[Atlas of the heart] Anna的读书笔记

Anna

This Chapter in 3 Sentences

We feel stressed when we can't manage things successfully in time. This includes elements of unpredictability, uncontrollability, and feeling overloaded.
Stress on a daily basis takes much energy. Chronic exposure to stressors can be detrimental to our health.
Doing nothing was the only way back for someone totally overwhelmed. Being overwhelmed can lead to poor decision making.

Impressions
I spent a long time reading the "introduction" part and a small part of chapter one. "Stress and overwhelm" is the main emotions that I was reading about. Feeling stressed and feeling overwhelmed is the result of our uncontrollability to our environment, our own thoughts and our ways of living. We feel helpless.

How the Chapter Changed Me
How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.
Currently I am overwhelmed by increasing pressure from peers and life. Reading this part "stress and overwhelm" is like I am analyzing myself. Mindful play, or no-agenda, non-doing time, is the cure for overwhelm. At this moment, I am doing "nothing", reading this book, trying to cool down.

Anna

Quotes:

Social comparison falls outside of our awareness—we don’t even know we’re doing it.
Significant parts of our lives, including our future, are shaped by comparing ourselves to others.
I acknowledge the inevitable and make a conscious decision to wish them well and return to my swim.
While admiration fosters self-betterment, reverence seems to foster a desire for connection to what we revere—we want to move closer to that thing or person.
Thoughts:
Comparison is worldly pervasive. We are comparing with others without awareness. This can in some sense be called peer pressure. So much I have been suffered from it that I get riled up so easily and lose myself when seeing how fascinating others are. Reading this chapter, especially the beginning part helps me to look at my inner self, and think "what is important to me?" and "what is my real intention WITHOUT comparing with others". Most of the time, I am doing upward comparison which tend to damage my self-esteem. I have to say I suffered a lot. Well, as the writer says, I am trying to cultivate my empathy and wish them well. "Wishing others a good future and the happy things will happen to me too" I told myself. And the next step is to listen to my inner heart: what do I need? What do I want to do? This really baffles me. Because it's never easy to discard the influences from the society. Spending nearly a month myself, stepping out the comfort-zone, I went to new cities travelling myself. Being alone spared me much time to think and what I saw and heard helped building my pyramid of my plan. Giving myself more quiet time works well so far.
Comparison produces admiration, reverence, envy, jealousy. The former two emotions foster self-betterment, which is so beneficial in our lives. While envy and jealousy can dangerously lead to unintentional harm to ourselves and others. Speaking of my own experience, being jealous of others always let me down and damage the relationship between me and the person I am jealous of.

Dan

Anna This really baffles me. Because it's never easy to discard the influences from the society.

Agree. It's hard to stop comparing with others in society even now I‘m more aware of it.

Anna

Last week I read two Chapters. Chapter 4&5.
quote:

Awe inspires the wish to let shine, to acknowledge and to unite. It brings people together.
To have confusion means there is new territory for us to explore. It has the potential to motivate, lead to deep learning, and trigger problem solving.
We have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can become curious. We aren't curious about something we are unaware of or know nothing about.
Feeling bittersweet is to feel sad and happy at the same time. It's mostly about sadness of letting go of something, mixed with happiness and/or gratitude about what's been experienced and/or what's next.
Impression:
These two chapters talks about some more nuanced emotions that we wouldn't consider as emotions, such as awe, confusion and curiosity.
"We have to have some level of knowledge or awareness before we can become curious. We aren't curious about something we are unaware of or know nothing about." With this sentence I have some resonance. People are all curious. Being curious of the world, the outer space, or curiosity of our future or other people's life. With some level of basic knowledge about the world, we develop the curiosity of knowing more about what we don't know. Then I am thinking: how to build our knowledge system so that we are ignorant. Apart from extensive reading, we need to deep our research. This means we should have deep learning about a subject or a specific area. Confusion will come too in the process. It drives us forward.

Anna

Quote:
Chapter 5 & 6

Interestingly, nostalgia is more likely to be triggered by negative moods, like loneliness, and by our struggles to find meaning in our current lives.
So, is nostalgia good, helpful, bad, dangerous, or detrimental? The answer is yes.
In these challenging moments of dissonance, we need to stay curious and resist choosing comfort over courage. It's brave to invite new information to the table, to sit with it and hear it out. It's also are these days.
Vulnerability is the first thing we look for in other people, and the last thing we want to show them about ourselves.
Irony and sarcasm are forms of communication in which the literal meaning of the words is different, often opposite, from the intended message. In both irony and sarcasm, there may be an element of criticism and humor. However sarcasm is a particular type of irony in which the underlying message is normally meant to ridicule, tease, or criticize.
To live without hope is to risk suffocating on hopelessness and despair, risk being crushed by the belief that there is no way out of what is holding us back, no way to get to what we desperately need.
Setting realistic goals is a skill and a prerequisite for hope.
One way to build resilience is to practice thinking about the temporary nature of most setbacks as a part of how we look at adversity on a daily basis.
Impression:
Cognitive dissonance and paradox are two complicated emotions which involves contradictory feelings. Cognitive dissonance requires us to embrace new information even if we try hard to ignore the coming new information.
Our vulnerability is something we try to hide and love to see from others. When seeing others succeed in doing what they were never good at, we would give them thumbs and applause. But when things come to us, we probably would say we can't do it or we don't want it that way, that's so hard. To see ourselves in a way from the outside, I mean let's try, we could have a better judgement of ourselves. We could do things that we don't believe we could do. We are just blinded daunted by the coming challenges in the imagination. In fact, at least, we should try.
I never believed myself. Looking back on the past five years, things didn't go wrong and went better than I expected instead. So the problem is my self-cognition. I look at my vulnerable parts and make plans to overcome them. Step by step, things get better.
Sometimes show our vulnerability to our beloved ones are important too. In that way we have closer connection and they could help us too.