Hello friends of this great community; I don't usually believe in magical solutions, I am the first skeptic with those promises to “change your life 24 hours” or be “happy forever with that trick”, but I have to confess that a few months ago I made a decision, I adopted a small mental habit that has literally saved me 99% of the suffering, anxiety, and anger in my daily life, in fact, I am happier, I live calmer precisely because of this habit.

I have a lot more peace of mind thanks to this and it is such a ridiculously easy change to apply and the results are seen almost immediately, so it will probably help you, I don't want you to expect a super complex formula, a two-hour meditation routine, because it has nothing to do with that. It is basically about changing our lens, our glasses, the lens with which we interpret everything that happens to us.

The secret to stopping making life bitter is summed up in a phrase, a phrase that I recently read, which at first seemed funny to me, but then became etched in my mind, and is well known in the world of medicine that goes like this: "If you hear the sound of hooves, think of horses, not zebras." stay with that idea.

Stay with them because they are the antidote to drama, yes, let's see step by step how they can save you any day of the week, let's start, "If you hear hoofbeats, think about horses, don't think about zebras." This means that when something happens unexpectedly, something that we do not understand at that moment, the tendency of the human being, it is the tendency, it is a horrible tendency, right?

We use our creativity to think of the worst that could have happened. We immediately invented the most dramatic, strangest, most catastrophic movie of all, the most painful possible to make it hurt. So, we think of a zebra, that catastrophic place, we think of the zebra. Instead of thinking about the most logical explanation, the simplest, the most boring, which would be to think about a horse.

I'm going to give you an example that may have probably happened to you with a friend. Imagine that it's Friday, you feel like going out and you write to a friend that you haven't seen in a while, and you write "Hey, do you feel like going out to dinner today?", 2 hours pass and your friend responds, "I can't, I'm sorry." He only answers that, he stays dry, without emojis, without explanations.

So what does your brain do at that moment? You hear the sound of hooves, which is NO, but your anxious mind starts to paint a giant zebra and you think, "Wow, she's probably angry with me, I don't know what I've done, but she's angry", "I'm sure I said something that bothered her last time, she's no longer interested in our friendship, she's become a bore", she's leaving me aside.

You begin to review all your previous conversations looking for the error, searching for the error, that anguish and you decide that in the end you are not going to write to him anymore either, but what is the horse here? What is the most probable statistical reality? that she is probably tired, that she is exhausted from the work week and maybe she just wants to sleep or she doesn't have money for this month and she is embarrassed to tell you or she simply has a headache and she answered quickly like that to forget about it.

Notice the difference, if you think about the zebra, it hates me. You go to sleep sad and angry, however, if you think about the horse, well, she must be tired, you go to sleep peacefully and even feel empathy for her. Reality is usually much more boring than what your ego tells you.

Also another example, this one for those of you who work or have personal projects, imagine that you launch something new, that you publish a project, that you launch a product, that you deliver a piece of work and the results are a little lower than normal, maybe people don't like it, maybe your boss is late in responding, then your brain zebras, starts screaming, "I'm a failure, I'm not enough, no one cares about what I do, they're going to fire me, I should leave everything."

Reality, horse, however, whispers to you, "It's a holiday, people are not connected or your boss is in an eternal meeting or today simply has not been the best day, tomorrow will be another. Stop looking for conspiracies of the universe against you when in doubt always go for the simplest explanation. I promise you, I promise you that you will be right 99% of the time and you will save yourself 100% of the anguish.