Do you ever get the feeling that you are reading exactly the right book you are supposed to be reading right now? Brianna Wiest’s book: The Mountain Is You is packed full of wisdom for everyday life. Some truths hit harder because they are so subtle but in plain sight all along. In this article I will reflect on two topics from the book and what impression they left on me, namely:

• The Necessity of Change

• Processing Emotions

I hope by reading you get a better idea of what the book is about, so you can see if it’s relevant for you.

Change

We Need Change

“But our minds also need adversity, and that’s why it’s instinctual to keep creating problems-even if there aren’t any real ones in front of us. The human mind is something called antifragile, which means that it actually gets better with adversity. Like a rock that becomes a diamond under pressure or an immune system that strengthens after repeated exposure to germs, the mind requires stimulation in the form of challenge. If you deny and reject any kind of real challenge in your life, your brain will compensate by creating a problem to overcome. Except this time, there won’t be any reward at the end. It will just be you battling you for the rest of your life.”

- Brianna Wiest

Use it or lose it. One of the founding ideas of this website. Not only does that apply for our body and mental capacities but also for our potential. It’s as if deep down, we know that we are capable of building our lives the way we want them and delaying that creates inner tension. Like many Centenarians (those who live past 100) agree, you need some kind of striving to maintain your thirst for life. I’ve heard Ken from The Humble Penny state a statistic that people who take up part-time work after retirement live longer. The message here is that we need to set ourselves challenges worth conquering, because either way, we will come up with something or other to battle.

Why We Resist Change

“It might seem counterintuitive, but we are not really wired to be happy; we are wired to be comfortable, and anything that is outside of that realm of comfort feels threatening or scary until we are familiar with it.”

- Brianna Wiest

Is there anyone in your life whom you think is smart enough to know that they need change, but set in their ways enough to resist it? Comfort is a hell of a drug. I love this Wiest quote because she explains that resisting change is just a part of our nature. It’s not something to fight, we are wired to be cautious. There is something in humanising non-desirable behaviour. It’s telling people – “Hey, it’s ok. You aren’t weird, or strange, or broken. You are behaving correcting in this situation.” I’ve seen first hand how the moment we say to someone “It’s ok, there is no need for you to be different,” do they realise, they are free to move on.

How to Change in a Harmonious Way

“If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until these choices are habituated. Then you’ll just continue to do them.

- Brianna Wiest

Wiest calls them “microshifts.” Take the smallest step ever.

• If you want to get in shape, just roll out your yoga mat.

• If you want to start a business, just read one book on the topic.

• If you want to find your partner, just go on one date.

These things in themselves are unlikely to get you to the end result, but after you’ve done this microshift – something incredible happens. You’ve now got momentum. Everything we do has momentum. This is why I encourage people looking to create long-term change in their lives to do a 30 day Challenge, or heck – try even a seven day challenge. It’s much more palatable and by the end of it, you have such momentum going that taking the next small step is not only easier, it feels natural.

Processing Emotions

“When you are only able to process half of your emotions, you stunt yourself. You start going out of your way to avoid any possible situation that could bring up something frustrating or uncomfortable, because you have no tools to be able to handle that feeling. This means that you start avoiding the very risks and actions that would ultimately change your life for the better.”

- Brianna Wiest

Here Wiest clarifies that in life, there will be positive and negative emotions. Not running away from the bad ones is healthy. It reminds me of hunger and fasting. For the last two years I’ve been mostly eating once a day. The first thing people ask me is “aren’t you hungry.” The truth is no, because the body is made to fast - but their question reveals something about us. We’re scared to feel the negative. To not give it space in our lives. After two years, I’ve come a long way from getting ‘hangry’ before dinner. Yes, it’s not comfortable but I don’t think we should be comfortable every second of our lives. Being hungry is part of being human, and so is accepting the other negative emotions we will feel throughout our lives.

“Your emotional backlog is life your email inbox. It might be a simple analogy, but it’s an effective one. When you experience emotions, it’s as though you’re getting little messages from your body staking up one at a time. If you don’t ever open them, you end up with 1,000+ notifications deep, totally overlooking crucial information and important insights that you need to move your life forward. At the same time, you can’t sit around all day and respond to every message just as  it comes up; you’d never get anything done.”

- Brianna Wiest

Everything we experience has a certain processing time. Even though now we can multi-task more than ever, it takes time for us to integrate what we experienced into our mind. In other words, if we’re always adding more input, we never get to catch up to the messages our emotions are trying to tell us. Maybe being present just means we’ve caught up to all the metaphorical emails and now that there’s no emotional backlog, we can savour the moment.

“When people are crying out or acting out in their lives, they aren’t just asking for help. They are most often just asking for someone to affirm that it is okay to feel the way they do. And if they have to inflate and exaggerate circumstances for you to truly feel the weight and impact that they do? They’ll do it. They’ll do whatever it takes to get someone to say: I am so sorry for what you are going through. This is not because they are incompetent or dumb. It is because in a world that does not teach us how to adequately process our own feelings, we must often rely solely on our maladaptive coping mechanisms.”

- Brianna Wiest

What an incredible insight. You know it too, when someone close to you is going on about how bad their new job is, very often they aren’t looking for a solution – they know how to handle it, but that doesn’t make the experience suck less, nor lower their desire to express their frustration. Very often trying to troubleshoot gets in the way of them being allowed to feel this way.

Recently, I had a lovely hike with my mum but there was a moment when a touchy subject came up; my lack of desire to have children. I believe – were it not for my regular meditations, I would have lashed out in reflexive caveman self-defence rather than had the insight catch myself and come from a place of understanding ‘hey, this is new and unexpected for her – be patient.’

Conclusion

Brianna Wiest’s The Mountain Is You is akin to therapy in a small package. It makes sense why when it comes to emotions, we don’t know what to do with them, we’re never taught that. I think this has been one of her goals with writing this book. Some other notable insights I’ve had are:

• How to read our self-sabotaging behaviour

• Anxiety isn’t overthinking. It’s underthinking all the ways you can get through the situation.

• Strength isn’t how happy we are but our ability to move through challenges with fluidity and reason that doesn’t hold our potential back.

I hope you enjoyed my key takeaways, this is a link if you want to find my takeaways on other books I’ve read.

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