“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Why it was said

Hamlet says this to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after they tell him they do not find Denmark the prison he does. Jonathan Haidt sets the line at the head of the chapter of The Happiness Hypothesis (2006) on changing your mind, where he moves from ancient wisdom to meditation and cognitive therapy.

What it actually means

Haidt takes the line seriously and then qualifies it. Much of our distress does come from interpretation, and both Buddhist practice and modern cognitive therapy work by changing how events are appraised. But Haidt also argues that the mind is not fully under conscious control: people differ in their emotional baseline, and reasoning alone rarely overrides a deep reaction. That is why he favours methods that work on the automatic side of the mind (meditation, cognitive therapy and, in some cases, medication) over simple willpower. Read that way, the quotation is less a promise that you can think your way to happiness than a pointer to where change has to happen: in the habitual interpretations you make without noticing.

How to use it

1. 1When an event upsets you, write the event and your interpretation of it as two separate lines.
2. 2For that interpretation, write a second, equally plausible reading of the same event.