CHAPTER 5
easing “the overwhelm”
Before you allow yourself to question your entire life and any decision you have ever made, check: hormones, sleep deprivation level, messiness of house, whining level of children, ridiculousness of colleagues. If none of these is the guilty party responsible for your unhappiness, then you may indeed have bigger problems.
—Kristin van Ogtrop, Just Let Me Lie Down
Although it’s often less fun and more effort in the short run than fostering positive emotions, we can also increase our happiness and stress resilience by ridding ourselves of unnecessary negative emotions.
I say unnecessary because all negative emotions are not to be negated. It is necessary for us to grieve our losses, to feel afraid when we are in danger, to feel fury when we are wronged. But sometimes our negative feelings aren’t like the keel of our ship. They aren’t helping us navigate or stay balanced, and they are more like the anchor dragging us down. Three negative circumstances in particular are big anchors for many people: overwhelm, dread, and rumination.
DEALING WITH “THE OVERWHELM”
The most anchor-like negative emotions for me are feelings of exhaustion and being overwhelmed: the sense that I can’t possibly get everything done. Brigid Schulte, in her important and practical book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, documents dozens of scientific research threads indicating that most well-educated people in the United States—indeed, in the industrialized world—feel caught in the snare of overwork and exhaustion at work and at home. Two-thirds of us working folks regularly feel like we don’t have enough time to get our work done, and 94 percent have felt overwhelmed “to the point of incapacitation.”
There are two somewhat counterintuitive facts about “The Overwhelm,” as Shulte calls it, that are important to recognize if we are going to reduce or even eliminate the negative feelings that come from being overwhelmed and exhausted.
First, feeling overwhelmed prevents us from working and living from our sweet spot. In fact, it makes us dumber than if we were stoned or deprived of an entire night’s sleep! It also makes us irritable, irrational, anxious, and impulsive. Neuroscientists call the state of feeling overwhelmed “cognitive overload.” It impairs our ability to think creatively, plan, organize, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, resist temptations, learn new things easily, speak fluently, remember important social information (like the name of our boss’s daughter), and control our emotions. In other words, it impairs basically everything we need to do in a given day.
Second, although we experience The Overwhelm individually, it is also a social and cultural phenomenon. Sociologists and time-study scholars have been documenting the rise of our modern busyness culture—the perception that those who are busy are important and powerful while those who are idle (or even those who make time for leisure) are underemployed, lazy slackers whose lives lack meaning and relevance. It is hard to overstate just how pervasive and pernicious this cultural climate is. How much we’ve got going on has become an indication of our social status. Like the herd animals we are, we conform to this misperception.
We humans are hardwired to remain with the herd even when we know, on some level, that the herd is leading us in the wrong direction. Say a researcher shows us two lines on a piece of paper, and one line is clearly shorter than the other. Then she asks us which line is longer. Alone, we will, of course, point to the obviously longer line: It’s not a difficult question or a visual trick. But, if we are in a group of people who have already indicated to us that the shorter line is longer, three-quarters of us will not only say that the shorter line is longer but actually believe that the wrong answer is right. Really. That experiment has actually been done!
Here’s the thing: When it comes to our cultural beliefs that busy people are high status, the herd is leading us in the wrong direction, off a cliff. Busyness is not a marker of intelligence, importance, or success. Taken to an extreme, it is more likely a marker of conformity or powerlessness or fear. We often work long hours in part because we are afraid that we will lose our job or we won’t have enough money to have all the latest stuff. We schedule our kids in every enrichment activity possible because we are afraid that they won’t develop the mastery, intelligence, and athletic prowess they need to get into the right schools or land the right jobs. We “helicopter parent” in our new time-and-energy-intensive ways because we are afraid that our children will fall down or be average or simply feel discomfort, boredom, or disappointment.
All this is to say that easing the overwhelm in your life may mean straying from your herd, which can be a terrifying experience. Whenever I notice that I need to stray from the herd—to defy a cultural norm—I need to muster extra courage (more on how to do that in Chapter 9) and fully acknowledge that it can be pretty frightening to do things in ways that will likely be perceived by others as threatening, dangerous, or just plain stupid. We are often dealing with two types of fears. One is conscious, like a fear that our kids aren’t going to get into college; the other is more subliminal, rooted in our herd mentality, our desire not to be different or left behind. When I recognize that I’m dealing with both types of fears, I somehow feel more able to do the right thing.
Without further ado, here are my favorite strategies for systematically eliminating the things in life that overwhelm you.
DECIDE ON YOUR FIVE TOP PRIORITIES AND SAY “NO” TO EVERYTHING ELSE
“Saying ‘no’ has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined. ‘No’ guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations,” Kevin Ashton wrote in a Medium post called “Creative People Say No.”
“We are not taught to say ‘no.’ We are taught not to say ‘no.’ ‘No’ is rude. ‘No’ is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence. ‘No’ is for drugs and strangers with candy.”
And yet we can’t do everything, so we must sometimes say “no.” But in order to even be able to say “no,” we need to have an effective filter for all the invitations that come our way: Invitations to attend and contribute, requests for help, opportunities to join or to do—even for those things that we think we should do that don’t come from any outside source but rather from a place inside ourselves. Before we can muster the strength to say “no,” we need to be totally clear about what to say “no” to.
Perhaps you think it would be a good idea to get a master’s degree at night, or maybe you’re wondering if you should sign your kid up for basketball, or you’re debating about your desire to keep going to the book club you’ve been part of for a decade. These types of questions aren’t about how best to manage our time, or about whether or not there is enough time. They are about our priorities. Because we can’t do everything, we need to make choices. Which means that to the extent that we can, we need to say “no” to all the things that don’t reflect our values and highest priorities.
Which begs the questions: What do we most value in life? What are our tippy-top priorities? How can we spend our time in a way that best reflects our ideals?
Knowing the answers to those questions is often not so simple. My friend Michelle Gale, an outstanding executive coach and former Twitter executive, knows a thing or two about managing The Overwhelm. She encouraged me to do what she does: Sit down every year and write a simple intention (or personal mission statement) to use as a litmus test or filter for all new tasks, projects, and activities. Hers is “I’m committed to raising consciousness in myself and the world through my practice, my community, and my work.” This is a lofty statement, but having talked with her about it, I know that she is clear about what “raising my consciousness” really means to her, so it guides her well. Before she puts anything on her to-do list or commits to anything, she runs it through this filter (which she has committed to memory, by the way). She asks herself if the activity, task, or project will help her raise consciousness in herself or her world. If it won’t, Gale says “no,” swiftly and without guilt.
I know, I know. Writing an intention like that, or a personal mission statement, sounds hard. And you know what? It can be. It can be hard to know what our life’s purpose is, what guiding principles we should use to manage our time. (If you are struggling with this, I’d encourage you to work with a life coach, or join a group that explores this at your church or community center. This sort of self-exploration is richly rewarding.)
I don’t have a personal mission statement like Gale; clearly I’m a wordier (and less evolved) kind of gal. To be honest, I wasn’t able to even articulate my most important priorities until nothing seemed to be working in my life. This point came several years ago when I was sick all the time and totally exhausted, a financially strapped single mother trying to bootstrap a new career and family together. I realized then, at an all-time low, that I needed to identify my priorities and start scheduling my time accordingly.
I once saw time-management guru Peter Bregman, author of 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, advise people on Fox Business News to pick their top five priorities and then spend 95 percent of their time doing only those activities, saying “no” to virtually everything else. This idea made a lasting impression on me because I—working single mom that I was—was convinced that there was no way I could spend 95 percent of my time doing things that fell into my top priorities. I was too busy just making sure the trains ran on time!
But it turns out that now I do (and I’ll share how I managed that below). To give you an idea of how this worked for me, here are my five main priorities this year, in order of importance:
(1) Maintain my own health and happiness. Because this is my top priority, I first schedule the things that most affect my happiness. I make time for sleep, exercise, and my friends and family, and I say “no” to those activities—fun as they might be—that interfere with my sleep, exercise, and time with my closest friends. When I skip exercise or shortchange myself on sleep, I might cross more off my task list or answer more emails, but that puts my first priority—staying healthy and happy—at risk. And if I get sick or so stressed-out that my energy is drained? Well, that puts my other priorities at risk, too. So I always remind myself: It takes less time to exercise in the morning than it does to recover from the flu, should I get run down. (This doesn’t mean that I’ll never catch another cold, but it does mean that I’m less likely to!)
As I mentioned, when I first started thinking about my top priorities, I wasn’t even coming close to spending 95 percent of my time on them. In addition to my top five priorities, I had a coaching practice as well as a half-time position at the Greater Good Science Center. Spending 95 percent of my time on my top five priorities leaves only about five hours a week for other things. Something often has to give; for me, it was my health. Like many working mothers, I had put my own well-being on the back burner, never exercising and rarely getting enough sleep. I was sick all the time.
Guess what? Now I spend closer to 98 percent of my time doing something that falls into one of those five buckets. The only things on my to-do list this week that aren’t in a top-priority category are:
• Rent a car for an upcoming trip to Ojai, for a board meeting
• Attend a Greater Good Science Center meeting
• Return a call about a fund-raising effort I’m involved in
(When I look at this list, I realize that I could delegate the first item to my assistant or intern. More about that below.)
How we schedule our priorities doesn’t have to be entirely proportional. We might value family most in life, but spend the biggest chunk of our time working. The key is alignment with our values. Does work support the life you have with your family? Or do you expect family to support your work life?
To truly align our time (and the activities we fill it with), we need to give up the three big “scarcity lies” that our culture teaches. As outlined by Lynne Twist in The Soul of Money, the lies are:
• “There isn’t enough”
• “More is better”
• “It just is the way it is and I don’t have the power to change it”
First, we need to give up the idea that there isn’t enough time for the things that matter most in life. That belief (or, more accurately, that resignation) is a quick ticket to joylessness.
To truly align our time with our values, we need to lay claim to a place of time sufficiency, even if we have to will it into existence. We need to understand that we have enough time to be successful at work, to find happiness and meaning, to have rich and rewarding relationships with our friends and family members. There actually is enough time in the day—when we act on our priorities, with discipline, and when we accept that an authentic “good enough” is often better than a false “great at everything.”
We also need to give up the deep-seated conviction that more is better: more work, more enrichment activities for the kids, more vacation time, and more stuff—even things like more “quality time” with our kids, more friendships, and more social functions. Parents spend more time today with their kids than they ever have, even when we compare mothers today to stay-at-home mothers in the 1950s. Yet we feel that even more time together would be better. When we realize that more is not always better, we can recognize when we already have enough.
Equally important, we need to question our belief that “this is just the way things are”—that there isn’t any time for friendship, that we really are okay with the nanny or day care doing all the fun stuff with the kids, that we’ll go on vacation with our family next year or the year after. We are not powerless to the market forces and consumer culture that create pressure to prioritize work and money, but when we believe and act as though we are, we cannot make our time reflect our values. The most important thing? Remembering that we get to decide, for the most part, how we spend our time.
Once we are scheduling our time from a place of sufficiency, we can add back time for our highest priorities. I’m not saying that time is an unlimited resource and we can waste it or that we will never have to say “no.” Rather, I’m saying that there is enough time when we manage our priorities carefully.
STOP MULTI-TASKING
Unless you’re a professional juggler—a clown or performance artist who must toss multiple balls in the air and pay attention to them simultaneously—multi-tasking talent is nothing to brag about. When we focus on just one task at a time, we’re actually more productive in the long run and less exhausted at the end of the day. This is because multi-tasking exhausts more energy and time than single-tasking does. Take it from productivity experts Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy:
Distractions are costly: A temporary shift in attention from one task to another—stopping to answer an email or take a phone call, for instance—increased the amount of time necessary to finish the primary task by as much as 25 percent, a phenomenon known as “switching time.”
Despite the cold, hard facts, I often find it harder to single-task than to multi-task. For example, I have to totally remove all distractions to single-task. I do my best writing at a desk I’ve set up in a large closet that doesn’t get good phone reception. I group my daily tasks into two categories: “Think Work” and “Action Items.” Then I block off time on my calendar for both things. I do my Think Work at the closet desk totally uninterrupted, setting a timer so that I take a break every sixty to ninety minutes.
My Action Items take less focus, but I still tackle them one at a time in sequence—not parallel. Unless I’m working my way through my email, my email application is closed. I answer the phone only for scheduled calls. I leave my iPhone in do-not-disturb mode (so that I can see if my kids’ school is calling, but that’s about it), and I reply to texts when I’m taking a break. Having these rules for myself has dramatically increased my productivity and decreased the panicky feelings that I don’t have enough time to get it all done.
Sound neurotically organized and focused? Believe me, it didn’t come easily. I work from home most of the time, so the pull of all the things that I could be doing instead of writing is usually more powerful than any intention I have to just focus. (Some of the things that tempted me this morning were the laundry, the breakfast dishes that didn’t fit in the dishwasher, chatting with my neighbor, retrieving the dog’s ball from behind the sofa so he stopped barking at it, email, texts, a quick thank-you note, bills, yesterday’s mail, and chatting with my husband on the phone. I’m naturally very distractible and messy—a “big-picture thinker, but not so much a detail person,” as my father would often euphemize when I was younger. So I had to carefully construct a work structure for myself that would support focus rather than allow me to hop from one easy but not important task to another.)
Outsmarting overwhelm in this way—by forcing myself to stop multi-tasking—was a process. I had to create a formal ritual to get myself into the zone. As I’m brewing myself a second cup of coffee or tea, I take a quick peek at my calendar and email on my phone. Is there anything urgent? The idea isn’t to respond to emails; it’s a check that keeps me from worrying while I write that I should have checked my email, and keeps me from wondering if there is anything on my calendar that I should be preparing for. Then I head up to my closet office, with my coffee and a full glass of water. (I’ve also had a snack and used the restroom. I’m like a toddler going on a car trip.) I do a quick cleanup, removing yesterday’s coffee cup from my desk, closing books left open, putting pens back in their place. I put all visual clutter in deceivingly neat piles. I put my phone in do-not-disturb mode, and close any unnecessary applications or windows that are open on my computer. I launch Pandora and choose the “listen while writing” radio station I’ve created (mostly classical piano because it doesn’t distract me like music with lyrics does). I tell Buster, my trusty canine colleague, to go to his “place”—a bed right next to me where he’s trained to stay while I work.
I write at a standing desk that has a small treadmill under it. When I’m ready to start writing, I start the treadmill. Walking slowly while I work has a lot of positive outcomes; one of them is that it more or less chains me to my desk. Finally, I launch the app 30/30, which times my Think Work and break time.
At first, I actually felt guilty for carving out such dedicated time to focus on my “most important” work. Perhaps that sounds ridiculous to you—it’s most important, after all! But honestly, I felt like I should be more responsive to my colleagues’ emails throughout the day, and I shouldn’t be creating the scheduling nightmares that blocking off dedicated work time does because it’s basically at the same time every day. So it’s very hard to schedule a meeting with me in the morning, when I do my best Think Work, or in the afternoon, when I pick up my children from school. This means that it’s pretty hard to get me to go to a meeting.
So how did I ultimately let go of the guilt? I switched herds. Instead of trying to conform to the norms of the ideal office worker (which made me feel a little terrified anytime I was straying from that path), I started to see myself as an artist. I read everything I could about other writers’ and artists’ work habits, and talked to a half dozen successful writers about how they get things done. Guess what? They have writing rituals just like the one that I set up. They had already carved the path. Following my new herd made the whole thing easier for my inner elephant. Even if you aren’t self-employed like me, I welcome you to join my herd.
Even if you aren’t a writer or an artist or working from home, you may need to switch herds, too. Who in your office seems to be in a groove? Who is clearly producing great work through great focus? How can you lead your existing herd in this new direction? Know that when you stray from your herd—when you defy social norms—it will be threatening to many people. Presenting the science around performance and productivity can help.
My extensive pre-work ritual is what it takes for me to be able to establish the focus I need to hit my stride at work, to get into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.
[A] person in flow is completely focused…Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification.
When I go through my pre-work ritual, I can get into a flow state fairly automatically. Although the neuroscience on this is embryonic, I do believe that my pre-work focusing ritual helps my brain produce the type of brain wave (gamma) that puts me squarely in my working sweet spot. Gamma waves produce the most brain power with the least strain. This is similar to how my bedtime ritual helps me slip easily into a deep sleep (when my brain produces delta waves).
Even though I preach the evils of multi-tasking at work, I actually double-task all the time. For starters, I walk on the treadmill while I work. I also sweep dog hair off the floor while I talk on the phone. I fold laundry while I watch TV. I listen to audiobooks while I drive. I return work calls while I walk the dog. I do mindless food prep (washing and chopping vegetables—anything I can do on autopilot) while helping the kids with their homework. I chat with my friends on the phone while washing dishes or tidying the house. I brush the dog while going over the weekly schedule with the sitter. I doodle in meetings. I’m sometimes less accurate while multi-tasking in this way, but errors in these types of activities are not all that important. Notice that my multi-tasking combines one intellectual endeavor with some kind of mindless or physical effort. In my experience, we get into trouble only when we try to do two “thought things” at once.
ELIMINATE “JUNK STIMULI”
Another way to eliminate feelings of overwhelm in our lives is to get rid of a lot of the “junk stimuli” that comes our way throughout the day. We are bombarded, day and night, with loads of crap: TV ads (or even news!) we aren’t interested in that we watch anyway. A mailbox full of advertising and other “dead tree marketing.” Emails upon emails mingling with Facebook posts and tweets and texts.
Left unchecked, all this junk stimuli will bleed us dry. It’s exhausting even as it is often entertaining. Do a quick audit of all the clutter in your life. Start with your environment. Where is there junk stimuli—stuff that makes you feel tired when you see, hear, or otherwise experience it? Consider visual clutter, like that overstuffed kitchen drawer you open every day looking for a paper clip. Ponder auditory clutter, like whiny kids who make you tense or the neighbor who really does need to fix his car alarm. Think about online and media distractions. (You might enjoy them, but for mental health and personal energy conservation, consider indulging in them only occasionally, as a treat.) Then follow this three-part plan to eliminate junk stimuli.
FIRST, RID YOUR ENVIRONMENT OF PHYSICAL CLUTTER
• Clean out one drawer or shelf every day religiously until everything in your home has a place—and everyone in your household knows where that place is. Commit to five minutes a day, every day, until the job is done.
• Find a large box for donations or other giveaways, and put it somewhere accessible until you are finished with this process. Donate or recycle anything that hasn’t been used for a year. This goes for clothes, dishes, books, furniture (yes, furniture), games, toys, shelf-stable foods and spices, the super-awesome tortilla maker you’ve really wanted to try out since you picked it up in the 1980s, and that tent you haven’t pitched for three years. Remember that the stuff you keep is for today, not some imagined future. Be ruthless. You will thank me later every time you open a tidy, nearly empty drawer or cupboard. (Okay, okay: I do acknowledge that some folks have a stronger hoarder instinct than others. It’s true, you never really know when you will want to read that book or pitch that tent. But there is a cost involved to keeping those possibilities alive. Remember that these things contribute to The Overwhelm, and overwhelm makes us dumb, irritable, and impulsive.)
NOW, LIMIT THE AMOUNT OF STUFF YOU LET BACK INTO YOUR HOUSE
• Cancel all nonessential snail mail. Sign up to get your bills online. Cancel all catalogs and junk mail. (I like the free app PaperKarma: You take a picture of catalogs, mailers, credit-card offers, phone books—and it gets you off the mailing lists.) You can get everything you need online or in a digital version, including ticket information from your local theater, updates from nonprofits you love, and concert schedules. Without PaperKarma, you may have to call the sources of the snail mail to ask them to remove you from their lists; I’ve had to plead and beg in the past (despite what I think are federal laws). Again, be ruthless when you ask to be removed from these lists. All that direct mail is clutter.
• Put a recycling bin right by the door that you walk through with the mail, and don’t open junk mail. Photograph it for PaperKarma, then rip it up and recycle it.
• Before you go shopping, take time to make a list of what you need. I’ve found that having a list can drastically decrease the number of items I buy on impulse that I don’t really need. (I also have a better chance of moving through the store efficiently when I have a plan, thereby making up the time I spent making a list.)
FINALLY, GET RID OF ALL UNNEEDED MEDIA AND AUDIBLE STIMULI
• Turn off the ringer on your landline, if you’ve still got one and you still get junk calls (even though you are on the Do Not Call registry).1 Have friends call your cell phone, and use your landline only to check messages or dial out.
• Turn off your TV unless you specifically intend to watch something. Don’t expose yourself to advertising; it is junk stimulus in and of itself. Record your shows and fast-forward through the ads.
• Identify sources of irritation or unwanted stimulation in your household, like whining, too-loud music, background television, or a pet hamster that runs endlessly on a squeaky wheel (and smells bad, to boot). Make a concrete plan for how you will eliminate these junk stimuli over the next few weeks. I’m not suggesting that you get rid of the hamster; just put it in a place where it won’t bother you. (And do grease that annoying wheel!) And I’m not saying to get rid of the whining kid. Instead, make a plan to eliminate the whining. Some of these things will not be easy. See my other book, Raising Happiness, to help deal with whining kids.
• If your home or work space is noisy, play soothing music or play white noise in the background. Ironically, it will help filter out distracting noise. This is also a proven way to sleep better! (I like the app White Noise.)
PREVENT RECURRING LOW-LEVEL STRESSORS
Despite the many optimists (defeatists?) out there proclaiming that “some stress is good,” I just don’t buy it. While it is true that stress can be motivating—its evolutionary function, of course, is to propel us out of the path of a charging lion—personally I feel better when I’m motivated by emotions other than fear.
Longtime stress researcher Robert Epstein conducted a study that makes this totally clear. The people who are the least stressed-out are very good at preventing stress rather than just knowing how to cope with it (though coping skills don’t hurt, either). So we need to spend a little time identifying the things that make us stressed in our day-to-day lives. Really listen to your body for this one. When do you feel nervous? When is your breathing shallow? Your shoulders tensed and aching? When are you likely to snap at your kids or lose your patience?
Lingering to-do items tend to be low-level stressors for me. I’d be rich if I had a dollar for every time I’ve woken up at 5:00 a.m. worrying about an unfinished project, an email I forgot to send, an appointment I didn’t have a chance to make, or something I meant to do, but didn’t.
Researchers used to think that this low-level worrying about unfinished tasks was our unconscious mind trying to help us get things done by reminding us of what we still needed to do, and that the reminders—or distracting thoughts and worries—would persist until the task was complete. This in itself is a worrying theory for those of us who have never-ending task lists.
But now research shows that simply making a plan to deal with an unfinished task makes a huge difference in our ability to focus on other things without being constantly reminded by our unconscious mind about what else we need to do. It’s not so much about deciding what to do—by making a list or something—as it is about deciding when to do it. When we don’t know when we plan to do the things that are on our task lists, our thoughts will typically wander from whatever it is we are doing to our undone tasks. As it turns out, our unconscious isn’t nagging us to do the task at hand, but rather to make a plan for when we will get it done.
So before you leave work or hit the hay this evening, take a look at your task list and make a plan for completing unfinished tasks. Knowing what the next step is for undone items, and when you will do them, can make you a whole lot happier.
Before taking stock like this, I was already very aware of how work pressures were stressing me out. But when I spent some time jotting down the other times when I felt anxious, I realized that I am frequently most tense when I’m running late. And I was always running late. Sources of stress vary for each of us; for example, my friend Aaron usually feels stressed when he gets home from work and realizes he doesn’t have enough food in the house for dinner and doesn’t have the energy to go out.
Sometimes planning—preventing stress from occurring—becomes just one more thing that we need to do, which contributes to The Overwhelm. Remember that you don’t need to plan everything perfectly to make things easier. Aaron tries to plan a few meals a week, and he shops on the weekend for those that he can imagine. This means that, most nights, he feels prepared for dinner or knows that he has to stop at the store for, say, only the guacamole he forgot. He’s given himself a head start, which makes dinnertime less daunting.
So take some time to re-engineer your routine and recurring stressors. Epstein’s study suggests that planning—preventing stress from even occurring—is the most effective way to manage stress. For school-day mornings to be calm in my house, for example, I’ve learned I need to wake up a full forty-five minutes earlier than I wish was necessary (why can’t the kids just get dressed when I do?) and get backpacks packed the night before, even though the kids and I never want to do these things at the end of the day. (Not wanting to do something is very different from feeling stressed-out and rushing to do it in the morning.)
In order to avoid the routine stress of always running late, I need to plan to arrive where I need to be ten minutes early rather than quickly checking one more thing off my list before I leave. Aaron needs to plan his meals and grocery shop over the weekend. This doesn’t mean he has to eat everything he shopped for in the order he planned; he is still free to change his mind and/or remix ingredients. Planning ahead doesn’t have to make us rigid. But avoiding preventable stressors like these not only makes life feel easier, but it leaves us with more energy for the things we need to accomplish.
SILENCE THE SMARTPHONE SIREN SONG
Do you check your email, texts, voicemails, Facebook, Instagram account, or Twitter feed within an hour of waking up or going to sleep? While you’re in line at the store? During dinner with your family? Would you check it at a church while waiting for a funeral to start?
If so, ya ain’t alone. Harvard Business School professor and author of Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Leslie Perlow, did an amazing study with the Boston Consulting Group. She found that before her intervention, 70 percent of BCG executives checked their phone within an hour of waking up; 56 percent checked their phone within an hour of going to bed. (No doubt many use their phones as their alarm clock and checked before they even got out of bed in the morning.) Half checked their phones continuously throughout their vacation and on weekends.
There is something gratifying about constantly checking our email and our social-media feeds. The distraction is pleasurable because it gives us what researchers call “variable ratio reinforcement.” In other words, we are drawn to our smartphones in the way we are drawn to slot machines. We never know when we’ll get a satisfying message on Facebook or an email with good news, so we just keep checking.
Even though our brain tends to seek that variable ratio reinforcement, which suggests pleasure, usually we aren’t consciously checking our email for fun or recreation. We check constantly to abate our anxiety that we are missing something. Are we supposed to be responding to something urgent at work? What if someone called about something really important? Constant device checking looks a lot like an addiction (or obsessive-compulsive disorder). One study found that many people respond to “phantom phone vibrations”—they think they feel their phone vibrating even when it isn’t.
If you are using your smartphone as an alarm clock, odds are that you are tempted to check your email before you even get out of bed. Is this really the best way to start your day? Maybe it is. Perhaps checking your email is your highest priority, and you have time for it before breakfast.
If that isn’t you, however, you aren’t alone. Most people do much better when they put off checking their email until they are actually at work. Here’s an easy solution: Bury your email application on your phone in a folder on a back page. That way, when you turn off your alarm, you won’t see your email icon, and you won’t see how many unread emails you have. This is akin to hiding Halloween candy from your children so they don’t start begging you for a piece first thing in the morning, when they see it. If that email strategy doesn’t work (because you are, um, addicted), remove your email from your phone altogether for a few months, or use an old-fashioned alarm clock until you’ve kicked the habit.
And even if you aren’t addicted or don’t check your emails and messages and feeds compulsively, often your mental health is still, in fact, at stake. Certainly your productivity and satisfaction with your life are. Perlow’s intervention with the Boston Consulting Group executives was nothing short of transformative. She required that participants establish “Predictable Time Off” (PTO)—time when they would not check their email or work remotely from, say, the family dinner table.
Work satisfaction and, ironically, productivity shot up for the BCG executives, and dramatically. Before establishing PTO, only 27 percent were excited to start work in the morning. After PTO, 51 percent were. Before, less than half were satisfied with their job, but after, nearly three-quarters were. Satisfaction with work-life balance went from 38 percent to 54 percent. And people found their work to be more collaborative, efficient, and effective; for example, just establishing PTO made 91 percent of the consultants rate their team as collaborative, up from 76 percent when they were checking their email at all hours of the day and night. Perlow explains:
[B]usy managers and professionals tend to amplify—through their own actions and interactions—the inevitable pressures of their jobs, making their own and their colleagues’ lives more intense, more overwhelming, more demanding, and less fulfilling than they need to be. The result of this vicious cycle is that the work process ends up being less effective and efficient than it could be. The power of PTO is that it breaks this cycle, mitigating the pressure, freeing individuals to spend time in ways that are more desirable for themselves personally and for the work process.
What all this means is that unless we want to feel overwhelmed and exhausted, we need to unplug. A lot. Specifically, we need to carve out times and spaces that are insulated from checking behaviors. This can be very, very hard when it doesn’t come as a company mandate, as it did at the Boston Consulting Group, because it can require that we stop traveling with the herd a few times a day. But even though it might be difficult, and require some courage, I promise, it’s worth doing. Here’s how.
Step 1: Disable Push features, alerts, and notifications on your mobile devices and desktop and laptop computers. This is the hardest step for many people. You don’t have to turn off your phone altogether, but do turn off distracting dings and vibrations (junk stimuli) when you are working or focusing on something besides the incoming emails and texts. Most people do not have the self-discipline or mental fortitude it takes to ignore an incoming text or email. But when you interrupt yourself to check what just came in, you lose time, focus, and productivity (see Stop Multi-tasking). Give yourself the gift of being fully present with your attention wherever you are, feeling whatever you are feeling, even if that feeling is boredom (at first). Allow yourself to truly connect with the people who are in your presence, even if it is a checker at the grocery and you don’t know him or her. In the next chapter, I’ll reveal why this will make you more productive, intelligent, and happy.
Step 2: Designate the spaces in your life in which you will not use devices and computers. Just because we can take a laptop into the bathroom does not mean that this is a sensible thing to do. (Fecal matter can be found on one in six cell phones. Do we need to outlaw pooping and texting at the same time?) Similarly, your bed is for sleeping, not for checking Facebook, even though you can. Neither is it safe to text in the car, while driving yourself, nor is it polite if you’re a passenger in a car and the driver is a friend or someone expecting conversation. Tempted to check your email at a red light? Turn your attention to your breath and just breathe: You will gain more in productivity and well-being from the one-minute relaxation. Remember, boredom is not a health hazard, but technology overuse is.
Step 3: Decide on the times during which you will not use a device. For example, here are some times in my life when I try hard not to text, be on the phone, email, or check my Facebook feed:
• During meals. There is nothing so important that it can’t wait twenty minutes, and I don’t want to lose this important downtime (if I’m alone) or time to connect with my friends and family.
• While someone else is helping me with something, like a clerk in a store.
• While I’m working, unless I’m working on answering and writing emails.
• After 9:15 p.m. In the evening, all my devices automatically switch over to their “do not disturb” setting and are turned off entirely thirty minutes before I go to bed. Why thirty minutes? Because the low-energy blue light emitted by our tablets and smartphones stimulates chemical messengers in our brains that make us more alert, and it suppresses others (like melatonin) that help us fall asleep.
• Before breakfast. I’ve found that if I start checking my email first thing in the morning, I derail my carefully constructed morning routine. (See Chapter 3.)
Feeling panicky at the prospect of unplugging? Start with very small chunks of time, or very limited spaces. Commit to unplug for just twenty minutes—at dinner, for example—or to just leave your device out of your children’s rooms, or do not check email before you are actually out of bed one morning per week. Often, we need to give our nervous system time to adjust; we need to have the experience that our heart does not actually stop beating—or that a crisis has not erupted at work—in the few minutes that we’ve turned off our phone. (In fact, we enjoyed it! We were more efficient and less stressed!) The idea is to build internal fortitude through positive experience slowly rather than trying to massively make over our lives in one fell swoop.
LIMIT YOUR CHOICES
Barry Schwartz, the psychologist who wrote The Paradox of Choice, has done interesting research on the consequences of living in a culture that assumes that more choices are better than fewer. The gist of what Schwartz’s research famously shows is that having a lot of choices is a curse on our happiness.
Schwartz divides the world into people who, in the face of their many choices, maximize and those who “satisfice,” or accept the first available option that meets their criteria. Maximizing is a form of perfectionism; we maximize by searching out all the best possible options when making a decision, hoping to make the “perfect” choice. We satisfice when we choose something based on preset criteria and move on. Satisficing doesn’t mean settling for something less than we really want; it is just a different way to go about making a decision.
Happy people have different decision-making processes than do unhappy people: Happy people tend to satisfice. Maximizing is very tempting for perfectionists, and it is associated with unhappiness and discontent.
This may be hard to believe, especially if you are a perfectionist, because it seems like maximizers would have higher standards and so could be expected to make better decisions that make them happier down the road. Not necessarily. Maximizers actually tend to be less happy with the decisions they make (when they finally make them). Why?
Consider this example from my own life: My mother wanted to reupholster the cushions on my kitchen banquette for me. I was thrilled with this generous offer. The kitchen was white, with nothing else going on, so she could do anything. She spent a day looking at possible fabrics and came home with a trunk full of samples. Not having a lot of time, and not wanting to overwhelm myself, I took one look at her car trunk and said, “Let’s just consider the blue and orange fabrics that are washable.”
Dismayed, my mom went along with this initial weeding out of 90 percent of what she had chosen. There were now only seven fabrics for me to look at. I chose two immediately that went together well, and was thrilled. My mom, on the other hand, could see all the choices I didn’t make, and felt loss and doubt about the choice I’d made. She wanted me to “think about it for a while,” which I didn’t, knowing that I wasn’t going to have time to revisit the decision or see the samples again. My mom, on the other hand, drove around with the samples in her trunk for a week considering them, wondering if we made the right choice. I’m happy that the cushions match my kitchen nicely, and I can sponge them off when one of the kids (or I!) inevitably spill something.
(1) Outline your criteria for success. What are the objective signs that a project is finished or an option good enough? If you are choosing toothpaste or a new car, what are the things you just can’t live without? No need to set your sights low; just set your sights on something.
(2) Choose the first option that meets your criteria, or stop working the moment the pre-decided “finished” signs appear. If you are looking for a toothpaste that whitens without a specific chemical, for example, but you aren’t all that concerned with price since they are all priced similarly, choose the first whitening toothpaste you find that doesn’t have the substance you want to avoid. If you are buying a car, go ahead and do your research to find the one that meets your criteria, but stop researching when you’ve unearthed your options. Don’t suddenly start considering cars out of your price range, for example, just to see what you are missing. People with decision paralysis or perfectionists who have a hard time calling it quits might also want to set time limits—say, two minutes—to decide, or no more than a half hour a day browsing car websites.
(3) Once the decision is made or the job done, focus on the positive aspects of the choice or accomplishment. Focusing on what might have been is not a happiness habit. Enjoy the fruit of your work.
Even if you don’t have a project or a big decision to make, limit your choices. In my experience, this is a very effective way to reduce the overwhelm that comes from living in a place where I am confronted with so many choices all the time. The bonus is that I end up feeling happier with the choices I’ve made. For example:
• I buy the same brands again and again, from the same retailers, no matter if it is toothpaste, breakfast sausage, carrots, soy milk, cereal, or gas. I even stick to the same variety and color of apple. Once something meets my criteria, I don’t make decisions about which brands or varieties to buy again or where to shop. I get variety in my life in arenas other than the grocery store. If this sounds horrible to you—perhaps you take great joy in trying lots of apple varieties —see where you find relief in constraining your choices. Perhaps you decide to shop only at one store, or choose only one new brand or variety per shopping trip.
• I have only three or four “uniforms” that I wear day in and day out. If I’m exercising, I like a particular style of Athleta pants, a T-shirt, and a zip-up fleece. Speaking engagement? A J.Crew suit dress and blazer. (I have three of each in different colors. Bet you didn’t know happiness experts could be so dang boring.) Casual workday? Lucky brand jeans and a T-shirt, and a turtleneck sweater if it’s cold. I keep a Patagonia jacket—the down kind that can be stuffed into its own pocket—in my purse. I get variety in my shoes and jewelry, which is quite enough variety for me.
• I eat pretty much the same thing for breakfast and lunch every single day, and our family dinners follow a formula, too. Want to know what it is? Monday Meatballs (usually some variation on an Italian spaghetti and meatballs), Taco Tuesday, Wildcard Wednesday (usually some sort of chicken dish, like paprikash made in the slow cooker while I work), Thursday Thaw (something from the freezer I cooked the previous weekend), and Friday Fast Food (not literally—usually homemade pizza or burgers).
Whatever you do, don’t waffle. Embrace the choices you make. This advice is derived from what Dan Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness, calls “the unanticipated joy of being totally stuck.” His research has found that people naturally prefer what they perceive themselves to be stuck with. Consider this experiment: Gilbert and his colleagues had college students rank their favorite Monet prints, and then he gave them the choice to take one home that they ranked three or four (out of six). Fifteen days later, he asked the students to re-rank the prints, and they (of course!) ranked the print they chose to take home much higher this time, and the one that they didn’t choose much lower. This works even when the research subjects have a serious amnesia disorder and literally can’t remember which print they chose to own.
These data get even more interesting when we look at what happened in a different experiment, when Gilbert and his collaborators let photography students take home one of their two favorite photographs but had them give up the other to the class instructors. Students in one group made their choice and then immediately had to give up the photo they didn’t choose. Students in another group were allowed to change their minds about the choice they made and had several days to reverse their decision about which photo to keep. The students who had to make their choice without the possibility of change tended to be far happier with the photograph they chose when asked about it later. The other students, however, who were allowed to waffle about their decision, and even change their mind if they wanted to, ended up being far less happy with the choice they made. Go figure.
The lesson here is that the brain naturally justifies its choices and actually creates positive sentiment about them—but only when it perceives that a choice is complete and can’t be reversed. This is what Gilbert calls our psychological immune system. So make your decisions and be done with them.
Maybe this seems boring—and honestly, it can be—but it is also easy. Of course I take into account when I’m out of town or we might have a social engagement. I don’t plan those meals, but by cooking variations on the same themes, I save a lot of energy that I’d otherwise be expending trying to decide what to eat (and what to buy). I make the same quantity of food regardless of who shows up at the table: enough for eight people. Although there are usually only six of us, I want the kids to feel free to invite friends to dinner whenever they want. And the leftovers are always packed for school lunches (which solves that problem). I eat more for pleasure and variety on the weekends, and when I go out to eat.
We all have a limited capacity for decision-making in any given day. Eventually this capacity fades, and with it the quality of the decisions we make, and our self-discipline in general. In other words, making a lot of decisions, even small ones, tires us out. Knowing this makes me feel better about restricting my choices. And I no longer think of myself as settling when I make a decision without exploring all the options. I’m practicing satisficing, and I’m happier than I would be in the long run if I were to maximize. I also have more energy and clarity when big decision-making moments come along.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALL THE STUFF YOU CAN’T SAY “NO” TO
Now that you’ve gotten rid of all the junk and clutter in your life that is overwhelming you, it’s time to deal with the stuff in life that you dread doing—to prune that never-ending task list and neutralize the toxic situations in your life. This section is for dealing with what can’t be considered junk clutter, which you can just trash and move on. This section is for things that aren’t so easily discarded: a toxic relationship; a long, stressful commute to a job you actually love; a daily task you feel you have to do but you always dread doing. It’s for the things that don’t fall into your top five priorities but that you can’t seem to say “no” to. It’s even for the things that do fall into a top priority but you still really, really, really don’t want to do. Listen to your body and your unconscious for these items. What people give you an unpleasant feeling in the pit of your stomach? What do you consistently procrastinate doing? What would you celebrate raucously if you never had to do it again? Consider that these things are a steady source of negative emotion for you. For these things, I use Martha Beck’s three B’s method: Bag it, Barter it, or Better it.
DO YOU DREAD IT? THEN BAG IT IF YOU CAN
If you feel hassled by a long task list, weed that puppy down with gusto until it is a realistic representation of what you actually can accomplish given your current status as a human being (and not a supercomputer).
Start by automating as many of the routine tasks on your list as you can. Set up auto-pay for your bills. Create a standing grocery order (I use planetorganics.com; it chooses seasonal fruits and vegetables for me). Switch to a dry cleaner that picks up and delivers your laundry on a set schedule. Word of warning: Don’t automate anything that brings you joy.
For most people, email is a to-do item that never quits and contributes to daily feelings of stress. Rein it in. Which emails do you really have to read? Which must you respond to? Consider boldly deleting everything that you don’t absolutely need. I love Gmail’s tabs because they allow me to batch-delete emails that I don’t have time to read before I get sucked in and read them anyway. And I use a “bypass the inbox” filter for a lot of emails; they go straight to a file, where they wait for me until I have time for them. Feel free to respond to email on your terms; there is no law in the universe that says you must sacrifice your sleep, feelings of well-being, or other priorities so you can get through your email.
Further prune your to-do list of more major items with this question: If it turns out that my life is a lot shorter than I hope it will be, which of the things on my list right now will I wish I hadn’t wasted time on? Pay particular attention to anything you do just for prestige or praise or to feel superior to others, anything that makes you tense or anxious but doesn’t contribute to your growth over the long haul, and anything that involves toxic people or situations.
Also take a little time to identify arenas in which you are “shoulding” on yourself. What things are you doing not because they are good for you or because they bring you joy or because they are a top priority, but just because you feel you should do them? Do you dread volunteering in your kids’ classrooms but do it because you want people to think you are a good parent? Why not find a way to contribute in a way that you love?
Finally, remember your reason for being, and your reason for saying “no,” and then bag things before they end up on your calendar by cultivating well-practiced ways to say “no.” Mine is, “Oh I’d love to do that, but I can’t this time. Let me help you think of someone else who can help you.” Or the vague and strangely effective, “That isn’t going to work out for me this time, but thank you for asking.”
CAN’T ELIMINATE IT? BARTER OR BETTER IT
There are lots of things in life I dread doing that I can’t simply bag. I hate doing dishes and emptying the dishwasher, so I’ve entered into a barter with my kids. They do these things (with my husband’s help), and I plan the meals and lead the cooking. I hate scheduling travel, but I don’t mind proofreading, and so I’ve bartered these non-household tasks with my husband. He schedules our vacations and travel, making reservations and such, and I proofread the marketing pieces he sends out for his business. When I was newly divorced and trying to get my career off the ground, I had an extra room but no money to hire help. One of the best things I ever did was arrange for a graduate student to live with us rent-free. In exchange, she helped me keep my house from imploding on itself; she kept up with the breakfast dishes and helped me with the kids and the laundry in a very significant way.
That said, sometimes bartering is better when it is just delegating or hiring out help, if you can. I could never have survived as a single working mother without my longtime house cleaner, Marly. As a liberal sociologist, I’ve long felt guilty about letting someone else clean my toilets, but after many discussions with Marly about it, I’ve come to understand that she loves her job, and she loves our house, and she loves me and my family. Just because I hate cleaning doesn’t mean that she also hates it, and while I still can’t imagine that she enjoys cleaning toilets, I do see that—for her—being a housekeeper is a calling, not a job. (More about this in the Conclusion.)
Another example: I hate taking the garbage cans to the curb each week. It involves a tricky gate, a flight of stairs with a heavy garbage can, and stinky compost. Since this is a task that must be done, and because my husband hates doing this, too, we pay our across-the-street neighbor, a teenage boy, a few dollars a week to do it. And my father, who lives nearby, often puts the cans back once they’ve been emptied. He enjoys the simple pleasure of helping us out. More in the next chapter on why this actually is a valuable barter for him (because clearly I get something, but he gets something valuable, too).
A word of caution about hiring help, however: I do think it is possible to hire out too much. The important research of Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist and author of The Time Bind, The Second Shift, and The Commercialization of Intimate Life, makes it very clear that although, with enough money, it is certainly possible to hire people to do pretty much whatever we might dread doing ourselves, it’s not advisable to hire someone to live your life for you. (Not to mention that managing all that help is a job unto itself!) I could pick up relatively healthy and inexpensive prepared meals from Trader Joe’s for dinner every night (believe me, I sometimes do, and I’m not judging those who do!). But I don’t always do this because I love the connection that the kids and I have when we cook together, even if we don’t have time to be particularly creative. Freeing up the time it takes us to cook would lead me to fill my time with something I love less (driving the kids around to their various activities, perhaps) or with something I already have enough of (work).
Similarly, there are some things that we might not enjoy because they bring up painful but necessary negative emotions (remember, this section is about eliminating unnecessary negative emotions). These difficult things are still important for us to do. I don’t love planning birthday parties (my father was right, I’m not a details person), but it is important to my children that I don’t distance myself from these meaningful annual events. Or you might not want to plan your grandmother’s memorial service—too painful, the grief is too hard, you don’t have the time—but plan it yourself you must. The takeaway: Barter, delegate, or hire out help for routine things that are toxic to you or you truly just don’t like doing to make time for more meaningful activities.
What if we can’t bag a dreaded task or situation and we can’t barter or delegate it? Perhaps you have a poor relationship with your sister, but you can’t delegate interactions with her to your spouse, and your relationship with her isn’t bad enough that you just want to bag it altogether. First, bag or barter as much of it as you can. Perhaps you love her relationship with your children but you dread dropping them off at her house and picking them up because of the way she criticizes you at every turn. Barter or hire the dropping off and picking up part, and better the other times when you need to interact with her. Maybe she’s particularly mean at family dinners after she’s had a drink. So don’t serve alcohol, and get her engaged in a game with the kids before she starts spoiling for a fight. Some dreaded relationships can benefit from therapy, too—though not all. I’m a firm believer that life is too short to try to change toxic people, and some toxic people or situations are better avoided than improved.
My favorite way to better a dreaded situation is to make it entertaining. Perhaps you hate your commute, but for the time being you can’t eliminate it. What can you do to better it? Commute with friends and turn it into a party? Use the time to listen to audiobooks? Watch movies on public transportation? I clock about ten hours a week of predictable drive time, and I’ve come to love my time in the car because I use it to listen to fiction. (And there is an added bonus: Research shows that literary fiction helps us develop social and emotional intelligence, which the next chapter will reveal to be at the heart of our happiness and success.)
FINALLY, STOP OVERTHINKING THINGS
Say you’re a gazelle on the African savanna and a leopard tries to make you his dinner. He catches, instead, a nearby baby giraffe and rips it to shreds. You get yourself to safety, and because you are a gazelle and not a human, your heart settles back down and you treat yourself to some grass for dinner.
But imagine now that this happened to you—a human being. You’ve escaped the leopard today, but for crying out loud, what about tomorrow? What about the children? Your brain keeps thinking terrifying thoughts about how you almost died and about the baby giraffe and the injustice of it all. And every time you think about the leopard, your fight-or-flight response is activated again, and your body surges with fear and worry about something that is actually no longer happening.
This happens to us all the time. Something bad happens, and because of our evolutionary ability to plan and predict the future, we imaginatively (and then emotionally) keep making it happen again and again. Sometimes this is useful: It helps us avoid leopards in the future.
But we also create a lot of unnecessary negative emotions by ruminating on negative events. This is like the reverse of savoring positive emotions; rumination amplifies and prolongs negative emotions. I’m all for feeling deeply, even if the emotions are difficult or negative, but we also need to move on once we’ve felt what we need to feel.
When people hear that I encourage my coaching clients to move on from unpleasant feelings, many worry: “Well, make sure you aren’t denying their negative emotions,” they tell me, worrying that I’m “sending the message that bad feelings are bad and should be avoided.”
Rest assured, I do believe that all feelings, good or bad, are okay. I see emotions like sadness, frustration, anxiety, and jealousy as windows into our worlds, as part of the keel that balances and steers us. I am not encouraging anyone to just buck up, or stuff down bad feelings.
But sometimes enough is enough, and we need to move on from bad feelings. The truth is that rumination is bad for us. As psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky explains in The How of Happiness:
Overthinking ushers in a host of adverse consequences: It sustains or worsens sadness, fosters negatively biased thinking, impairs a person’s ability to solve problems, saps motivation, and interferes with concentration and initiative. Moreover, although people have a strong sense that they are gaining insight into themselves and their problems during their ruminations, this is rarely the case. What they do gain is a distorted, pessimistic perspective on their lives.
Or as renowned compassion and mindfulness researcher Paul Gilbert has famously said, “Attention is like a spotlight—whatever it shines on becomes brighter in the mind.” So instead of continuing to shine a spotlight on negative events—mistakenly thinking that we are solving our problems by doing so—we need to turn our attention to positive distractions. Instead of thinking a negative thought, and then feeling a negative feeling, and then thinking the negative thought again and again and again, we need to picture a stop sign in our heads (really, I do this; I visualize a stop sign), and choose a strategy from Chapter 2 for fostering positive emotions.
Or we can employ my favorite Jedi mind trick for dealing with pain. It’s mindfulness. We can simply observe and become familiar with the tricks that our minds are playing on us. Watch your thoughts and emotions, and label them. “Oh look, I’m thinking that thought about my husband not being a good listener again.” Ask yourself how much you’ve bought into the thought, and if you are ready to let it go. “I’m really hooked by the idea that he isn’t compassionate, but that thought is making me feel despair. It isn’t getting me anywhere to keep looking for evidence that he isn’t compassionate. I’m ready to stop ruminating on this.” And then imagine that the thought that hooked you is now in a bubble or cloud, and let it float away.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the medical doctor and researcher who first “translated” Buddhist mindfulness practices into a secular program called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), defines mindfulness as the “awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally, to the unfolding of experiences moment by moment.” Scientific research on mindfulness—pioneered by Kabat-Zinn and encouraged by His Holiness the Dalai Lama—gives us ample evidence that mindfulness is really good for us. Practicing mindfulness boosts our immune systems, increases our happiness, and decreases stress and depression. It literally changes our brains, improving our ability to learn, focus, remember, regulate our emotions, and be more empathetic. And if that isn’t enough, mindfulness can strengthen our relationships when we are upset, helping us feel closer to our partners and making us more satisfied with our spouses.
