Do you magnify situations that aren’t as bad as they seem? Do you want to learn how to feel less anxious?
Oliver Burkeman explains that we generally have a lot of anxiety in life due to our desire for control. This prevents us from enjoying our lives to the fullest.
Let’s focus on methods to help you loosen your grip so you can embrace life and make progress toward your goals.
Method 1: Stop Magnifying Situations
Burkeman explains that our anxiety and desire to achieve perfection often cause us to make our goals, problems, and barriers seem bigger than they are. This only exacerbates negative emotions like stress and discourages us from moving forward. To feel less anxious, Burkeman makes three recommendations:
First, rather than viewing your goals as big and requiring massive motivation to accomplish, pretend that they’re easy. Taking this perspective can help you feel less overwhelmed and make the goal feel more manageable—especially if you also break the goal down into smaller tasks. Further, imagining that your goals are easy will help you avoid making them unnecessarily complicated—for example, by thinking you need a laptop or a certain program to write your book when you could make do with your notes app or a pen and paper.
Second, stop trying to control other people’s emotions. We often tailor our decisions to avoid causing negative feelings for others—even if the path they’d choose for us isn’t in our best interest. But Burkeman explains that you’ll never be able to control others’ feelings, so you shouldn’t use your desire to please them as a basis for decision-making. Instead, Burkeman recommends taking others’ feelings into account, but ultimately making decisions based on what’s best for you.
Finally, Burkeman says that rather than obsessing about creating perfect work, you should focus on consistently producing work—even if it’s flawed. If you wait to have a brilliant idea before getting to work, you’ll likely be waiting a while before you produce anything. In contrast, if you push through the desire for perfection and produce work anyway, you’ll make a lot more progress toward your goals.
Method 2: Go With the Flow
Burkeman’s second method for letting go of control is embracing resonance. He explains that embracing resonance means engaging meaningfully and reciprocally with your environment, relationships, or activities—taking all you can from your experiences, and seeing the unpredictability of life (including its good and bad parts) as a gift rather than an inconvenience.
Burkeman explains that embracing resonance helps us release our desire to control the uncontrollable. When we constantly attempt to exert control over life, we end up creating unnecessary anxiety for ourselves and others. We also fail to recognize how random, sometimes inconvenient situations can bring meaning to our existence. Embracing resonance helps us overcome such short-sightedness. For example, it helps you see that it might have been inconvenient for your car to break down in the middle of the street, but if it didn’t happen, you wouldn’t have made friends with the person who pulled over to help out—an event that held significant meaning for you.
To embrace resonance, Burkeman recommends doing what you can to achieve your goals (working within your realm of control), but rolling with the punches when setbacks or distractions occur (not resisting what you can’t control). On a typical day, this might look like doing your best to stick to your schedule but engaging with interruptions that arise, such as a surprise guest visiting your office. You never know—the interruption might even give you a burst of inspiration.
Method 3: Be Compassionate
Finally, to relinquish your need for control, Burkeman recommends practicing compassion for yourself and others. He explains that being kind and understanding to yourself minimizes controlling, self-sabotaging behaviors like perfectionism and self-blame that ultimately decrease your productivity and happiness. To treat yourself compassionately, lend yourself the kindness and understanding you would offer a friend, and don’t force yourself to do things you don’t want to—do enjoyable and fulfilling things instead.
Burkeman also explains that we often feel bad about ourselves because we believe we need to do more for others—we want to do something kind, but we feel like that means doing it perfectly and going all-out, so we end up doing nothing. Burkeman says you can avoid this trap by simply acting on your natural inclinations; behave generously when you feel like it, instead of putting it off for when you can act on it perfectly. For example, if you see a commercial that makes you want to give to charity, go online immediately and donate what you can spare rather than waiting for a time when you have more to give.
| Program Your Brain for Happiness Like Burkeman, Mo Gawdat explains in That Little Voice in Your Head that being compassionate toward yourself and others is key to living a happy and fulfilling life. He provides some tips for following this advice: First, practice being compassionate with yourself and overcoming negative thoughts like self-blame by checking your perceptions of and responses to the world around you. For example, if you interpret your work as unsatisfactory, your brain will respond by being upset. Instead, look at the situation objectively: Regardless of whether you think your work is good or bad, you accomplished the work. By telling your brain you accomplished something, it will be happier, and you will have been more compassionate toward yourself. Second, Gawdat recommends showing compassion for others by giving away the things you don’t need. When you buy something for yourself, you can also buy the same thing for someone else. For example, next time you’re buying a coffee, pay for the order of the person behind you. |
