The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life by Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson

Stoicism involves training in resilience. To become more resilient you need to reframe and expect hardships. Since you know they are coming, you need to look for ways to learn and gain new skills when they occur. Even if you can’t find a way to gain, you are getting practice in being resilient. One way to practice is to deny yourself something important temporarily. This can help convince you that you can be more resilient.

Being kind to yourself, to strangers, to those you love, to the world every day, at every opportunity will make you happier and more connected to everything and everyone that you have ever seen. (Doug: This is what I do and it must be working as I am very happy and unstressed.

When you pay attention to one thing, other things fade into the background and often disappear. Distress is often fueled by unhelpful tinking. When that happens you need to shift attention. Attend to ambient sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and body sensations unless they are the things causing negative thinking. Shifting attention to external things is a solid technique for driving negative thought away. Play some favorite music, add some favorite smells, or give your taste buds something to attend to. (Doug: If you play a musical instrument, playing should drive negative thoughts away as you have to concentrate on what you are playing.)

Mindfulness is a type of attention that involves changing your relationship to experience such that you are accepting whatever arises, while knowing you’re having an experience. It can make unpleasant experiences less overwhelming. The meta-awareness aspect puts distance between you and experiences. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Resistance is the opposite of acceptance. There are tips here for mindfulness practice including breathing techniques. One technique is to watch negative thoughts sail away.

Here is a short review of all 12 levers. There is a concern that there are too many tools here. The authors suggest that you pick the one that speaks the loudest to you and give it a try. If it doesn’t work, don’t despair. The key thing to do is to take action! The appendix contains evidence, further resources, and notes for each lever.

Spencer is an entrepreneur and mathematician with a PhD in applied math from NYU. He’s the founder of ClearerThinking.org, a psychology education and research organization that conducts novel psychology studies and offers the public more than eight interactive educational tools used by hundreds of thousands of people. His work has been featured by numerous major media outlets such as Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Financial Times.
Jeremy is a clinical psychologist with a PhD from Flinders University, where his dissertation explored the effects of self-compassion on social anxiety. He has treated hundreds of clients across thousands of clinical hours and has published research in various academic journals. He has also experimented with many self-help techniques himself, and some of them have changed his life.