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Stop Worrying, Start Living

I’ve gotten better at the drudgery of real life, but I still suffer from bad habits. I put off difficult tasks, and then I feel guilty about putting off these tasks, and I blow that guilt out of proportion, and then I rub all these bad feelings around my insides like broken glass. I become a worry machine. It is not an overstatement to say that the despair of these tiny, accumulated failures keeps me from truly living, because it creates in me a need to hide from the world. I needed to figure out a way to get right with the world—not because I was going to die soon, but because I probably wasn’t.

Sarah Hepola, on the weight of to-do lists.

The Psychology of To-Do Lists

The always wonderful Maria Popova at Brain Pickings delves into the psychology of to-do lists in her discussion of John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister’s book, Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. She points to the authors’ discussion of the Zeigarnik effect, which explains why our brains continue to nag us about what we leave unfinished. Originally thought to … Read more