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Happy Wednesday, friend!

You are reading The How to Live Newsletter: Your weekly guide offering insights from psychology to help you navigate life’s challenges, one Wednesday at a time.

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The Cure for Bad Feelings

This week’s topic, about accepting the reality of our emotional state, is inadvertently timed to coincide with a story I told at a Moth Mainstage event last March and is airing this week on PRX radio. It's about the night an epiphany saved me from suicide and taught me how to live.

You can listen to it HERE. (It's the very first story.)

Since I launched this newsletter, I’ve been trying to get a handle on time management. I haven’t captured the rhythm of dividing my week into reading, researching, writing, revising, and coming up with the flow of topics that build and add to the larger conversation I want to engage in with you.

So, I’ve become quite interested in the concept of time and started to read the work of Oliver Burkeman (the British journalist whose most recent book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which is more about how to live a meaningful life than anything else. 

Burkeman also writes a bi-monthly newsletter called “The Imperfectionist.”

While I’m preparing for the topic of the week, other things often pique my interest. I detour momentarily to take notes and save stuff to my Pocket app (If you are unfamiliar with Pocket, and this is the only thing you learn from me or this newsletter, then I feel I’ve done my job) to remind myself about things I want to explore later.

Recently, one of these diversions was about personal growth, which I will write about soon. But this led me to the website of clinical psychologist Nick Wignall (here's his newsletter). I read some of his articles and wandered to his podcast “Minds and Mics” only to discover an episode with my beloved Oliver Burkeman!

After listening to that episode (it was fantastic), I randomly selected another: a conversation with Gregg Krech, discussing a type of Japanese psychotherapy called “Morita Therapy.” I had never heard of it.

As I listened to the episode, I admit, I went from “This is utter bullshit” to “Holy Cow, this is really smart. I think I understand.” (The episode). So I began digging and learned enough to provide you with a basic introduction to the principles and concepts of Morita Therapy.

So, here we go...

In the early part of the 20th century, when Freud was consciously coupling with the unconscious mind and Jung was creating his archetypes, Dr. Masatake (also known as Shoma) Morita, the head of psychiatry at Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, was developing his psychotherapeutic methods with roots in Zen.

Dr. Morita worked with people suffering from anxiety and mind-body disorders. The name in Japanese for those who suffer from anxiety disorders was shinkeishitsu (which, like the word “neurotic,” is now outdated). A dedicated practitioner, Dr. Morita developed his therapy to address these issues with those patients.

Dr. Morita understood that we live in a paradoxical existence. We want to feel emotionally comfortable and at ease while also wanting to enjoy successful careers, deep and meaningful love, and have families and nurturing friendships.

Achieving any of the latter requires sacrificing the former. One cannot go after their dreams without pressing up against feelings of discomfort and vulnerable emotions.

And because these sensations are so wildly unpleasant, many of us suppress or avoid the things that give rise to uncomfortable truths. It’s this dysfunctional reaction to psychological suffering that keeps us stuck in place.

To truly know ourselves and others requires the emotional discomfort of facing our insecurities, inadequacies, fears, desires, doubts, and traumas.

How exactly do we do this?

My most profound insights don't go in the free version—they're distilled from my 27 years in therapy, decades of independent study, and work as a mental health advocate. These deeper dives are reserved for readers committed to going deeper.

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