No Hard Feelings

On the flip side, one of the most disrespectful things you can do is to make someone else feel invisible—and validation helps people feel visible.

How do you stop stressing about the things you can’t control? First, you have to be diligent about recognizing what you can’t control. If you feel responsible for the beyonds, you’ll never be able to confidently say you’ve done enough and relax.

There’s good news about anxiety: you’ll be most anxious about a decision when you’re trying to pick between good choices. Psychologists call this the win-win paradox (neuroscientists refer to it as “neural correlates of First World problems”).

Think of relevant emotions as your internal navigation system. When you imagine what would happen if you picked one option over another, that image is marked with a positive or negative feeling.

But emotions aren’t mystical signals; they’re based on expertise, experience, and rapid information processing (the psychologist William James described gut feelings as “felt knowledge”).

we seek help from our friends, so if we feel like an outsider, we may not reach out when we should.

But boredom can motivate us by signaling that a more rewarding activity might exist. Brief periods of boredom may help our wandering minds tap into memories and begin connecting ideas. When people lie in fMRI machines and wait for a task, their brains show increased activity in regions associated with memory and imagination. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates famously schedule time to simply sit and think. So next time you’re bored, see where your mind takes you!

World Economic Forum predicts more than half of children will work in jobs that do not yet exist; even the most talented engineer will one day need to code in a language that has not yet been written.

You can learn to bring your mind back to the present and stop ruminating. The first step to feeling better is to notice your cognitive distortions, or the dirty tricks your brain plays on you. Psychologist Martin Seligman identified the “three Ps” we tend to focus on after a negative event:
Personalization: thinking that the event is all your fault
Pervasiveness: thinking that the event is going to ruin every aspect of your life
Permanence: thinking you are going to feel like this (e.g., bad) forever

You will feel a lot better about leaving at a reasonable hour or taking vacation if you know you’re doing a good job (in fact, high performers take almost twice as much vacation as their colleagues). And the first step to feeling confident is to figure out your boss’s priorities. “Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard,” notes Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake.