START SMALL STEPS

“I think it boils down to sometimes just asking yourself, do I need to solve the problem or solve how I feel about the problem? And to gather some evidence. So, for example, you have a stack of bills on the table. Well, it's gonna be really anxiety provoking to open them up the envelopes. Right? So I'd rather go watch Netflix for an hour. And when I watch Netflix, my anxiety goes down.”

“When the study was over, eighty percent of people said, I feel so much better, and I sleep so much better. I'm gonna keep this going voluntarily. But just not having the phone in bed with you, then you don't scroll before you fall asleep. You don't then wake up and you start scrolling makes a big difference in our mental health. So I think we really have to be proactive about those boundaries that we set for ourselves.”

“Mental strength's about the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you behave. So we knew a lot of our thoughts aren't true. My brain will tell me all the time, like, you can't do that or you're gonna embarrass yourself. But I don't have to believe that. I can say, alright. Sure. Maybe I will embarrass myself, but that's okay. Or maybe I'm gonna fail, but I'll be okay if I do.”

“You don't have to be ready. Like, if you waited until you felt ready, I don't think you'll ever do it. Instead, you just take the action. And in my case, I'm married to a man whose bedroom was decorated in a sailboat theme when he was four. So he, like, always wanted to live on a sailboat. Correct. So this was his dream. It wasn't mine. Like, I knew nothing about being on a boat.”

“I would schedule time to worry. You set aside fifteen minutes a day to worry about that thing. And when you, like, expose yourself, but you give yourself a time limit where you say, okay, classic exposure therapy. Worrying's not bad. I just can't do it all the time. And I'll do this with my therapy clients. And the goal is you put it in your calendar, same time, same place.”

“If somebody were to look at my calendar, would that really reflect my values? If somebody looked through my banking account, would you be able to tell what I value in life? And for a lot of us, the answer is no. That I spend so much time doing these things that I don't love, or I end up spending a lot of money on things that I didn't really need, but maybe I just got sucked into it.”

“A boundary reset is just about backing up and saying, you know, I've made some mistakes, and you might have to go to the person and say, you know, I had said, like, I wasn't gonna work after seven. Lately, I've been answering emails all the time. I'm gonna back that up. Like, here's what I'm gonna do. And have that conversation. Get really clear with yourself.”