Emotional Regulation, San Francisco, Sunrise, and Money

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😶‍🌫️ I. Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation — the ability to manage your emotions and behaviors across time and different situations — is at the core of being mentally and physically well, cultivating healthy romantic relationships and friendships, dealing with stress, and working effectively with other people.

The problem is that emotional regulation is hard work.

Learning how to modulate yourself effectively is a lifetime’s worth of effort that often requires enhanced self-awareness, behavioral change, confronting limitations and traumas, and learning what works and doesn’t work for your system.

While there is no magic pill for emotional regulation, one of the hacks that works well for me is doing small acts of kindness for other people when I’m not feeling well. Small things like making dinner for my wife, paying for a stranger’s coffee, or helping a friend think through a hairy problem can have a profoundly positive impact on my psychology.

I don’t know exactly why this works, but being kind to others feels good. My guess is that it has something to do with getting out of my head and connecting in small ways with the people and world around me.

This little hack won’t cure all of your maladies, but if you’re feeling down or stuck inside your head, try doing something nice for another person and see if that nudges you toward a more regulated state.

🏢 II. San Francisco

I’ve been living in San Francisco for a month, and I’m convinced it’s still one of America's most beautiful and vibrant cities. It has a great balance of opportunity, nature, culture, and enjoyable places to hang out and eat.

What’s funny about my early impression of the city is how different it is from the story you hear about San Francisco on the news and Twitter. If you tune in to those places, you’d think that what was once one of America’s most innovative and beautiful cities has turned into a dangerous disaster zone that should be avoided at all costs.

While the city certainly has many well-documented problems and quirks, my experience so far is that those shortcomings don’t actually have a substantial impact on my day-to-day life or sense of satisfaction.

This delta between lived experience in a place and the stories that spread online about that place is one of the reasons why I stopped reading the news many years ago.

The reality of the modern world is that the business model of news and social media has created a vicious war for your attention. And the best way to capture that attention is to share stories that make you think the world is going to hell and that everyone around you has gone crazy.

One of my strongest beliefs is that you can improve your life significantly by not taking this stuff too seriously. If you want to know how something is, don’t read about it online. Go out in the world and see it for yourself.

What you often find is that most people are well-intentioned and kind, most cities are not falling apart, and everyday life is filled with more beauty than chaos.

🌅 III. Sunrise

I enjoyed this wholesome thread that features paintings of the sunrise. My favorite painting is The River of Light by Frederic Edwin Church (1877).

🧠 IV. Something I’m Thinking About

Looking back at my life, it’s funny to think about how much energy I’ve spent fretting about things that never came to pass. Some of that worrying helped me prepare for an unknowable future, but a lot of it was wasted energy and unnecessary stress that caused more harm than good.

No matter how much we want to exert control over our future, the reality is that we only have a light grasp on life.

If the world wants to hit us with a beautiful moment or a devastating wrecking ball, it will. We’re mostly along for the ride, and the best way to enjoy that ride is to do your best, try to enjoy most days, and avoid thinking too much about how everything is going to work out in the end.

That's all for now. See you next Sunday.

— Cal

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