SECOND THING TO TRY Talk to your internal voices The voices of power, reason, avoidance, and possibility aren’t the same in each of our heads. It’s important that you take these skeletal descriptions and figure out how they actually sound to you. (Sometimes you can trace the voices back to people in your life; I often joke with friends that parenti

How does the voice of reason get around this problem? Simple: with numbers.

Most of us have never received guidance about how to interpret these spikes of anxiety, and thus we often don’t remember them or assign meaning to them. But we should, because these sparks are the blazing signposts that tell us that something important to us feels threatened.

MISCONCEPTION 1 Arguments Are Bad They’re not bad, but they can be unproductive. We aren’t taught how to argue productively.

don’t arguments feel unavoidable in the moment? It’s true: in the moment, arguments perform a crucial—and underappreciated—job for us by waving a flag that something important to us is being endangered, whether it’s a personal preference, a hunch about the best strategy for meeting a shared goal, or a core value of ours. This endangerment sparks st

How we argue matters. Luckily, this is a solvable problem. We can learn this skill.

listen to whatever voice is in your head for a moment and try to determine if this is a voice of power, reason, avoidance, or possibility. Then ask it some questions: What’s urgent right now? What’s threatening right now? What could I be doing right now instead of this?

If you both settle on a question about what is true, you can ask: Is there a source of information we both trust that could give us the answer to this question? What qualifies as a trustworthy source?

Disagreements about information are by far the simplest conflicts to resolve, because there’s a source of truth out there, somewhere within reach.