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Michel de Montaigne - "A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears." · the Daily Quote - Positive Daily Inspiration and Motivational Quote of the Day

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  Dot com. Welcome to the Daily Quote, the
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  podcast designed to kick start your day in a positive way.
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  I'm your host, Andrew McGivern, and this episode is brought to
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  you by the Great News Podcast because good news should be
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  heard. And the link is right here in
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  the show notes. Today's quote comes from
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  Michelle Demontagne, 16th century French philosopher,
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  statesman, and the man widely credited with inventing the
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  personal essay as a literary form.
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  A man who spent much of his adult life in genuine physical
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  pain, suffering from a severe hereditary kidney disease that
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  caused him constant discomfort throughout his later years.
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  A man who knew real suffering deeply and who from that place
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  identified a second kind of suffering that most of us
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  inflict entirely on ourselves. From his essays, he wrote, A man
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  who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.
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  There are two types of suffering in that sentence.
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  Only one of them is real. The 1st is the suffering that
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  arrives. The difficulty, the loss, the
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  pain, the thing you were dreading that actually happens.
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  That suffering is real, It has weight and texture, and it's
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  asking something genuine from you.
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  You go through it, you face it honestly and move through it and
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  come out changed on the other side.
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  The second kind of suffering is the one Montagne is pointing at.
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  The suffering that exists entirely in anticipation.
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  The suffering of imagining the thing before it arrives.
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  The sleepless night before, the difficult conversation, The
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  months of dread before the medical result.
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  The years spent avoiding a decision because of what might
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  happen if it goes wrong. The career unlived, the
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  relationship unpersued, the opportunity untaken.
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  All because the imagined suffering of failure felt too
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  heavy to risk. Here is what makes Montagne's
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  observation so devastating. The imagined suffering is often
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  longer, heavier, and more exhausting than the real thing
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  ever turns out to be. He wrote extensively throughout
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  his essays on the realities of illness, aging, and death
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  precisely because he wanted to familiarize himself with their
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  inevitability to rid himself of fierce tyranny by looking at
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  what he feared directly rather than flinching away from it.
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  He found consistently that the looking was less terrible than
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  not looking, but the fear of the thing cost more than the thing
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  itself. Modern psychology has a name for
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  this pattern, anticipatory anxiety, the mind's tendency to
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  simulate negative future events with far more intensity and
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  duration than those events when they arrive actually were.
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  We are, by design, catastrophizers.
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  The brain rehearses danger to prepare for it, but it cannot
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  distinguish between preparation and the experience itself, so it
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  suffers before anything has happened, sometimes for years
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  before anything has happened, and sometimes in anticipation of
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  things that never happened at all.
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  Montang's invitation is simple and also radical.
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  Stop paying in advance for a debt that may never come due.
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  The suffering you're carrying right now, how much of it is
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  real, and how much of it is a shadow of something that hasn't
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  even arrived yet? So here's the question.
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  What are you currently suffering from in anticipation that hasn't
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  actually arrived yet because Montagne isn't telling you?
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  The hard things won't come. Some of them will.
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  He knew that better than most. What he's telling you is that
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  paying for them twice, once in fear and once in reality, is a
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  choice, and the first payment is always optional.
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  Stop suffering from what you fear, save the cost for what
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  actually comes. That's it for today.
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  I'm Andrew McGivern, signing off for now, but I'll be back
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  tomorrow. Same pod time, same pod station
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  with another daily quote.