The Practice of Groundedness summary

On a cool, breezy day in northern California, Stulberg went on a hike in a forest. Looking up at the massive redwood trees surrounding him, he had an epiphany.

What enables a redwood to soar hundreds of feet into the air while getting buffeted by strong, sometimes violent winds? It’s not the tree’s canopy constantly striving to grow higher and higher. It’s the roots keeping it firmly anchored to the ground.

When Stulberg began his struggle with OCD, his initial reactions were denial and wishful thinking. He told himself his intrusive thoughts and feelings were “just” in his mind – they weren’t real. Or maybe they were just the symptoms of a weird physical illness that would eventually pass.

When that didn’t happen, he switched gears from denial to resistance, trying to force his thoughts and feelings to go away. He figured that if anyone could will himself out of a mental problem, surely it was him – an expert on mental performance.

Accepting his OCD was the crucial first step on Stulberg’s road to recovery, but it was also just that: the first step. The path ahead was long and difficult. There was no overnight cure. In fact, strictly speaking, there was no cure at all. Rather than getting rid of his OCD, he had to learn how to deal with it in a healthy manner, and that meant many months of therapy and work on himself.

The details vary, but the same general lesson applies to everyone’s life. When it comes to the biggest problems and goals, the path to success and happiness is rarely short and easy. To stay on that path and keep making progress, you have to maintain focus and stick around for the long haul, which is what the next two principles of groundedness are about.

A few years ago, Stulberg received an email from a young man. He wanted to ask a question that would normally seem rather flattering: How had Stulberg achieved such an accomplished and fulfilling life by his early 30s?

Little did the man know that on that very day, Stulberg was struggling with especially acute symptoms of OCD. He was being tormented by thoughts and feelings of his life being meaningless. The email made him feel like a fraud. On the outside, he was presenting himself as a strong, successful person – an expert on performance, no less. But on the inside, he was falling apart, hardly performing at all.

After Stulberg published his essay, he was flooded with hundreds of emails from readers. They wanted to thank him for opening up about his struggle. They also wanted to share their own mental health issues. Suddenly, he felt much less alone.

That’s a powerful feeling – and there’s a reason for that. Remember those redwood trees? Stulberg learned something else about them after that epiphany he had while hiking. The reason they’re so firmly anchored to the ground isn’t that their roots are especially deep. In fact, they only descend six to twelve feet into the soil.

Among the many people who contacted Stulberg after he published his essay was a 32-year old woman named Andrea Barber. If you’re a similar age, you might know her better as Kimmy Gibbler – the character she played on the sitcom Full House back in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Her life hadn’t gone smoothly after her time as a child star on a hit TV show. For years, she’d struggled with depression and anxiety. Like Stulberg she eventually found help in many forms, including therapy and medication. But there was one thing that helped her more than anything else – and it was also the thing she was most eager to share with Stulberg.