Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Stress

How to Encourage Yourself During Tough Times

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My biggest takeaway from Daniel M. Cable’s Exceptional: Build Your Personal Highlight Reel and Unlock Your Potential (2020) is maintaining an inventory of reminders of all of the things you’re grateful for: the achievements, accomplishments, things you’re proud of, and events you want to celebrate—even others’ notes of gratitude.

When you’re entranced by ongoing anxieties and unable to find refuge in presence, the negative self-talk becomes your default setting. Unable to focus on what is happening right now, you spiral downward and find yourself in ruts that hold you back from your potential. Reigniting a certain sense of pride within yourself can jolt you into a more optimistic cycle and create real personal change. It can enable you to maintain a stable center no matter what’s going on in your life right now.

Research on the ‘Reflected Best-Self Exercise’ indicates that scanning the “highlight reel” of the best you’ve achieved in your life can help you, as it would a professional athlete, rediscover and reinforce how to repeat past successes. It can energize you to use your strengths even more and give more to others.

Idea for Impact: You make your most significant impact when focusing on what you do best. A personal highlight reel will remind you how others perceive you when you make your best impact and hope you build upon the unique strengths that make you exceptional.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed
  2. The Best Breathing Exercise for Anxiety
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. The Law of Petty Irritations
  5. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

How Emotional Resilience Improves with Age

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Studies of social and emotional aging have consistently shown that we tend to enjoy a better sense of emotional well-being as we grow older—starting from our late 50s.

The brain slows down, and memory deteriorates with age, so we process information slower. We get better at regulating the instinct to enact annoyance and anger.

As we get older, we tend to have a positive bias. We stop sweating the small stuff, pick our battles wisely, and find it easier to let go of situations we experience as unfavorable, especially with friends and family.

The lessons these studies bear for us all: organize your life’s physical and social aspects to reduce unnecessary stressors. Happiness is indeed a result, not a cause.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. The More You Can Manage Your Emotions, the More Effective You’ll Be
  3. Anger is the Hardest of the Negative Emotions to Subdue
  4. This Trick Can Relieve Your Anxiety: “What’s the worst that can happen?”
  5. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy

You’ll Overeat If You Get Bigger Servings

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So many diets, so little evidence that they work. Many of the better plans boil down to basic strategies: eat lots of fruits and vegetables, stay active, and keep portions under control.

Most people have struggle with portion control

If you’re reading this article, you live in a society with too much food. Food production has become more industrialized and cheaper. Healthy food is not just more expensive than unhealthy food, but less convenient. Portion sizes have increased spectacularly in the past several decades—and that includes packaged foods in the grocery stores, meals served at restaurants, and plate sizes at home.

Dr. Brian Wansink, formerly director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2001,) has shown that plate size prompts portion size. In study after study, he has found (some of his data analyses have been questioned) that the bigger the plate, the more you eat. This trend derives from an optical illusion—the same amount of food on a bigger plate seems smaller.

Whatever size of plate you choose, you’re likely to fill it. As a result, if you reduce your plates’ diameters from 12 inches to 10 inches, you’ll significantly reduce the amount of food you dish up. Besides, per Wansink, using a smaller plate gives the illusion that you’re getting more food. That’s a first step towards addressing your concerns about your health or waistline.

Visual aspects of a meal, such as portion size and plate sizes, can influence how much you eat

'First Bite' by Bee Wilson (ISBN 0465064981) British food writer and food historian Bee Wilson’s brilliant First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (2015; my summary) states,

Being able to regulate the amount of food we eat according to our needs is perhaps the single most important skill when it comes to eating—and the one that we least often master. The first stage is learning to recognize whether the stomach is empty or not.

The first and most obvious step to weight loss is reducing the portion size—and thus the number of calories you eat. When you’re consuming fewer calories than the body uses, you’re likely to start losing weight.

  • Consider one of those “portion control plates” to help reset and reinforce in your mind what a portion size should be. Sectioned and color-coded, these plates take the guesswork out of getting nutrition from all food groups and reduce the risk of overeating.
  • Slow down when you eat, take time to chew and savor your food, and pause between mouthfuls. Stop when you are already full. You don’t need to eat every morsel of what’s dished out for you.
  • If you’re uncomfortable with not filling up your plate and risking disrespecting a host, say at a holiday party buffet, spread your portions around the plate and leave a bit of space around each food item. Your plate will look full but will have fewer calories.

Idea for Impact: Small plates help make portions look more substantial

If you’re trying to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, keep the portions down. You certainly don’t need as much food as you think you do.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Stop Dieting, Start Savoring
  2. Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating
  3. Six Powerful Reasons to Eat Slowly and Mindfully
  4. Eat with Purpose, on Purpose
  5. How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis

Get Everything Out of Your Head

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When there’s so much going on in your head, you’re constantly playing mental ping-pong. All those unfinished tasks can indeed affect your ability to be present with anything that you’re doing.

Sitting down to write out all the things that are weighing on your mind can boot out the clutter. Per the Zeigarnik Effect, interrupted tasks and unfinished thoughts tend to inundate you with a constant stream of reminders. Just the simple act of capturing a task can achieve a sense of completion for the moment.

Clear off your cluttered desk, pour some tea, put on some relaxing music, light a candle, mute the phone, and write down all the things you need to pay attention to. Work stuff, home stuff, kids stuff, paperwork, school stuff, friends stuff—all the stuff! Get it all out of your head.

Writing down everything that’s occupying your mind right now won’t solve your problems, but it makes them evident. This exercise makes it a lot easier to make good intuitive choices about where you should focus now and where it’s okay that you don’t focus now.

Idea for Impact: Stop what you’re doing right now and write down everything you have in your head. Not only will this exercise put in perspective all those things you need to keep track of, but also it’s a great way to reset your day.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Cope with Anxiety and Stop Obsessive Worrying by Creating a Worry Box
  2. Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal
  3. The Power of Negative Thinking
  4. This May Be the Most Potent Cure for Melancholy
  5. The Law of Petty Irritations

Niksen: The Dutch Art of Embracing Stillness, Doing Nothing

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Niksen - Dutch Technique of Doing Nothing, Just Being The Dutch have a practice they call Niksen, derived from “niks doen,” which literally means “nothing-ing.” It involves purposefully engaging in doing absolutely nothing, embracing a state of aimlessness.

Think of it as a sanctioned daydreaming session.

Niksen entails gazing out the window and allowing your mind to wander wherever it pleases. Unlike mindfulness meditation, where you observe your thoughts or focus on your breath, Niksen is about simply existing. Just being there. There’s no effort to return to the present moment or to analyze your thoughts.

In Niksen, you’re just being. You take a pause, practice stillness, and let your gaze drift to the horizon. It’s about being wherever you are, whether sitting or standing, without any deliberate action. When thoughts arise, you let them pass without scrutiny, allowing them to come and go naturally.

As a stress-relief technique, Niksen is gaining popularity. Embracing idleness means disconnecting from the constant buzz of connectivity and the pressure of stress, anxiety, and depression. Studies show that allowing your mind to wander activates different parts of the brain, maybe even tapping into some hidden wisdom.

Give Niksen a shot, even if it’s just for a minute or two every now and then. It can provide a much-needed break during moments of tension and worry. These brief escapes can add richness and intrigue to your life, expanding your horizons beyond the everyday.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Learn to Cope When You’re Stressed
  2. A Quick Way to De-stress: The “Four Corners Breathing” Exercise
  3. Zen in a Minute: Centering with Micro-Meditations
  4. The Best Breathing Exercise for Anxiety
  5. When in Doubt, Write it Out

Entitlement and Anger Go Together

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Exaggerated entitlement could possibly explain what’s driving the recent surge of abusive or violent incidents on flights in America.

We live in a time where everyone seems hypervigilant to the point where even a slight snub can be taken as an act of deliberate aggression—either reactively or without provocation. People want to assert themselves, and every little social interaction seems to turn quickly into a battleground of entitlement.

Self-Protective Efforts Heighten Entitlement

To make things worse, air travel sits at the confluence of so many things involving so many people (and circumstances) where each “participant” has little direct control over what’s happening to them and others around. Political polarization and mask mandates seem to have intensified these anxieties too. Moreover, the FAA’s zero-tolerance policy toward disturbances and the threat of massive fines are unlikely to disincentivize passengers and staff in the heat of the moment.

When people feel entitled, they’re not just frustrated when others fail to acknowledge and entertain—even listen to—their presumed superior rights. People feel deceived and wronged. They feel victimized, get angry, and exude hostility. Worse, they feel even more justified in their demands and thus assume an even stronger sense of entitlement as compensation.

Idea for Impact: Entitlement and Responsibility are Inextricably Linked

Underlying this kind of anger process is a lack of separation of rights from responsibility. No professional, social, or domestic environment can remain stable and peaceful without everyone respecting the fact that rights and responsibilities are inseparable.

Nobody is entitled to compassion or fair treatment without acting on the responsibility to give it to others. If you don’t care about how others feel, you can’t demand that they care about how you feel. It’s a formula for disaster in human interactions.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Don’t Abruptly Walk Away from an Emotionally Charged Conflict
  3. Think Twice Before You Launch That Truth Bomb
  4. Who Told You That Everybody Was Going to Like You?
  5. Hate is Self-Defeating

Make Time to Do it

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Think about how these two declarations sound:

  • “Let me make time to do it.”
  • “Let me find time to do it.”

If you asked someone to do something, which response seems more convincing and persuasive?

When someone says they’ll make time to do something, you sense they’ll give the matter a feeling of priority. It implies that they’ll prioritize.

On the other hand, if someone says they’ll find time, it appears like they’ll hope to find a gap where they may fit you in—if they can remember what it is you asked them to do.

Often language—particularly self-talk—can have a way of revealing truths about values and priorities. The expression “I’ll make time” shows how the idea of time management only matters to how important the stuff is that’s competing for your time.

Idea for Impact: You know something is important when one makes time for it.

Think carefully about what you make time to do versus what you find time to do. The essence of time management is to prioritize.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  2. Ask This One Question Every Morning to Find Your Focus
  3. The Mental Junkyard Hour
  4. This ‘Morning Pages’ Practice is a Rebellion Against the Tyranny of Muddled Thinking
  5. Keep Your Eyes on the Prize [Two-Minute Mentor #9]

Don’t Cheat. Just Eat.

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If you’re someone who likes to “cheat” over the holidays and indulge in calorie-rich festive treats, why think of food as yet another serving of shame?

Being out of shape isn’t a failure of character.

Guilt around food is not just pointless—it actually can be harmful. Distress can sabotage digestion. Research suggests that anxiety kicks your autonomic nervous system into high gear. The capacities of your digestive organs are subdued, and instead of metabolizing and assimilating your food, it’s processed less effectively. In other words, guilt—or any sort of negative self-judgment—can initiate stress signals and neurotransmitters. These hinder a healthy digestive response.

Eat whatever it is you want mindfully and let it make you happy. Indulging is part of what sets a holiday apart. As the Roman dramatist Terence counseled, “Everything in moderation” (to which the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde added, “… including moderation.”)

Also, stop “food policing” others.

Idea for Impact: Give Your Guilt a Holiday

Eat, drink, and be merry this holiday season. Yes, slackening up on your diet plan doesn’t feel great, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, either. However, labeling it “cheating” probably is. Your language matters!

Wondering what to read next?

  1. This Isn’t Really a Diet Book, But It’ll Teach You to Eat Better
  2. Eat with Purpose, on Purpose
  3. The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails
  4. A Hack to Resist Temptation: The 15-Minute Rule
  5. How People Defend Themselves in a Crisis

Do it Now // Summary of ‘The 5 Second Rule’ by Mel Robbins

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Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage (2017) argues that much of what holds you back in life has roots in those few precious moments between when you have an idea and when your brain gets in the way of acting on that idea.

The 5-second rule is simple. If you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill it. …. Hesitation is the kiss of death. You might hesitate for a just nanosecond, but that’s all it takes. That one small hesitation triggers a mental system that’s designed to stop you. And it happens in less than—you guessed it—five seconds.

Robbins asserts that you have five seconds to act on your ideas before you run the risk of subconsciously convincing yourself not to. Stay alert for those decisive moments. Each time, consider the benefits and liabilities of doing versus deferring.

When you internalize a do-it-now mindset, you’ll be dragging your feet less: “There’s one thing that is guaranteed to increase your feelings of control over your life: a bias toward action.”

There’s some wisdom here: don’t wait for motivation, high energy, or a sense of focus before taking action. Create motivation by taking action. Once initiated, action tends to gather momentum—tasks become increasingly easy to sustain.

Recommendation: Skip Mel Robbins’s The 5 Second Rule. You don’t need 240 pages of testimonials and cheery page-fillers on not thinking your way out of problems. Watch her TED talk instead.

Idea for Impact: When you catch yourself thinking you’ll do something later, take it as a nudge to do it now. Take action before procrastination sets in. Action motivates.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Are You So Afraid Of? // Summary of Susan Jeffers’s ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’
  2. How to … Make Work Less Boring
  3. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  4. Real Ways to Make Habits Stick
  5. Zeigarnik Effect: How Incomplete Tasks Trigger Stress

Make a Habit of Stepping Back from Work

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“Busyness” often initiates as a lack of focus. Our culture has been seduced into thinking that we can achieve anything if we try harder and work longer.

Besides, good jobs are overwhelming. Many company cultures count on employees to compartmentalize their lives and prioritize work over all else. Managers expect that employees become what sociologists have identified as “ideal workers”: folks who are entirely dedicated to their jobs and are always on call, sometimes at great expense to their personal life. Such dedication is detrimental not just to employee wellbeing but also to the bottom line.

Being productive requires acknowledging that you can’t work for extended periods and maintain a high-performance level.

Make a habit of stepping back. Taking your mind off work can help you overcome mental blocks. Being productive requires creative thinking more than perseverance.

You’re more likely to find breakthrough ideas when you temporarily remove yourself from the grind. The best solutions uncover themselves when you step into the shower, go for a run, have lunch away from your desk, or set off on holiday.

  • Up the Good Stuff. To feel less burned-out, do a little more of the things you love and a smidgen less drudge work.
  • Seek Breathing Room. That’s a metaphor for space to catch up with yourself, regroup, think over whatever’s happening, and know how you feel and what to do next.
  • Thwart Decision Fatigue. You have a limited capacity for concentrating over extended periods. You can restore your executive function and overcome mental fatigue through interventions—short rest, engaging in creative purists, and increasing the body’s glucose levels.

Idea for Impact: If you want to get more done, start taking breaks. Busyness is very different from effectiveness.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Zen in a Minute: Centering with Micro-Meditations
  2. How to Clear Your Mental Horizon
  3. Personal Energy: How to Manage It and Get More Done // Summary of ‘The Power of Full Engagement’
  4. Niksen: The Dutch Art of Embracing Stillness, Doing Nothing
  5. To Rejuvenate Your Brain, Give it a Break