Three Keys to Resilience — TED Notes Revisited
Today’s Topic Is About Resilience
Every now and then, people suffer. There are already tons of theories and therapies to help cure people out of the aftermath of those sufferings. But those guidelines are truly hard to follow strictly even for those experts. So in most cases, we’ll find people use negative and short-period methods to get rid of sorrows, such as drowning in alcohol. Compared to pretending nothing has happened, a better way is to live forward with the sorrow — sorrow that can be eased in some helpful ways.
From now on, you don’t need to get stuck with complicated theories or worry about even worse outcomes warned to you by experts if you don’t follow their instructions. Just three key ways can help you get back to the driver’s seat and roll back onto your life.
1. Admit. It is essential to admit those bad things’ happening. Unfortune falls on everyone, and it’s true that the degree differs across people. But admitting your miserable experience is still helpful in avoiding endless groaning about your sorrow and repeatedly asking why it falls on you rather than someone else. Admitting is the first step to living together with sorrow.
2. Control your instinct. People are inclined to focus on bad results rather than happy results. This helped our ancestors be cautious about dangers and successfully avoid them. But today most bad results are not critical to our survival, so it’s time to control such instincts — the attention and energy spent on them. A good way to divert your attention to other things is to think of three happy things each day. Sticking to this habit can really make people grateful and positive towards life.
3. Check whether it’s useful. Check whether each thing you are about to do is actually useful. Whether meeting the criminals is useful; whether drinking one more bottle of wine is helpful; whether staying up late all night is helpful. Checking whether your behavior is useful and justified can bring great influence to all the corners of your life. Just like one of my teachers said before, what limits the speed of cars is not the functioning of engines but the performance of brakes. Thinking about the aim of each behavior — and whether the behavior can really lead you to that aim — can serve as brakes to avoid taking actions immediately and recklessly. This method is helpful not just in dealing with sorrow but in everyday decisions. If I had learned about it before, I wouldn’t have done something meaningless, like staying up late playing games, just to drain off my bad emotions. Such behaviors cannot ease my negativities, and there are obviously better alternatives.
Just three methods can lead to a whole different life. This can be applied to every emotional fluctuation brought by unanticipated reasons. Admittedly it is hard to follow them strictly every day, but even if you can think of them sometimes, they still help a lot.
Revisited 2026 — what I’d add now.
If I were to rewrite these three keys in 2026, I’d add one connecting line between admit and control instinct: cheap audit, expensive change. The cheap part is making admit and check usefulness a near-zero-energy habit — three good things a day, one “is this worth it?” before each decision. The expensive part is really doing control instinct — that takes daily training of default reactions.
The 2020-me hadn’t read any CBT literature, yet was already using its core mechanisms (attentional allocation, behavioral usefulness checks). Looking back, I am still glad: the intuition came first, the tools came later. The 2026-me now has the tools to systematize the intuition; the 2020-me didn’t have the tools but had not missed the intuition either — and that, perhaps, is the most worth being grateful for.