1: It was the early 1970s, and cognitive psychologist Virginia Valian was stuck.

She “found herself so paralyzed by work anxiety that she couldn’t write a word of her PhD thesis,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.  

Our lives can be shaped by what it is we are trying to avoid, Oliver observes. “We talk about … continue reading

1: Author Oliver Burkeman was anxious.

He was waiting for the subway at the Union Street station in Brooklyn “fretting in my customary manner, this time about the logistics of a forthcoming move between apartments, although it could have been anything,” he writes in his terrific book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

What was he worried about? He was … continue reading