If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer… But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore.
— Thich Nhát Hanh
In 1947, Earl Tupper invented Tupperware, the translucent, airtight containers that would come to be a staple in American homes everywhere. Tupper’s epiphany came when he realized he could use an industrial waste product called “slag“—which was black, clumpy, and greasy—and turn it into flexible, durable plastic. The realization that he could transform something unwanted into a useful product made Tupperware, at its peak, into a fourteen billion dollar business.
We’ve all got slag in our lives. I’m talking about the emotional waste products that come from living through different experiences. These are the black, clumpy, greasy parts of ourselves that we often hide from others: the defenses, neuroses, patterns and habitual tendencies we develop over time. But these end up having a profound impact on who we become. They are the containers within which we hold the experience of our lives. And as the above quote from beloved monk Thích Nhất Hạnh demonstrates, they determine the quality of our reality.
Your Brain is a Prediction Machine
An emerging field of neuroscience called predictive processing suggests something counterintuitive and radical: we don’t react to the world as it happens. Instead, our brain constantly predicts what’s coming next using past experience, then adjusts those predictions base on incoming sensory data.
“Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain,” writes the neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, in her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. “It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all of your experiences and guides all your actions… and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.”
We tend to feel like we’re reacting to what’s actually happening in the world. But what’s really happening is that our brain is drawing on our deep backlog of experience and memory, constructing what it believes to be our reality, cross-referencing it with incoming data from our heart, lungs, metabolism, immune system, as well as the surrounding world, and adjusting as needed. In other words, in a process that even Dr. Barrett admits “defies common sense,” we are almost always acting on the predictions that your brain is making about what’s going to happen next, not reacting to experience as it unfolds.
“Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain.”
This is why you have a biological response to seeing a snake on a hike—pupils dilate, cortisol spikes, heart rate elevates, all of which you might sense as a jump scare—even if the “snake’ turns out to be a stick. It’s also why you have an almost visceral reaction to a sentence that’s missing its final
The implications of this theory are profound. It suggests that both our expectations and our feeling states influence the reality we ultimately experience. A particularly anxious or neurotic person will experience the world as more threatening, not necessarily because the world is more threatening, but because their default setting (hyper vigilance) primes their brain to predict a more alarming world.
Your external conditioning—the expectations, scripts, and stories that you’ve been given by some combination of experience, society, parents, and friends—becomes the lens through which you see the world. Hence The Tupperware Theory of Everything: the “slag” of your past determines how you experience—or contain—reality’s present and future unfolding. It builds the container through which you hold all that happens to you.
At first, this is unnerving. First of all, it doesn’t line up with the sense of free will we normally believes ourselves to have. Secondly, most of our external conditioning is something that happens to us, not something we willingly participate in. But I’d argue it’s also liberating: the moment you see the ways in which your conditioning shapes your perception is the very moment you begin to have agency and autonomy in changing it.
“The actions and the experiences that your brain makes today become your brain's predictions for tomorrow,” Dr. Feldman Barrett told me, back in 2020. “So making an effort to cultivate new experiences and learn new things today is an investment in who you will be tomorrow. Some people have control over many things in their lives, and some people have less control because of their life circumstances, but everyone can control something.”
Practicing Your ABCs
In her book Everyday Zen, the spiritual teacher Charlotte Joko Beck calls the practice of expanding our capacity practicing our ABCs: building A Bigger Container. It starts by observing our habitual reactions without being consumed by them.
“What is created, what grows, is the amount of life I can hold without it upsetting me, dominating me,” she writes. “At first this space is quite restricted, then it’s a bit bigger, and then it’s bigger still.”
The epigraph above is about building A Bigger Container: salt poured into a cup doesn’t have the same effect as salt poured into a river, because more space means less salinity. This is true of life, too. You can think of life’s difficulties as its salt. The bigger our capacity to handle difficulty, the less likely we are to be rattled by its ups and downs.
“What must be increased is the ability to observe. What we observe is always secondary. It isn’t important that we are upset; what is important is the ability to observe the upset.”
You know you’ve hit your limit when you feel squeezed—that moment before you spill over into a temper tantrum, panic attack, or simply snap at someone. This is why metacognition—the ability to see one’s own thoughts—is such a powerful tool. It allows you to observe when you’re reaching the limits of your container, so that instead of reacting habitually to your emotions, you can respond autonomously and constructively.
“If I can observe my mind and body in an angry state… it shows me that I am other than my anger, bigger than my anger, and this knowledge enables me to build A Bigger Container, to grow. So what must be increased is the ability to observe. What we observe is always secondary. It isn’t important that we are upset; what is important is the ability to observe the upset.”
Yerkes-Dodson Law & The Science of Growth
Sports psychology offers a helpful framework here. Above is a graph of the Yerkes-Dodson law, which shows that we need just enough stress to perform optimally. Too little challenge and we’re bored; too much and we break down. In order to grow the capacity to handle challenge, a performer has to spend enough time in the orange and red zones to expose themselves to difficulty, but not stay there so long that they burn out.
Consider a six-minute miler who hopes to drop their time to 5:30. They don’t just go out and run a 5:30 mile. That might lead to injury. They run at a 5:30 mile pace for shorter intervals—maybe a quarter mile or half mile—with rest periods in between. Then they gradually extend the length of the intervals over weeks and months. It’s constant, incremental exposure to elevated stress.
The tricky part, though—as any runner who is new to speed work knows—is that your brain is designed for survival, not nuance. Before you train it, it only knows “safety” and “danger.” Part of what you’re doing by running at a faster pace for a shorter period is quite literally training you brain to understand that running at a pace that feels too hard (aka “dangerous”) is actually doable and won’t kill you. You are improving your cardiovascular capacity, but, perhaps more importantly, you are teaching your brain the subtle difference between productive challenge and debilitating stress.
I think of applying this same type of calibration to my emotional and psychological life, too. In her book “Emotional Agility,” Susan David describes this moment of moving to the outer edge of the “optimum” zone and into the “stress” zone as being “whelmed.” You’re not comfortable, but you’re also not overwhelmed. This is when we are reaching the limit of what we can hold. We feel squeezed. But much like the runner who trains himself to stay with a faster pace for a quarter mile, if we can begin to recognize this feeling of being “whelmed” as an opportunity for growth rather than a trigger to panic, we can begin to increase our emotional capacity. We can build a bigger container.
What does this actually look like in real life?
I have pretty significant OCD tendencies, so I constantly have unwanted, intrusive thoughts that require compulsive checking in order to make them go away. Some of these are benign and simple enough to make disappear. Every time I leave the apartment I panic that I left the stove on even if I haven’t used it in days. That’s resolved with an easy check. Others are more complicated. Basically every time I’m in a car and take my eyes off the road or let my focus wane for a second, I imagine I’ve run somebody over. If I were to circle back and retrace my route—which I have done countless times—I’d never get anywhere.
One of the most effective cognitive behavioral therapy treatments, especially for OCD and other anxiety disorders, is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), in which a patient is gradually exposed, in a safe environment, to situation or objects that trigger their anxiety response such that they can learn that the stimuli isn’t as dangerous as they fear. In other words, they’re brought ever so slightly into the “whelmed” zone. This framing has been extremely helpful in moments where I feel the pull to perform a compulsive ritual. I remind myself that not listening to it is the emotional equivalent of running a quarter mile at a really difficult pace. It’s one rep. I can’t do it every time. But over time, stacking rep after rep, I’ve increased my capacity to sit with my discomfort and anxiety.
You don’t have to struggle with anxiety or OCD to use this technique, though. In the age of digital distraction, we so often reach for our phones as a way of pacifying any type of emotional dysregulation—the discomfort of boredom, while waiting in line at a coffee shop or for the elevator to arrive, for example. Sitting with that feeling, and not giving in to the urge, that, too, is a form of going into the “whelmed” zone. Even if you’re the most emotionally present, balanced, and healthy person of all time, this “whelmed” framework is one I’ve found helpful in physical pursuits. Pushing for one more rep at the gym, or maintaining a hard pace on the track for ten to fifteen more seconds, these, too, are ways of expanding your upper limit.
In each case, you’re building a bigger container.
Kintsugi & Oryoki
There are two ancient practices that help to bring these ideas home for me.
The first is a Japanese bowl-mending technique called kintsugi, in which shattered pottery is repaired using gold lacquer to reattach broken pieces. The process creates a bowl that is no less effective, and is more unique, for its damage.
The other concept is a traditional Zen eating practice called oryoki. The word translates to “vessel that contains just enough” or “container for receiving the right amount,” and describes a ritualized meal in which participants are asked only to fill their bowls with exactly the amount of food they need. It is a practice of knowing your capacity and its limits.
These two ideas together are a beautiful summation of what I’m hoping I’ve explained here today, which I’m calling my Tupperware Theory of Everything:
The ways in which we’re broken (our “slag”) and come back together give us our distinctiveness, and determine the size and shape of the container within which we contain life’s vicissitudes.
Becoming aware of the limits of that container and working, slowly, over time, to incrementally expand them outward, so that you can have more space with which to maneuver, is a lifelong practice.
We are forever engaged in the practice of trying to create more space in our lives. There’s a very simple definition of enlightenment I’ve always liked that sums this up nicely: “Lots of space, nothing holy.”