you are beating yourself up about how you feel, you're compounding it. For me, I found that one of the things that happened is I got into sort of a loop, a kind of rumination loop. And I think a lot of us do this where we replay like a tiny film in our minds, like old arguments or conversations like, oh, if I had said this, we sort of get in this little spiral where we are pacing in our minds until the carpet has, you know, a path in it. And it's really hard once those grooves are in the carpet to get your feet to travel a different path. You just normally kind of find that track and go around and around and around. And so part of writing the book for me was, how can I understand it differently in order to walk a different path and not be stuck in the same kind of grooves of my own old, frankly, not that useful thinking about myself and my life. For

those of us who love the data-driven approach, there's some work by Maya Tamir and Iris Maus and their colleagues showing that judging your emotions actually hurts your well-being over and above looking at what the emotions are in the first place. So people who feel bad about having negative emotions actually end up with poorer well-being than people who recognize and accept that unpleasant emotions are part of life. And I think that that really underscores your point that judging your emotions, it compounds it, as you've said. And remembering that just because something feels bad doesn't mean it's bad for you or you shouldn't have felt it.

Unfortunately, we don't always get to pick our lessons. If only we got to design our life syllabus,