Creativity generates positive energy.
You will be tempted to be creatively productive, to make something with utility, but don’t succumb to that instinct: Make something pointless that makes you laugh.
Play is the ultimate cure for burnout.
Tag: stress
- Theme: Culture
Play cures Burnout
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
Do not avoid stress, run towards it.
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1–2 minutesWe spend much of our lives avoiding pain or distress, assuming happiness will arrive when anxiety has dissipated.
Yet, joy and bliss are intense feelings grown from overcoming challenges and fulfilling psychological goals.
Running away from stress is self-defeating: neither solving the problem nor producing an ecstatic state of owning a problem and overcoming it.
- Theme: Self
The Human Barometer
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1–2 minutesMy body is so sensitive to weather pressure it affects my mood: downward pressure depresses my mood, causing anger and headaches.
We are environmental creatures, often reacting to cues so subtle we are unaware and only able to understand that odd personality with sympathetic hindsight. - Theme: Growth
A Shinier Stick
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1–2 minutesI watched a kid pick up a stick and hit some things. Then throw it, pick it up, and hit stuff until it broke.
Anything can relieve boredom, but a shinier toy offers more attachment and subsequent loss when it breaks… and it tends to break quicker.
- Theme: Self
Things break at the worst time
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1–2 minutesThe worst time is the most necessary time: the situation with the most reliance is also the situation with the most to lose.
The fact you rely on something is its value. Equally, no matter how robust, everything under stress eventually breaks. And it will always happen at the "worst time," as the failure designates the time as "worst."All that is left is to predetermine how to react after the break.
- Theme: Self
Panic is a form of hubris
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1–2 minutesPanic (fear and irrationality) stems from a loss of control: the world does not operate as we anticipated.
Yuval Noah Harari says upheavals are much better met with bewilderment. At least bewilderment does not emanate from self-assured pride, but is more open to recognizing the fluctuating mystery of reality and our place within it.
- Theme: Growth
Exhaustion leads to productivity
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1–2 minutesExhaustion can lead to a dumb form of productivity simply because you are too tired to transition.
You won’t learn anything and you will make mistakes, but you do get to check all the little boxes on your to-do list. - Theme: Self
Spend your life de-stressing
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1–2 minutesYour stress management is not removing stress: it is delaying it while stoking the embers.
To douse it, change your story.
- Theme: Self
It really is the small things
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1–2 minutesThe idiotic little chores are tiny burdens, so miniscule as to be nearly invisible. And so we succumb to their inevitability, writing off that portion of our life.
To have even one of these simple things lifted, our gratitude is immense and out-of-proportion, but every day will now be easier because of someone else’s thoughtfulness.