January 7, 2024
Your “Failure and Disappointment” Journal
This “Peter Attia Drive” podcast with Arthur Brooks is so good – and long at 2 hours – that I’ll be blogging about several items that I learned from it. One is related to the “fear planning” blog I penned a while back.
At the 1:09 mark, Arthur talks about putting metacognition in practice – specifically at the 1:11:40 mark, he describes how journaling helps with anxiety (ie. unfocused, undefined fear) by writing down the five top things you’re most fearful of right now – what am I actually afraid of? Fear is supposed to be episodic and not something that lingers. By focusing your fears, you move them out of your limbic system and into your prefrontal cortex.
In addition, write down your disappointments – and leave two blank spaces beneath them. For the first space, come back thirty days later and see what you learned from the experience – and for the second space, come back six months later and see if anything good came from that disappointment (that way you can see what you learned from that disappointment).