Many of my clients ask me for memorable maxims so that they can tell themselves better stories about themselves. It is hard to choose just one, and mine have (thankfully) evolved over the years. When I was young, I wanted to get a ‘reality continues to ruin my life’ tattoo. Then, having become slightly more mature, I thought about an ‘amor fati’ design in my Stoic phase, but I’m now very glad I got neither of these.

For a while, I believed that the most important thing we can do is to learn all the time, especially about ourselves, and I loved this quote, commonly attributed to Einstein: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.’ The biggest existential crime seemed to me *not *to learn from experience. We all have some old, irrational patterns that don’t serve us anymore and that we keep repeating, consciously or unconsciously. We may think of it as repetition compulsion, hard-wiring, bad taste in partners, or as trying to undo and change trauma patterns by finally succeeding in mastering them.

I also love Gregory Bateson’s ‘Knowledge that isn’t in the body is just rumour’, because it illustrates so powerfully the difference between knowing something cognitively and allowing it truly to sink in and change the structure of our feelings, in the form of embodied, somatic wisdom. There is a crucial difference between head knowledge and felt, lived, truly integrated knowledge that shapes how we act and feel.

And I love Pema Chödrön’s phrase, ‘Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.’ That is so true for most of our psychological challenges—especially for burnout.

But if I had to choose the three mental mantras that are most helpful for telling ourselves better stories about ourselves (and others), they are the ones below. They are the core philosophical pillars on which my own more compassionate self-stories rest—the ones that bring me self-acceptance and inner calm, and that allow me to show up with openness, empathy, and curiosity in my life.

1. We are not our thoughts.

For me, this ancient insight is nothing less than lifesaving. As someone who has struggled with toxic self-stories, negative thoughts, and a pretty cruel superego all my life, this remains the most soothing mantra of them all. What my mind habitually tells me – all the unhelpful self-stories and harmful interpretations it comes up with – are not the truth. Instead, they are just that: stories, thoughts, interpretations. Mere words. Old tales. Whenever I recognize that, they cannot harm me so much.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches us how to deploy this crucial metacognitive skill in our everyday lives. ACT assumes there is a permanent, observing self which is capable of “de-fusing” from the impermanent chatter of our minds. Our observing self can be trained to turn our stories, thoughts, emotions, and judgments into the object of our discerning attention, rather than allowing them to determine our experience and behavior.

So, rather than taking the story “I am unlovable and nobody likes me” at face value, for example, we can train ourselves to think, “I am telling myself the story that I am unlovable.” Or, even better: “I notice that I am telling myself the *story *that I am unlovable.” In that way, we create a crucial gap between ourselves and these thoughts. We label them as stories, which is what they are. They are not the terrible truth about ourselves. It is in this gap and the act of “de-fusing” from our stories and thoughts that our power to make wiser decisions and tell ourselves better narratives lies.

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Ultimately, I believe that most mental suffering is an inability to differentiate between helpful and unhelpful stories. When our brains turn into our enemies, bombarding us with toxic stories and self-sabotaging interpretations, and we no longer have the necessary distance to recognise them as such, we are in trouble.

2. It is not my fault, but it is my responsibility.

I love this framing, which combines Buddhist and Stoic wisdom. Sometimes people have a negative reaction to psychoanalytic or even to neuro-cognitive self-narratives, thinking that they abdicate us from responsibility and that we might use them as an excuse to stop trying to improve ourselves, or even use them to tell ourselves a victim story. As in, “because of my various traumata and my upbringing, I am broken and doomed and will never be able to do x or z.” Or, “my brain is wired differently, and therefore I simply can’t do x or z.”

I see the main function of psychoanalytic and neuro-cognitive insights into how we have come to be who we are as enriching our self-knowledge. They allow us to understand our patterns and where they come from, so that we can tell ourselves less self-blaming and more compassionate stories about ourselves. Many things we grapple with really *aren’t *our fault. But we are still responsible for dealing with our unique challenges as best as we can. And we can only truly and sustainably change from a place of self-knowledge, self-acceptance and self-compassion.

3. The aim of all inner work is not feeling good, but feeling good.

This is a radical counter-proposal to the wearying dictate of the happiness industry that makes us believe we should all feel amazing all the time. No one does, and it’s not a realistic goal. There are two sides to the feeling coin: In order to be a person able to feel joy, gratitude, love, connection, exhilaration and excitement, we also need to accept that we will occasionally feel all of their opposites. We can’t just cherry-pick the positive feelings. Either we feel, or we don’t feel, and if we do feel, we will feel everything on the vast spectrum of human emotions from time to time.

Of course, we prefer the pleasant feelings, and ideally, we will experience many more of them than of the more challenging ones. But we can’t avoid the latter if we aim to be truly and fully alive. We can’t ever control what we feel. But we can choose what to do with our feelings. It is a great practice simply to accept and name what we are feeling. We can, for example, say to ourselves, ‘I notice I’m feeling anger’, or ‘I notice I’m feeling sadness,’ and cultivate curiosity about it. We don’t always have to act on our feelings. We may choose to do so sometimes, but we don’t have to. Sometimes, we can just observe our feelings and sit with them, and watch how they evolve over time.