Something bad or terrible happened, and you feel sad.
This is the first box. It’s an underlying feeling that you don’t like because you don’t want to feel sad. You need to cry, but you don’t.
Because you don’t like to feel bad, you add another box with good feelings on top of the box with the sad feeling.
For example:
- Breakup & Gym: You have broken up with your partner (sad feeling), so you start going to the gym every day (good feeling). The gym helps you, and you feel better, but it also masks the original problem—you need to cry and feel sad.
- Work & Family Issues: Someone works 80 hours a week (good feeling) because they don’t have a stable family home (sad feeling).
- Coping & Past Memories: Somebody with an eating disorder might use food control to mask painful memories of things that happened in the past.
Ok, what should I do?
You should do both things. You should go to the gym, but also cry.
I like to see this as fighting: you dance around (you go to the gym), and you jab (cry). You dance and jab, dance and jab.
Why is cancer something bad?
If you want to treat cancer, you claim that human life is more important than other resources.
We constantly transfer energy from one place to another. This is where humans are exceptionally good at: balancing energy—choosing where it goes.
For instance, I use AI for a grammar check. Therefore, I extract resources from nature.
If we treat cancer, we extract energy from other sources.
The key word is importance: what do we think is important, and why?
This responsibility is completely in our own hands.
Funny enough, that's also how an ADHD brain works.
You start with folding the laundry. Then you go call somebody. You do the dishes. You start smoking.
Every step of the way, you find something new that's most important at that moment. That's how we learn.