically negative now if we're talking about a clinical depression it's it's useful to say that there's a physiology to this that you know can be driven from below in a way that's not narrowly responsive to their thinking right so it's it'll tend to produce depressive thoughts and the depressive thoughts will tend to feedback on the state and everything else that is good to do that people sort of lose their commitment to doing at the worst possible time should be done I mean you have to sort of get behind yourself and push to exercise and to socialize and to do things that you you may not want to do because those are good for you and help you know break can can break you out of it but the normal range of psychological suffering you know not clinical depression but just feeling like you know life sucks and you're a failure and there's nothing you know it's like you just it's you're stuck that is a story of telling yourself a story you're thinking and you can either become more and more mindful of that and interrupt that more and more and or and it should be and you can reframe this continually and tell yourself a better story but you can actually just engineer you know you can change the code that you're you're you know running moment to moment and I mean just very simple one which I you know I used actually recently recorded this in a lesson on the app you know just gratitude just thinking there's actually you know this particular maneuver is I believe comes from stoic philosophy I didn't actually get it from stoic philosophy but this this sort of use of negative imagination where you think of all of the bad things that haven't happened to you right so if you're just you know if you're stuck in traffic drivin to the job that you don't like and you're you're frustrated you can think of all the things that could happen to you right that happened and if any one of them happen to you you would consider your prayers answered if you could just be returned to this moment right like you haven't been diagnosed with cancer right you've got two young kids say you know you want to live to see them grow up and you could be the guy who today is gonna find out you've got two months to live right and you have to then the next two months is spent just unwinding your worldly Affairs right you're not that guy right that hasn't happened to you yet that's just more thinking but it can have a profound effect you can you can reframe your experience in a way that doesn't actually change anything material about your circumstance and it can let the light in the generic situation we want to find ourselves in more and more is to effortlessly cooperate with creative and happy strangers right I mean that we're the 7 billion of us we need institutions and laws and norms and ways of thinking that take the friction out of pleasurable and non paranoid interaction with strangers and it's not just about having you know five or so close friends who's got who have your back right I mean like clearly we're all on the same team on some basic level and if we can't figure out how to build a civilization where everyone thrives to some degree we'll have the world we currently have until it becomes unsustainable and because we're in a situation now where I think it's reasonable to worry that our default state of partisanship and tribalism and rational fear of the incompatible aims of you know other groups and other people is unsustainable in the presence of more and more destructive technology I just think I think we have to get our act together psychologically and socially in a way that we haven't yet it may be useful to have a slightly delusional self-serving bias right to think you're coming off better than you are well I get may give you more enthusiasm for your life and more confidence but anything that's two out of register is just illusion right and other people notice and other people treat you like somebody who's just not tracking in a reality and so I think we want our beliefs to be true in some basic sense and therefore we want to be open to new evidence and better arguments perpetually right because if you're if you closed yourself off if you say well listen I'm done I'm done thinking about reality and I know what's true then again more when more data comes in you know when something surprising when one of your intuitions proves to be faulty if you can't error correct again you're just going to fall out of alignment with what's going on in the world and what with what other people think is true as well so that really the only mechanism we have to do that is human conversation we have to be open to having other people point out errors in our thinking and we had in and in the conversation we have with ourselves we have to do like what many of the things that people think they want out of life the ways they're keeping score about how good their lives are or aren't they're not seen as this experience is being delivered to them either based on the skills they have or the skills they've never thought to acquire [Music]

Channel: Motivation Madness

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Keywords: motivational video, motivation for 2019, motivational video for 2019, motivation, motivational speech, speech, 2019, motivational, success, motivational video compilation 2019, inspirational video, motivational speeches, motivational speech for success, be inspired, motivation madness, meditation, sam harris, sam harris meditation, sam harris ted talk, sam harris motivation, sam harris speech, sam harris mindset, sam harris life advice, change your future, life advice, must watch

Id: LRm_H158qc0

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 25 2019