Most people I know are carrying extra weight—and I’m not talking about gaining a few pounds. I’m talking about the mental and emotional weight we lug around with us. We carry it everywhere—like a backpack full of bricks—and it weighs us down. Personally, much of my extra weight comes from the expectations I have for myself to be more—more present, more productive, more enlightened. Although these might be wonderful things to work toward, wanting to be more can easily translate to not being enough now.

In that way, each desire to be more than what I currently am equates to a few more bricks in my backpack. An extra load to haul around on my back, making life a little harder to navigate.

For me it happens to be expectations, but our habits can weigh us down too. Watching television that doesn’t nourish our souls, eating foods that don’t nourish our bodies, and holding on to thoughts that don’t nourish our minds. The effects add up. And let’s not forget the hand-me-down beliefs. Beliefs like “Good things don’t happen to people like me,” or “I’m just not lucky in love.” Or the old memories we replay, or the feelings we refuse to feel that bubble under the surface.

They are all heavy, needless weight. Just know that those bricks in your backpack aren’t real. This might feel like a moot point because they feel real. We treat them as if they are real, and we behave as if they are real. But they aren’t. You can’t literally spread them on the floor. You can’t physically weigh or measure them. They are just perception—just thought. Like all thoughts, they come and go, wax and wane, feel consuming and then float out of your mind just as swiftly as they floated in. When your thinking changes—which it always does with time—the weight of the backpack changes. When you see things in a new way, or you have an insight, or you gain new awareness, you just might realize that what felt like heavy bricks are actually more like foam bricks. Or like imaginary bricks. They aren’t dangerous in and of themselves, as long as you remember that they aren’t real. So when you are feeling particularly weighed down, take off the backpack and dump it out. Do what you can with what you see and set the rest aside. And remember, even the ones that feel very heavy are fleeting.