Brian Johnson explains the struggle switch: fighting negative thoughts amplifies suffering, while accepting pain reduces it. He uses quicksand as an analogy and cites Kristin Neff's formula that suffering equals pain times resistance, making resistance the multiplier that matters most.
Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another micro class. This one's on the struggle switch. It's inspired by the Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, the struggle switch. You have two options for this struggle switch. It can be in the on position or it can be in the off position. If you are struggling with all negative thoughts and feelings that arise in your life, then your struggle switch is on. And he says you need to know that when your struggle switch is on, you amplify all the negativity. It's kind of like a person that's in quicksand, right? If you fall into quicksand, keep this in mind. Pro tip here. If you fall into quicksand and you struggle, you sink faster than if you were just calm and you kind of laid at the surface waiting for someone to come help you. That's actually the wise thing to do. You turn the struggle switch off, otherwise you're going to sink really deeply. He says it's the same thing if you are say you get anxious, right? So you're experiencing anxiety. And rather than expand to allow the anxiety to be present, you get angry about your anxiety and then you actually get depressed about your anger, about your anxiety, right? You're struggling, your struggle switch is on. What you want to do instead is flip that switch off and quit resisting the pain. Which brings us to a little equation that Kristin Neff shares in Self Compassion. One of her mentors said, suffering equals pain times resistance. The reality is that we're all going to experience pain in our lives. The happiness trap is the idea that you shouldn't ever experience pain, that you.
Should be happy all the time.
Well, guess what? Never going to happen. And if you think that you're going to struggle all the time and you're going to resist this pain, which is going to create suffering in your life. And her teacher actually said it's more like this. Suffering equals pain times resistance. It's an exponential relationship. It's not a multiplicative relationship, right? Pain to the resistance, power. Your suffering is going to go up the more you resist. Therefore, don't resist, don't struggle switch. This struggle switch off. Allow pain to be present, diffuse from the negative thoughts, expand to allow those emotions to be present, and your suffering will go down. The Dalai Lama says pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. This is one way to look at it. How's your struggle switch doing? Can you turn it off a little bit more?
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