I’ve fallen into this trap where I believe that if I have more time, magically everything will fall into place and I’ll feel lighter. That thought usually shows up when I’m teaching, working multiple jobs, and don’t have a lot of time. And then when I do get the time? Sometimes I fall into this existential dread of: I have so much time, why am I not doing more with it? Am I a failure? Should I be more busy? Should I be producing more? For years, we’re taught to produce. We fall into a system of school where you need good grades to get into a profession that produces money in order to live the life we think we should be living. Ah, the should. The part that makes everyone move toward something in a manner that may not be true to yourself because someone told you that you have to work very, very, very hard to achieve this, **insert external goal here.** I’m not judging you. I do it too even with as much as I know about the nervous system — but especially when I was younger, which is exactly why I talk about it now. “I’ll have more fun when I make this much money.” “I’ll be set once I buy the multi-family.” That’s mine, by the way. You can steal it, but that’s mine. “Things will be good and I’ll relax once I’m married.” All the married people can laugh at that one. “Once the kids are grown, I’ll do the selfish thing I’ve always wanted to do for myself.” The problem is the external validation never actually f*****g works. It never provides the happiness we deem it will because we always find another thing to fill the void within ourselves if we don’t face the void head on. You know what this is called? Hedonic adaptation, sometimes coined the hedonic treadmill. What Is Hedonic Adaptation? It’s a concept psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced all the way back in 1971. This shit has been happening forever - we’ve been running on the same nervous systems for thousands of years. We’re just still learning how to work with them, because it’s our first time experiencing life every single day, and a new experience takes our body and nervous system a little time to understand. Hedonic adaptation describes your brain’s capacity to build a new baseline every time we reach a pivotal moment tied to external validation. A pay rise. A new house. A marriage. Even a baby. A compliment from the person you’ve been crushing on. Retirement. You tell yourself I’ll be happy when... and then it happens. And you ARE happy - you get the dopamine hit, the rush, the high. That part is real, and I’m not taking it away from you. But two weeks, two months, two years later, you’re like “wait, I don’t really care about that anymore.” You’re not really at “baseline”. You DID experience a new high. But your threshold changed. It’s exactly like weight training - you eventually have to lift heavier to burn the same calories you did the first time, because your body adapted. That adaptability is a beautiful thing. It’s genuinely cool but when it comes to happiness, it’s brutal, because we hit the new goal, we ride the high (f**k yeah, I just got a pay rise and life is going to be smooth sailing), and then a few weeks later, the existential dread creeps back in. Bills are still bills. Dinner still needs to be made. The thing that annoyed you two weeks ago, is still annoying to you. How rude huh??? But also kind of beautiful, when you look at it. Our body and mind are adaptable. Capable to hold, preserve, and shift. But when we’re chasing external goals, we’re never actually going to find true freedom or peace within ourselves because we’ll always meet that baseline again. Freedom From vs. Freedom To The terminology from The Gap and the Gain helped this click for me - freedom from vs. freedom to. “Freedom from” is getting relief from external pressures. This is what we think will make us happy — the pay rise, the house, the promotion. To be clear: it’s okay to still want those things. I’m clapping right now, picture me clapping in your face. I’m not the person telling you to suffer in poorness. F**k that. Money is good and fun in the right hands. Keep the goals. What we’re trying to release is the ideal - the belief that you will only be happy once you reach that external thing. Because when we’re only acting from external pressure, we’re not shifting anything internally. We’re not finding freedom or happiness where we actually live - inside ourselves. “Freedom to” is the shift. Finding internal happiness regardless of circumstance. Not toxic positivity, not “just be happy wherever.” Sometimes we get in our feelings, and that’s allowed - we’re trying to get better at feeling, not to feel better. Freedom to is: how can I find the internal capacity to make choices I feel confident in - action-based, for my happiness, for what I actually want - instead of what everyone else thinks I should be doing? I’m curious - pause here for a second. What does freedom mean to you? What would it feel like, in your body, in your brain, if you moved through life with this sensation? Why It Matters: Expansion vs. Constriction Somatically, this is where expansion vs. constriction comes in. When we shift from “from” to “to,” we shift our thoughts from constriction into expansion. This will help you stop feeling so tethered to external factors, and opens you up to the possibility that happiness could exist right here, in this moment, instead of on the other side of a goal. If you’re operating from an ideal - this timeline you set for your life, what it’s “supposed” to look like - you’re going to inherently feel behind. Not as confident. Not as validated. I know this from personal experience. Nobody who’s done this mindset work walks around in expansion 24/7. This is a consistent practice in recognizing when you’ve slipped into constriction, and knowing how to shift back out. Because we can be cognitively aware for YEARS and never truly embody the shift. I create doers here. And we are creating capacity for your coolest life. How to Apply This: 3 Ways to Practice Freedom To 1. Act based on what you want vs. what you need. Remember the should from earlier? I should go to college. I should buy a house. I should get married. I should have a kid. Ask yourself how many times you’ve done something because you thought you should — for someone else, because society or your parents told you, because it was “cool.” To be clear - I’m not talking about basic decency. That shit’s non-negotiable; a little kindness goes a long way. I’m talking about the big life choices made on someone else’s timeline. I’ve watched people walk into marriages because they thought that’s just what you do at a certain age. We all make mistakes - but that’s two people not actually choosing their own happiness. And if you’re not choosing yours, no one who interacts with you gets the best version of you, and you will begin to impact theirs. Next time a decision brings up anxiety, ask yourself: is this what I want, or do I feel the need to do this because of someone else’s opinion? 2. Next time you complain, try to turn it around. Ask: what is this situation teaching me? This is NOT toxic positivity. I’m not saying slap a smile on and call it gratitude. I’m talking about looking at your life as lessons instead of shortcomings. Real example: you’re rushing out the door and your bag hooks on the doorframe, everything spills out. You can go one of two ways. “This always happens to me, the universe is against me, I have somewhere to be.” Or did you sit on the couch scrolling for twenty extra minutes instead of getting ready??? And if you’d started five minutes earlier, you’d have walked out instead of run out. Zero backed data here, but I’d guess maybe 10% of what happens to you is genuinely random, and 90% you actually had some hand in. Where could your preparation have shifted the moment? What decisions brought you to where you are? 3. My delusional suggestion of the day - approach each day with the physical embodiment of the happiest day of your life. Bear with me. Close your eyes if you can. Think of a day - last month, last year, maybe you have to go back a decade if you’re deep in it right now - where you remember being one of the happiest days of your life. What did your body feel like? Peace? Openness? Radiating excitement? For me recently, it was a morning in Ireland overlooking the Cliffs of Moher - coffee in hand, sun out, a yoga class later that day, and everything I needed to handle before the trip was already done. I felt accomplished. At ease and excited. Now, what if you took that exact physical feeling and brought it into other moments of your life? Even the mundane ones? It may take a moment to settle into it, but 2 min to find that peace and then execution will shift your life in ways you never thought possible. Bonus practice I use every day, without fail - I look for small moments of humanity. A parent watching their kid get on the bus. A dog walking down the street, tail going a mile a minute. Holding a door for someone and watching them light up because so few people go out of their way anymore. Honestly we should all just approach the day like a dog. When you start embodying this in the small stuff, it’s a cellular shift. Life starts to look like expansion instead of something trying to beat you down. Shifting from external to internal is something we have to fight for but what if we practiced using our free will there, instead of looking at what we don’t have??? Your freedom is on the other side of making a decision to live. Lots of love, Tia I’m sure you’re not the only one struggling with this. If freedom to is a concept you understand in your head but can’t access in your body, that’s nervous system work - not a mindset problem you can think your way out of. That
