My Best Self 101 Blog
The semester had been the longest of my life. Tragedy struck—my dear older brother took his life just as my routine was setting in, and my life fell apart. I had to quickly pick it up again because midterms were around the corner, and my many responsibilities would not wait for me to get my act together. Now, with my final class done, I could breathe again.
The freedom to choose is one of humanity’s most cherished gifts, woven into our very souls. It is defended by constitutions, psychologists, and even toddlers as a basic human need. Yet an endless buffet of choices is neither required nor always beneficial for exercising agency and promoting self-determination. In fact, too many options can decrease life satisfaction and lead to decision paralysis (Scheibehenne et al., 2010). I have personally experienced this.
We all know someone who seems to navigate life’s chaos with surprising steadiness. Plans fall apart? They adapt. Unexpected stress shows up? They adjust. A hard emotion hits? They don’t get stuck, they get curious. People like this aren’t simply resilient, and they’re not “lucky.” They’re practicing a major life skill, something psychologists call psychological flexibility, and research shows it may be the single most important predictor of mental health and well-being across nearly every domain of life. In fact, many scientists argue that psychological flexibility is the core of human flourishing (1). And yet, unlike mindfulness or gratitude, it rarely gets the spotlight. Let’s fix that!
There was a day, one I’ll never forget, when walking through my own front door felt like stepping into a miracle.
We had just returned home briefly between hospital stays. My son Wyatt’s body was exhausted from chemotherapy, my own heart was stretched thin, and every hour inside the oncology unit had felt heavy. The quiet hum of machines, the fluorescent lights, the interruptions through the night, those details had become our “new normal.” So when we finally made the drive home, unlocked the door, and stepped into the familiar light of our living room, something inside me shifted.
Suddenly, everything ordinary felt holy.
Dread words, but ones we have all said in the benighted times of our lives. Myriad challenges lead us this mindset: betrayals, setbacks, failures, mistakes. The shadowed condition of our minds in this state is miserable.
Someone recently asked me “what motivates you?” The immediate answer was my fiancee. She constantly supports me and helps me in every endeavor; I am so grateful for her. However, another answer crept into my mind, “Money.” Honestly, this answer surprised me. It scared me too, and caused me to worry “Am I really that materialistic?”
Spring is (almost) here! With the sun shining and the world awakening, it is natural to feel a sense of enthusiasm for life. I find myself feeling that fresh desire to dig into spring cleaning, sign up for a half marathon, try new recipes, and get outside. While these things are all good, beware of giving into the urge to speed up too quickly. As with running a long race, sprinting can burn you out quickly, whereas a gradual acceleration and maintainable pace can help ensure that you have enough left in the tank to make it successfully to the finish line. Resilience is defined as the ability to recover successfully after a change, challenge, or adversity. It can be easy to equate resilience with “doing it all”. To the untrained eye, we may assume that someone who is having lots of achievement is also resilient, however, resilience is not found in the ability to stretch, but in the ability to recoil. The space BETWEEN stop and go is the place where resilience is grown and maintained- it takes place in what I like to call the yellow zone.
My older brother had been missing for the past twenty-four hours, and we knew he was not in a favorable mental state. Everyone else in the family was on the road to his home in St. George, Utah to look for him. I was the closest, being in Provo, but I didn't have a car. So, I waited, sitting in fear and trembling, hoping that this was just another one of his solitary trips for introspection.
It wasn't.
A few days ago, I found myself in a very quiet place. It is a space of stillness and meditation, so quiet that even whispers can be heard by others in the room. I was sitting next to my cousin, and something we said or a look we exchanged must have set us off, because it wasn’t long before both of us were inadvertently caught with a case of the giggles. I turned away from her, told myself to just breathe, and I swear, I nearly composed myself a few times.
Some days I wish I had been born into a quieter decade where my attention wasn’t on constant assignment to (what feels like) one hundred million different tasks. It’s easy to lament the increasingly distracting world: being continuously bombarded with a slew of notifications from Apple News, pop-up advertisements, email dings, group-me pings, and text messages. While it’s thrilling to hear which states federal agents are being deployed to and the recap of the 2026 golden globes within the span of 30-seconds, I’m afraid my life would be a lot less noisy without these buzzes on my phone.
