Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [35]
The major obstacle to regular practice of this exercise is the impression that it’s too boring to get through. This is nothing more than a rationalization. How can typists tolerate typing and assembly-line workers stick rods into sockets for eight hours if we can’t endure five minutes of tedium? Can anything in the world possibly be so dull? It isn’t boredom that makes us quit. We start to count our breaths and are shocked to discover that we can’t perform what seems to be a trivially easy task. It’s hard for us to admit that our mind is so totally out of control. So we tell ourselves that we could have done it if we wished, but that it was too boring. Then we go to our desk and make out bills for the next hour. This absurd rationalization may be dispensed with if we understand from the start that counting breaths doesn’t come easily to anyone. We’re bound to fail in our first attempts. If it were easy, there would be no point to it.
The Universe never asks more than one thing of us at a time. In the midst of a thousand desperate emergencies, we have only to attend to the most desperate emergency. The remaining 999 are simply not our concern. To be sure, disaster may strike if we don’t get to them in time. But in this respect, the objective situation is really the same as in our unharried moments. Having taken care of all the business that seemed urgent, we may step out of the house and be run over by a truck. It’s only because we don’t think of it that the menace of trucks doesn’t make us feel more busy. Trucks don’t present themselves to us as a problem. But neither are we presented with the known problems that can’t yet be dealt with. For the time being, they can also be put out of mind. We accomplish nothing useful by trying to hold them in consciousness. And the attempt to hold them interferes with our work on the task at hand.
In reality, there’s never more than one thing to do. Being too busy is always a trap.
cceleration is the trap of acting at a faster than optimal rate. We repair a broken appliance so hurriedly that we make mistakes and the appliance immediately breaks down again. As a result, the resources that were devoted to this project have gone to waste. We might as well have done nothing at all.
Acceleration is a mirror image of procrastination. When we procrastinate, we are slow to start: we put off getting to work on the broken appliance with one excuse after another. When we accelerate, we’re too quick to finish: we don’t give the task its due measure of time and attention. These two traps are by no means incompatible. Sometimes we procrastinate at the beginning and then accelerate to the end.
We need to make a distinction here between acceleration and simply moving quickly, which will be called hurrying. We hurry but we do not accelerate when we run out of a burning building as fast as we can. On the other hand, an ordinary walking pace may already be accelerative when we’re making our way through a minefield.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to doing things rapidly. The advantages are that (1) we get unpleasant business over with more quickly, (2) we sooner attain the goal we are working toward, and (3) we can sooner begin the next item of business in our life. For example, when we wash the dinner dishes as rapidly as we can, we may be motivated by the desire (1) to get a distasteful chore over with, (2) to have the dishes clean in time for a mother-in-law’s imminent inspection, or (3) to give ourselves more time for a later and more important project.
The disadvantages of doing things too quickly are that (1) we are more likely to make errors along the way and (2) the activity is made more unpleasant by the irritant of having to rush. Washing the dishes as rapidly as we can, (1) we leave coffee stains