Here’s a thing my brain does.

I’ll send a message—an email, a text, a voice mail—and then I’ll wait. While I wait, I decide the delay means something. I was too blunt. Or not warm enough. The other person is annoyed. They’re rethinking the whole relationship. By the time they write back (”sounds good!”) I’ve already attended the funeral for a friendship that was never in any danger.

None of it was real. But it felt real, which is the whole problem.

This feeling is a cognitive distortion: an irrational thought pattern that feels like an accurate read on the situation when it’s nothing of the sort. And when one of these is running quietly in the background, it doesn’t just ruin an afternoon. It locks your anxiety in place and keeps feeding it.

The tricky part is that you almost never notice the distortion itself. You only notice the conclusion—I’m failing, I’m behind, nothing’s going to change. The distortion is the lens that made the conclusion feel obvious. Take the lens off and the conclusion gets a lot harder to defend.

A handful of these show up over and over in people who feel stressed about time (including me, to be clear.) Here are five worth knowing by name.

The five distortions

Overgeneralization. One bad moment becomes a permanent forecast. “I missed one deadline, so I’ll always be behind.” A single data point, projected across your entire future.

Black-and-white thinking. The either/or with no middle. “If I can’t do this perfectly, there’s no point starting.” So you don’t start, which guarantees the zero you were afraid of in the first place.

Filtering. Three things went right today and one went wrong, and you already know which one you’ll be replaying at midnight. The good stuff doesn’t even register.

Personalization. Assuming you’re the cause of anything bad within range. “They rescheduled. Must be something I did.” Maybe their kid got sick. You won’t consider it.

Catastrophizing. Expecting the worst, and treating an ordinary stumble like a disaster. This one’s the heavyweight, so it gets its own section.

Catastrophizing comes at you from three directions

Catastrophizing hits the same event from past, present, and future all at once.

It goes after your past (”I made a terrible, unforgivable mistake”), your present (”only an idiot would mess up like that”), and your future (”I’ll never recover from this”)—all aimed at one forgettable experience. Each tense makes the other two worse. The verdict in the present makes your past mistake feel bigger, and the two together make a grim future feel like a foregone conclusion.

An observation: the loop needs all three tenses to hold itself up, but you only have to knock out one to bring it down. Usually the future one works best. “Will I really never recover from this?” is a question that mostly answers itself. (No! You will recover!)

Fun fact, you’ll spot these in a friend before you spot them in yourself

When a friend says “I missed one deadline, I’m going to lose the account, I’ll probably get fired,” you can see the flawed thinking instantly. Naming the distortion gives you that same outside view on your own head.

So here’s the one practice that’s helped me most. Pick a single anxious thought from your day—a real one, ideally about time—and walk through it like this:

Catch it and write it down. Be specific. “I’m going to fail at this whole project because I missed one deadline.” Vague thoughts are slippery; written ones hold still.

Name the lie. Overgeneralization? Catastrophizing? Personalization? If you can’t decide, don’t start spiraling about that too. They overlap, and naming any of them takes the air out of the thought.

Interrogate it. Just like you’d question a suspicious claim from anyone else. “Is this a fact or a guess? What’s my actual evidence? Have I been here before, and what happened last time?”

Write the counter. Skip the pep talk; you won’t believe it anyway. Go for something balanced and true. “I’ve hit deadlines before. Missing one doesn’t sink the project. What’s the next move that makes this one work?”

That’s the whole technique. You won’t catch it the first time, or maybe the tenth. But the distortions have recognizable shapes, and shapes get easier to spot with practice.

The next time your mind tries to send you to a funeral for a friendship that’s doing perfectly fine, you might catch it on the way out the door.

Which of the five cognitive distortions do you identify with the most? What’s been helpful for you?

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When you feel overwhelmed, it’s not just that you don’t know what to do. You also worry about perpetually disappointing people. You do your best, and you know it’s not enough.

So you experiment with different patterns of triage.

Pattern one: cyclical. Today I will disappoint my parents, tomorrow I will disappoint my partner, the next day I will disappoint my boss.

Pattern two: relationship management. Status check—who needs me most right now? Who’s been waiting longest? Who will be the most frustrated if I keep ignoring them?

Pattern three: avoidance. Don’t open the email. Don’t check the text. If I don’t see it, technically I haven’t disappointed anyone yet.

(My personal favorite is #3.)

You are essentially trying to keep up with an algorithm of disappointment.

But just like any terrible social media algorithm—the ones that keep you watching short videos you don’t need to see—the disappointment algorithm is not good for you. Because ultimately the person you disappoint the most is yourself.

As we’ve noted before: caring for yourself is not selfish. Or if you prefer, it’s okay to be selfish! Among other benefits, it will give you more capacity to care for others.

You Can’t Have it All, Edition 27

A long time ago I wrote a post on the “four burners theory“ that continues to bring Google visitors to my site years later.1 The post referenced a David Sedaris article that used the analogy of a stove with four burners:

“One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. The gist is that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”

When I first shared the post, I got a lot of comments from people who found it disturbing. Which is understandable! The idea that we can’t do everything is indeed distressing. Life would be much easier and simple if we could “have it all.”

Isn’t that what it comes down to? If we had unlimited time, energy, and attention, we could make everyone happy and still keep up our Duolingo streaks and plan a solo trip to Japan. Alas, all of those resources—time, energy, attention—are severely limited.

So we are constantly disappointing people (including ourselves), as we negotiate between competing responsibilities and demands for attention. We know we aren’t good enough; we wish we were!

This is especially hard for caregivers of all kinds, including parents of young children. And it’s also hard for those who tend to put other people’s needs before their own. Do that long enough and—look out—one day you realize you’ve forgotten about your own needs altogether.

Getting Back to the Disappointment Algorithm

One weird thing about algorithms: they run in the background whether you’re paying attention or not. You can spend years of your life optimizing for the disappointment algorithm—shuffling who gets short-changed today versus tomorrow—without ever noticing that YOU never come up in the rotation.

Also, the algorithm only knows about people who complain. It doesn’t ping you when you skip your morning walk, cancel your doctor’s appointment, or stop calling the friend you like to talk to. You don’t disappoint yourself loudly. You disappoint yourself in silence, over years.

So maybe the question isn’t “how do I get better at triage?” Maybe it’s “what would it look like to stop running this algorithm at all?”

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Everyone feels stuck sometimes. You win by getting through it, not by pretending you never were.

But stuck wears a lot of costumes. Sometimes it’s rumination. Sometimes it’s burnout, grief, depression, or the particular inertia that comes with ADHD or autistic shutdown. Sometimes it’s your body telling you something your mind hasn’t caught up to yet. The way out depends on which version you’re dealing with.

Here are ten questions to help you sit with whichever version you're in.

1. What do I know to be true?

What do you believe beyond doubt or skepticism? It might be a short list. It might fill several pages in a journal. Whatever it is, it’s your truth.

Your truth can be different from other people’s, and probably will be. Think about a major world problem: climate change, a refugee crisis, lack of clean water, or literacy. Which matters most? Ask five people and you’ll get five answers, but none of them are wrong. They’re each a person’s truth.

2. What are my guiding values?

Be specific, and pick only a few. Choosing values is about prioritization. Almost every company in the world lists “excellence” as a core value, but what does that even mean? It’s like telling the genie your wish is for unlimited wishes. Nice try. He’s heard that one before.

When you pick only two or three values, you have to make hard choices. Is it more important to be curious or brave? Generous or kind? The differences are subtle but significant, and when you know your answers, decisions get easier.

3. What am I avoiding, and what is the avoidance costing me?

Stuck often has a specific texture: there’s a thing you’re not looking at. A conversation, a decision, a piece of work, a truth about a relationship. The avoidance feels like safety, but it’s usually the thing doing the sticking.

You don’t have to do the thing today—but try naming it. Name what it’s costing you in energy, sleep, focus, or self-respect. Sometimes naming the cost is enough to shift it. Sometimes it just clarifies that the cost of avoiding is higher than the cost of doing.

4. What am I pretending not to know?

This one is close to the avoidance question but sharper. Often when we feel stuck, we already know the answer. We just don’t want it to be the answer.

You know the relationship isn’t working. You know the job is wrong for you. You know the project you keep not starting is the one you actually want to do. The stuck-ness isn’t really confusion. It’s the gap between what you know and what you’re willing to act on.

Naming what you’re pretending not to know doesn’t mean you have to do anything about it yet. But you can’t act on something you haven’t admitted.

5. Since I don’t know how much time I have, what should I do with it?

You don't know how much time you have left. Could be decades, could be less—but you don’t know with any certainty. Life can be taken without warning, or you could live to 115.

Given the uncertainty and the lack of a reliable countdown clock, what changes do you want to make? What dreams are still unfulfilled? What troubles you that you keep pushing to next quarter, next year, next someday?

6. What would I tell a friend in my exact situation?

We tend to be more generous and clear-eyed with other people than with ourselves. A friend comes to you with your exact problem and you’d know what to say. You’d be kind, you’d see the way forward, you’d remind them of what they already know.

Try turning that lens around. What would you tell them? Now: why is that advice not for you? The answer is usually revealing.

7. Who haven’t I talked to about this?

Stuck thrives in isolation. The longer you sit with something alone, the bigger and more intractable it gets. Often the thing that finally shifts it isn’t a new insight, but a conversation.

Is there someone who would actually get it? Someone who’s been through something similar, someone whose judgment you trust, someone who won’t just tell you what you want to hear? You don’t need a whole support network. You need one honest conversation.

8. What does my body say?

Stuck often shows up in the body before it shows up in your thinking. Tension, exhaustion, the dread that sits in your chest when you open your laptop. A sleep pattern that’s off. The specific kind of tired that rest doesn’t fix.

Your body isn’t separate from your mental health. It’s often the first place you can read it. Before analyzing your stuck-ness, check in with what you’re actually feeling physically. The answer might not be another question. It might be water, food, a walk, or an honest look at how much you’ve been asking of yourself.

9. Do I have any regrets?

Like fear, regret is better faced than left to linger. If there’s something you wish you’d done differently, or just done at all, is it too late?

If it’s not too late, maybe it’s time to do the work.

If it is too late, think about how to avoid those situations in the future, and grant yourself some grace. We can’t change the past, and some things can’t be fixed. Live for today and build for tomorrow.

10. What is something I MUST do, no matter how difficult it is?

Warning: an honest answer to this question might change your life.

In my case, it’s what led me to visit every country in the world. More than any other reason (love of travel, goal-setting, compulsive personality, “it just seemed fun”), once I realized the idea wouldn’t leave me alone, it became something I simply had to take on.

Is there anything like that for you? If you’re ignoring it, or telling yourself you’ll get back to it when you have time, that might be exactly why you feel stuck.

And if your answer seems irrational, or if it isn’t one that everyone around you understands, you might really be on to something.

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There’s a meme that gets passed around online:

“Woodworking sounds really cool until you realize it’s 90% sanding.”

Is this intended to be both funny and true? I’m no woodworker, but my guess would be yes.

Someone who saw the original post chimed in to say that photography is 90% editing. If you want to become a great photographer, you need to be comfortable editing lots of photos. That’s just how it works! There are tools that make it faster and easier, but in the life of most photographers, taking photos is not the primary activity.

This same principle holds true across many fields. Writing is 90% rewriting. Cooking is 90% prep. Coding is 90% debugging. (Maybe you already know what yours is.)

Outsourcing and Delegation

Why doesn’t the woodworker outsource the sanding? Surely there’s a virtual assistant or intern woodworker who can take over?

It sounds absurd, but this is exactly how many people think about their craft. They look for shortcuts and ways to avoid “busy work,” without realizing that this work is integral to the finished product.

And I get it. The sanding isn’t what draws you to the craft. Nobody starts a business because they’re excited about invoicing. The detailed tasks can feel low-status, like they’re somehow beneath the “real” work. But that’s a misunderstanding of what the real work is. The sanding isn’t separate from the craft; it’s most of the craft.

Sure, be efficient! But don’t neglect the sanding. And if you hate sanding entirely—whatever “sanding” looks like in your world—maybe you should look for something else to do.

I’m just a few weeks past hosting my last event, which is both a celebration and a mission. Along with several other team members, this year I spent many hours working through a spreadsheet to slot in 70 different sessions and meetups across multiple rooms and time blocks. Every change created a ripple—move one session and you’ve got a speaker conflict, a room capacity problem, or back-to-back sessions on the same topic. Nobody at the event said “Wow, great spreadsheet work.” But they did say “I loved how the schedule flowed.” That’s sanding.

Several times in the weeks and months leading up to the big weekend, I thought about the 90% sanding analogy. Detail work is the main requirement of a successful event. Thinking things through is what makes the difference. Being willing to follow through and follow up, not just generate ideas, is where the value comes from.

And that’s okay! It’s how it should be. If you care about the details, you’ll have a MUCH better outcome than if you prefer to “be a visionary” and outsource your admin.

Finding work you love to do is the coolest thing. If you love your work, it affects everything else. It can carry you through hard times. It doesn’t replace the other parts of life, but it matters more than most people give it credit for.

What must you love about it? You must love the small things that take up most of the time! Or at least you must respect them.

If you don’t respect these parts, if instead you resent them and see them as beneath you—well, good luck. Find something else to give your effort to.

It’s hard to find the right match, but it’s very much worth the effort. When you feel discouraged, remind yourself: 90% sanding.

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You know that task you keep thinking about but still don’t do? The one that creates guilt, stress, and a constant sense that you should have handled it already? The one that probably wouldn’t even take that long, if you could just get started?

That kind of avoidance costs more than we realize. It drains mental energy, increases stress, and slowly turns into a story about who we are: lazy, flaky, undisciplined, broken.

But most of the time, that story is wrong. You’re not lazy. You’re stuck. And stuck people don’t need more shame, harsher self-talk, or another productivity system built around trying harder. They need a different way in.

Get the Guide + Tools

That’s what this guide is for. How to Do the Thing You’ve Been Putting Off isn’t just a PDF or audiobook. It also includes an interactive experience designed to help you figure out exactly why you’re stuck and what to do next.

In under a minute, it helps you identify the pattern behind your resistance and points you toward a practical way forward.

Along with the interactive tool, the guide covers why tasks can feel heavier than they are, what’s actually happening when you avoid them, how to make a task small enough to start, how to create conditions that make action easier than avoidance, and what to do when you’re still stuck.

The new guide is available now in two versions, with an option for the audiobook and the interactive experience. Both versions also include two bonus audio recordings, Dopamine Stacking and Why Habits Fail.

Get the Guide + Tools

This has been a fun project to work on, and I'm curious to know how it lands. If you end up picking it up, let me know how it helps you!

Last weekend I hosted NeuroDiversion 26, the sequel to our inaugural gathering last year in celebration of all types of neurodivergence. This time, more than 500 people traveled in from all across the U.S. and Canada, as well as 11 additional countries.

The first year was solid, but this year was a real leap forward. I’m very proud of our team! We leveled up all-around, with 40+ speakers, the debut of an expo format for dozens of vendors, and a lot more attention to detail.

In this post I’ll share a few highlights and stories. I realize if you weren’t there, it’s hard to fully experience the moment—and you also might not be interested. (Feel free to skip this post if so.) But for those who like live events, or neurodivergence, or just a rundown of an intense weekend, keep reading.

A Tale of 8 Photos

Rather than take you through everything that happened sequentially, I’ll share the experience through these eight photos. (There are more than 1,000 additional images on my Flickr, if you’d like to keep scrolling.)

Gary Ware All Tied Up

My co-facilitator Gary Ware and I like to mix things up when we open the show. This year’s bit involved Gary getting a little too inspired by the cowboy “trick roper” who performed at the opening party the night before. One thing led to another, and Gary ended up stuck overnight in the green room.

We had security cam footage and everything—him trying to lasso his way out, pacing around, the whole ordeal—before another speaker finally came to the rescue and delivered Gary to the stage. It was completely ridiculous, which is how we like to start things.

The Amazing Dr. Scott (Barry Kaufman)

is a psychologist and author, but apparently he’s also a mentalist? His talk turned into a full interactive experience—onstage magic, a live FaceTime call with a random stranger somewhere in the United States, and a card trick that somehow involved each person in the audience.

I still don’t fully understand how any of it worked, which I think is the point.

The Vibe With Ky (Westcott)

It was really great to have Kyrus Keenan Westcott with us this year. I didn’t know Ky very well before the conference, and connecting with him turned out to be one of the highlights for me personally. He brought this energy that just landed with the whole room. Before the talk, he told me he was going to “bring the spunk”—and clearly he did!

Jessica McCabe Back in the House

Our community champion Jessica McCabe was with us again this year after an amazing keynote in 2025. This time she talked about ADHD and creativity, which—if you know Jessica’s work—is right in her wheelhouse. Having her back, along with another longtime friend Cas Aarssen, felt like welcoming family.

Creative Writing Session on the Lawn

We had more than 40 breakout sessions over the weekend, featuring a bunch of topics you wouldn’t expect at a typical conference. One of my favorites was this creative writing session on the lawn (led by ), where attendees worked on short writing projects together in the sunshine.

Other outdoor activities included a hula hoop workshop, yoga, and sound healing. It was exactly the kind of thing that happens when you give neurodivergent people space and permission to do things a little differently.

ND Expo

This year we debuted something new: the ND Expo, a marketplace featuring dozens of small businesses and brands from the neurodivergent community. We opened it to the public, and more than a thousand people came through over the course of the day.

Among other things, the expo included a Meet-the-Author session with eleven authors from the community, a harpist providing the kind of ambient soundtrack every event should have, and a lot of conversations between people who’d never crossed paths before.

Attendee Stories on the Main Stage

In addition to our keynotes and other main-stage content, this year we featured fourteen two-minute stories from community members on all sorts of topics. These weren’t polished keynotes—just real people sharing a story, lifehack, or memory that mattered to them. It ended up being one of our most popular formats of the entire weekend.

This Isn’t the End

On the last day, I got to share some news: we’re coming back. ND27 will return to Austin next March, and we’re not just doing the event again—we’re building out a continuing education program, a business directory for the community, and more. This thing is growing, and we want to grow it with the people who were in the room this year and the ones who’ll join us next time.

Want to See Everything? Get the Media Package

Whew! And as I said, those are just a few highlights. We have over 1,000 photos and are slowly starting to go through hundreds of videos as well. If you’d like to access more of this content—including recordings of many of the breakout sessions, along with transcripts and slides—you can pick up a media package our team put together.

Buy Media Package

I don’t wish to suggest that the media kit provides the same experience as being there, however. NeuroDiversion is very much an in-person event!

As noted, we’ll be doing it again next year—once again, bigger-and-better—and you can join the waitlist on the ND homepage to be the first to know when tickets go on sale.

Join the Waitlist

The past few months have been nearly full-time for me on NeuroDiversion. I’m looking forward to getting back to my other work that’s been back-burnered for a while, but I’m also feeling very grateful for this time.

Wherever you are and whatever you’re up to, I hope you’re taking care of yourself. 💚

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One time in my late teens, my brother and I found a video game emulator—basically a device that let us play a bunch of old games that had come out when we were kids. We hooked it up to a TV and could choose from hundreds of games, which seemed both incredible and overwhelming.

For the first couple of hours, it was a blast to scroll through dozens of titles and play different games from our past. But before long we started to notice a theme: a lot of these games sucked. They were basic and overly simple compared to modern games.

In our shared memory, the games were awesome. But when we went back to play them, we soon realized they were awesome for their time.

Overall, we came to believe, modern games were simply better. (And that was 20 years ago. Another generational change has brought about even better games.)

The interesting thing wasn’t just that the games felt worse. It was that our memory of them was wrong.

We weren’t lying to ourselves. At the time, those games really did feel incredible. But memory compresses things. It keeps the feeling and forgets the limitations.

Years later I encountered this same idea in a completely different context—one that had nothing to do with video games.

The Way We Never Were

When I was studying sociology in graduate school, one of my seminars covered a book that stuck with me. It was called The Way We Never Were. Killer title, right? The subtitle is also great: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. The title and subtitle sum up the book’s thesis: that we look to the past with rose-colored glasses.

Specifically, the “traditional family” invoked in modern political and cultural debates is largely a historical myth. But according to the historical record, that version of family life was the exception, not the rule.

Families had always been messy and varied—multi-generational households, kids working outside the home, high rates of death and remarriage. The neat suburban model many people remember existed for only a brief period, made possible by unusually strong economic conditions after World War II.

Whenever people talk about “the way things used to be,” it pays to be skeptical. It’s not only that many things are better now—like with video games— it’s that the way we think about the past is often flawed and inaccurate.

Psychologists use the term “rosy retrospection” to describe the tendency to evaluate past events more favorably when remembering them than when experiencing them in the moment.1

Once you notice this tendency, you start seeing it everywhere. People say music used to be better. Movies used to be better. Cities used to be safer. Kids used to behave. (Have kids ever behaved?) Sometimes there’s truth in these claims, but just as often we’re comparing today’s reality to a past that has already been polished by memory.

Nostalgia isn’t just remembering the past. It’s remembering an edited version of the past.

The past often looks better because memory is an excellent editor. It keeps the highlight reel and quietly deletes the frustrating parts.

In the case of those old games, memory preserved the excitement of discovering them. It didn’t preserve the repetitive levels, the awkward controls, or the hours spent trying to figure out what you were supposed to do next.

The same thing happens with decades. We remember the music, the friendships, the feeling of possibility. We forget the boredom, the uncertainty, and all the things that annoyed us at the time.

Nothing is ever quite as good as we remember it—because memory has already improved it.

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• NeuroDiversion 26 is coming up in March, and it’s going to sell out! There are currently less than 50 tickets remaining. I’d love to see you there, so if you’re interested, don’t hesitate to sign up.

• I’m also hosting an online event for the New York Public Library on the topic of neurodivergent entrepreneurship. It’s free and anyone can join.

Last but not least, I’m working on updating some long-ago projects. Here are a few thoughts on that process. 🙂

Quick show of hands: who has a website that they haven’t updated in forever? Yeah, me too. Except I have twelve of them.

Some of them don’t matter—nobody goes there—but others do. Every day, a decent number of people follow links or search for phrases that lead them to one of my online homes. And then they have a poor experience or don’t find what they’re looking for, because everything’s outdated and nothing works.

Why, you might wonder, do I have so many inactive websites? (Why is the sky blue? I might respond.) I’m not claiming it’s the greatest way to live, though at the time I make each one, the idea seems logical enough.

• I have a new book coming out, so we need a mini-site to capture interest

• I’m going on a tour, so we need a process for people to sign up in 20 different cities

• I have a crazy idea that will end up being brilliant or terrible, but either way it’s gonna need an online home of its own

And then of course there are the main portfolio sites I build and maintain for years, before starting to … build and maintain something else. The bottom line is that I am simply hard-wired to work on multiple projects, and not be one of those “one thing” people.

(I greatly admire the author Percival Everett, who’s had a lot of breakout success lately, but struggled with low sales of some of his books for years. In one of my favorite interviews of him, he said something to the effect of “My agent told me I’d make more money if I kept writing the same book over and over, but I don’t want to do that.” Me too!)

The Problems Are Obvious (Which Somehow Makes It Worse)

I’m in a few groups with friends where we meet to critique each other’s sites and businesses. I enjoy being helpful! And I strongly dislike being the one in the hot seat, because I already know many of the things that are wrong.

The bio is from three years ago. The links go to dead pages. There’s a pop-up promoting something that ended in 2022. The design looks like it was made with tools that no longer exist—because it was. (Sadly, for many sites I’ve made, this list is greatly abridged.)

If you have your own version of this problem, you probably know the feeling. It’s not that you don’t know what to fix. It’s that knowing makes it worse. You carry around this low-grade awareness that something out there with your name on it isn’t representing you well—and every day you don’t fix it, the shame compounds a little more.

Am I satisfied with such mediocrity? Absolutely not—that’s why I feel shame over it. It bothers me often.

It’s Not Writer’s Block, It’s Maintenance Block

I’m not one of those authors who hates the act of writing but loves “having written.” I actually like writing! The process itself is fun, at least much of the time. In fifteen years of book-writing, I’ve only been “stuck” on a book once or twice.

But when it comes to revisiting anything from the past—I have a great level of resistance.

I suspect this is familiar to many readers. Making something new lights up every reward center we have. Maintaining something old activates approximately none of them.

For those of us with ADHD, it’s basically our calling card. Novelty is fuel, while maintenance is the opposite of novelty. And so the old things sit there, gathering dust, while we’re off chasing the next shiny object.

Why “Just Fix It” Doesn’t Work

Sometimes, not having a clear first step is the problem. Everything feels interconnected and overwhelming. You sit down to update one page and realize it’s connected to a template that’s connected to a plugin that hasn’t been supported in five years. Now you’re troubleshooting infrastructure when you just wanted to change a paragraph.

After a long process of getting psyched up to actually fix the problem, you’re right back where you started—only now you’re more discouraged than before.

Other times, the sheer number of decisions is the problem. Which thing do I fix first? Do I consolidate? Delete something entirely? Redesign from scratch or patch what’s there? Each question spawns three more, and before long you’ve spent forty minutes thinking about it and done nothing.

And then there’s the version of stuck that’s the hardest to explain: the strange comfort of familiar defeat. You know your website—or something else—is bad. You’ve accepted this state of being. There’s something almost stable about the situation—and the idea of partially fixing it feels worse than just leaving it alone. After all, at least right now, the shame is evenly distributed.

A lot of the work I’m doing these days is about why simple things are hard. Not “simple” in the sense of unimportant, but simple in the sense of you’d think it would be easy, and yet here we are. This might be a topic of my next book, but we’ll see how it goes. Just don’t ask me to update the website for it.

Do you feel shame about not updating your website—or anything else that “should” be simple? What’s your version of maintenance block?

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First, an update: I’ve paused the billing for all paid subscriptions here—everything with A Year of Mental Health is now completely free, and nothing is paywalled.

I’m working on something new for 2026, but some occasional posts will continue on this newsletter as well. Thanks for being out there! I love writing for you and don’t take your attention for granted. 🙏

Alright, on with today’s post…

Last week I heard a story on This American Life about an unsolved mystery. Thankfully, it wasn’t a murder mystery or true crime story—it was about a classroom game that a second-grade teacher plays with her students.

In the game, the teacher reveals a sealed shoebox and asks the students to guess what’s in it. The students pass it around, each giving it a shake or pressing an ear to it, before making a series of guesses.

“Nope!” the teacher says each time. All of the guesses are incorrect.

So, you might wonder—what was in the box? Surely the game comes to an end with a reveal of sorts, right?

Normally I’d say “I won’t spoil the ending of the story,” but in this case, the whole point is that there is no ending. Or rather, the game ends and the kids don’t get to find out what’s in the box.

The students are very frustrated with the lack of reveal. Some of them even get mad. But that’s the lesson—we don’t always get the answers we want.1

As I heard this story unfold on my morning run, I understood the frustration. I’m not sure those second-grade students are much different from most adults. We want closure! We want answers! We like mysteries, but only when they proceed to a swift and thorough resolution. We want to know what happened and why.

But of course, life contains all sorts of sealed shoeboxes and mysteries. You can drive yourself crazy trying to solve the riddles.

On Reading 3-Star Books

Earlier this year I started seeking out 3-star books to read. Specifically, I look for books (mostly fiction) that have a lot of five-star reviews and a bunch of one- and two-star reviews. The ratio is key: if it’s just a lot of 3-star reviews, that means the book is probably mediocre. You want to find books that are loved or hated with little in between.

These are books that are divisive! They are books that make an emotional impact with readers, and not always a positive one.

One of my favorites in this category is Piglet. A quick look at this book’s reviews reveals that readers love it or hate it. (Personally, I loved it.)

I don’t want to give away too much for someone who wants to read this book, so I’ll just note that the rift that develops between two prominent characters is ultimately left unexplained. You learn about the consequences of a betrayal but never the origin of the betrayal itself. So if you’re reading the book hoping to figure out “what happened,” you might be left unhappy!

This outcome, however, is like so much of life.

Life is the mystery box. Life is the change that develops between people that is examined obsessively in the interior world of at least one of them, but never openly discussed. (At least not to the satisfaction of one of the parties.)

It’s the person you’re getting to know so well who ghosts you forever.

It’s the job interview or business opportunity that seems so promising, just before it’s taken from you with no explanation.

It’s so many other things that don’t go the way you want, or even just the way you expect.

“But I thought…”

Well, you thought wrong! Sometimes that happens. 🤷🏼‍♂️

I’ve spent a lot of time considering why I’ve sometimes gotten stuck on things. Historically, I expended a lot of energy trying to pursue or create resolutions to situations that were fundamentally unresolvable.

One of the main ways I get stuck is in searching for “closure” or “the answers.” And sometimes, just like with the mystery box or a good 3-star book, the answers are elusive.

It’s hard to accept that sometimes you just need to move on without the answers that feel so urgent. There’s probably some German word for “the feeling of residue that persists after an undeveloped experience.”

In the absence of that word, at least in English, I just think: maybe I need to read more 3-star books.

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Doing something for yourself is a perfectly moral thing to do.

You don’t need a reason to change your life; you don’t need to justify your personal decisions.

It’s not selfish to follow a dream. You’re not a narcissist for looking after yourself.

In my first book, The Art of Non-Conformity, I told the story of Bernard Lopez.

After working in New York at the same comfortable job for eight years, Bernard Lopez suddenly quit, broke the lease he had signed on a new apartment, withdrew all his retirement savings, and set out to travel across the United States by bicycle. One of the questions he heard over and over (after the initial reaction of “Are you crazy?”) was “Are you doing this to raise money for charity?”

If Bernard had said yes, most people would have nodded their heads, their curiosity at least partially satisfied. It’s usually acceptable, if not always completely understood, to do something unconventional when it benefits other people. But Bernard wasn’t raising money for charity or riding his bike across the country to raise awareness for anything. “No,” he said truthfully when people asked. “I’m doing it for me.”

The idea for the cross-country trip didn’t come entirely out of nowhere. Bernard had recently ended a seven-year relationship, and shortly after that painful separation, his father was killed in an accident. After reflecting on these events during a long walk one day, the idea came to him: “I should leave my life in New York behind and bike across America.”

Riding a bike day after day for 4,000 miles is both challenging and simple. It’s challenging because your body and your mind both need time to adapt. It’s simple because once you adapt, you have just one task to complete every day: keep going.

Bernard dutifully adjusted and settled in, finding a rhythm and completing the trip on schedule. Afterward, he made other big changes, switching up his career and leaving New York for Chicago.

Later he said, “It is no exaggeration that the bicycle trip changed my life and allowed me to reach my full potential.”

Isn’t that amazing?! He reached his full potential by following his dream, not in direct service to anyone else.

You don’t need a reason to change your life; you don’t need to justify your personal decisions.

Doing something for yourself is a perfectly moral thing to do.

P.S. I told this story in video form recently as well:

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If you’re trying to build a business, a brand, or a community, here’s a good north star: focus on helping people feel less lonely.

Or if you prefer this phrasing: helping people feel closer to each other. It’s what we’re all searching for! It’s what we want, more than anything. Well, I suppose to be technical, we all want meaning and purpose. But an important part of living a meaningful life is feeling connected to other people, so there you go.

And it seems that lately we’re all feeling lonelier, even as technology makes all sorts of advancements that supposedly bring us closer.

Children in the Dark

Many people feel very anxious about AI. Some of the general concern is not just “Will this take our jobs?” but a more existential fear. Even the co-founder of Anthropic, one of the largest language models (like Chat-GPT), had this to say in a recent talk:

I remember being a child and after the lights turned out I would look around my bedroom and I would see shapes in the darkness and I would become afraid—afraid these shapes were creatures I did not understand that wanted to do me harm. And so I’d turn my light on. And when I turned the light on I would be relieved because the creatures turned out to be a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade.

Now, in the year of 2025, we are the child from that story and the room is our planet. But when we turn the light on we find ourselves gazing upon true creatures, in the form of the powerful and somewhat unpredictable AI systems of today and those that are to come. And there are many people who desperately want to believe that these creatures are nothing but a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade. And they want to get us to turn the light off and go back to sleep.

Remember, this story is from one of the main guys who’s advancing the field of AI! And it seems even he’s afraid of it, at least a little.

Then of course you have “social media,” which I put in quotes because it’s so fashionable to complain about now. As with AI, I don’t hate social, I just find it a little disturbing even as I consume it (and benefit from it) in different ways each day.

So we all feel unsettled, anxious, and uncertain. In a single word: lonely.

Like it or not, AI is not going away, nor are the algorithms that influence much of what we encounter online all the time. So in the absence of “let’s burn it all down,” I think the best response is where I started this post: to help people feel less lonely.

Feeling Lonely? Help Someone

If you feel lonely, it might be helpful to ask how you can be of service to someone.

Will this act magically solve your sense of isolation? It actually might! Research shows that performing acts of kindness or helping others can meaningfully improve your own well-being—for instance, a meta-analysis of 27 studies found a small-to-moderate positive effect (δ = 0.28) of kindness on the psychological well-being of the giver.1

But let’s assume that helping someone does not completely solve your loneliness. Even so, it’s still a much better choice than doing nothing. Someone else is now better off because of your actions, and that makes you feel good, too.

This is our mission at NeuroDiversion: to celebrate the lived experience of ADHD, autism, and other types of neurodiversity. It’s the project I’m working on more than any other this fall. Year one (March 2025) was a great start, but we’re going bigger-and-better for year two. This week we’ve been selling tickets and welcoming hundreds of new attendees to the community.

Over the next six months I hope to share the event with you one way or another—some of you in-person (!) and others from afar through posts, pictures, and videos.

And of course, I know that YOU may be working on something to help someone as well. Whatever that thing is, I hope you keep going. We need you!

Thank you as always for reading. Take care of yourself over there. 💚

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Long ago I accepted my side in a long-running debate: whether it’s better to become the “master of one topic” or pursue several interrelated interests.

For me it was fairly obvious: I was never going to be the greatest at anything. I simply liked too many things! And while I understood the importance of focus and the need to say no (etc.), I also developed what I now see as a “very ADHD” way of life. I am healthier, better off, and more productive if I follow my interests as they change.

The debate is one of those grass-is-greener things. I’ve talked with very successful people on both sides, and everyone tends to be slightly envious of the other group.

• The people who’ve chosen their one thing and achieved mastery of it sometimes wish they hadn’t been so tightly focused

• The people who never find “their one thing” to focus on sometimes wish they’d been more selective

(So, clearly, there’s room for some general acceptance on both sides.)

I finally came to realize something else: for most people who ponder this question, where you end up is not really a choice. Simply put, most people tend to naturally be good at one of the two approaches—understanding where you fall on that spectrum is more something you learn about yourself than something you decide.

Unless You’re in the “Master of One” Camp, Get Comfortable with Change

From here on, I’m speaking to the generalists. Let’s emphasize this point:

If you change your interests over time, and you follow those changes—meaning you don’t force yourself to keep doing the same thing over and over—there will be consequences.

When you make a change, things happen! If you’re a creator of any kind, you lose audience. The fans want you to play the hits. People are surprised, maybe even disappointed, when you change things up on them. You aren’t who they thought you were, or you no longer meet the needs they were projecting onto you.

But this is another decision I’ve made recently: all things considered, it’s better to keep evolving! Change is new and strange, and not everyone will come along for the ride—but it’s still worth it.

You will be happier, better off, and more productive if you follow your interests as they develop.

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Photos: On stage recently at The Conference for Conferences, founded by Jenny Sauer-Klein. After my talk I was given a “dare” to act out the alphabet with my body as the audience recited all 26 letters. I challenged Jenny to join me and fortunately she was a good sport.

The next time you’re competing in the Olympics (anything’s possible, right?), take note: you might be better off with taking third place.

Well, to be clear, you’ll probably be happiest with first place, the gold. But if you’re not going to outright WIN, better to come in third than second.

That’s right, winning third place is better than second! Or at least, that’s been the experience for many actual winners, based on multiple studies over the past thirty years.

The original study was done on winners of the 1992 Olympics. It found that silver medalists were less satisfied than bronze medallists, despite their objectively “better” finish.1

A follow-up study twenty years later replicated these results and examined how pre-event expectations affect reactions. One finding was that silver medallists may have higher expectations, which amplifies disappointment when they don’t get gold. Bronze medallists often have lower expectations (or different comparisons) so their emotion is less dampened.2

Yet another study (this one from 2021) examined the same question but with different methods. This one used AI to review the facial expressions of winners standing on the podium. It too found that bronze medallists were more likely to display genuine happiness than silver medallists, consistent with the older findings.3

So basically—this is a real thing. And doesn’t everything come down to expectations in so many parts of life?

Do your best, of course, but don’t EXPECT to win.

Another Helpful Thing: Remember It Could Have Gone Another Way

Whenever something goes really well, I try to remind myself: this outcome was not preordained. Much of it came down to chance and circumstance.

To be clear, you can—and probably should—celebrate when things go well. Life is hard, so might as well take joy in the good things.

Still, holding on to those “wins” loosely can help you feel less attached when something goes wrong. Those things, too, could have gone another way.

In thinking through some of the status anxiety I’ve experienced, it seems that unhappiness comes from when I’ve EXPECTED things. I’ve expected to be treated a certain way because of status or some other ridiculous reason, and if/when that doesn’t happen, I feel disappointed.

Solution: don’t expect to be treated a certain way! Be happy with any positive treatment at all.

Of course, we could just say “Have no expectations anywhere in life,” and that would solve a bunch of problems for Olympic athletes, you and me, and pretty much everyone else. But since that’s difficult, perhaps this is a starting point.

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When you set out to make goals, either general life aims or just “things to do before you die,” where do the ideas come from?

Most likely, you borrow your goal ideas from what you’ve seen and experienced.

Maybe they came from your family of origin, or your way of life growing up. You wanted to replicate what you liked as a child, and move far away from everything else. (Or perhaps somewhere in between.)

When it comes to those “things to do before you die,” perhaps you borrow from someone else’s bucket list. You know the type:

visit Paris, climb Kilimanjaro, learn a language, go skydiving, take a cross-country road trip, swim with dolphins, write a novel, ride in a hot air balloon, see the northern lights, etc.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! In fact, you could argue that some common goals rise to the top of valuable life experiences. Just because other people enjoy them doesn’t mean you can’t take pleasure in them as well.

Still, there’s value in going beyond your first instincts when it comes to setting goals. Maybe the thing you really want to do is something completely unfamiliar or unexpected!

Goals Are Like Art: It’s Good to Go Beyond the Mainstream

Most popular art forms end up with near monopolies. Top-ten artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Morgan Wallen sometimes command a majority of collective user listening on Spotify. The Nutcracker is the only ballet many people will ever see. Orchestras perform the same symphonies over and over, because that’s what people want. (And just like it’s nice to visit Paris, those popular symphonies are worth listening to. They’re just not the only symphonies.)

If you want to appreciate an art form, it’s worth diving deeper than the equivalent of the Spotify Top Ten.

Who inspired the popular artists you like, and who inspired those people, and so on? Where do different forms of art come from? How is art different in Western and Eastern traditions, and then regionally, and so on?

This type of investigation is more fruitful than just experiencing the same artists over and over. It’s fun, and you’ll learn something along the way!

So when it comes to goals—if you think about all the things you want to do, and realize that you can trace these goals back to a predictable source—could there be value in going deeper? What would you do if you eliminated all your current goals and decided to start fresh?

Are your goals yours, or have you taken on someone else's?

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A while back, I told the story of my two-day job as a telemarketer at the age of sixteen. This was a pretty extreme case of trying to be someone I wasn’t—a counterfeit self, as I called it. Thankfully, it didn’t last long.

At the end of my second day, the call center boss suggested that I might be better suited for another form of employment. I said that I’d understand if he wanted to replace me with someone else.

“That’s good,” he told me. “Because we already have.”

Oops. Well—it’s probably for the best that I wasn’t cut out to be a star telemarketer.

In the short video below, I share a different story of pretending—or in this case, of overcoming the urge to pretend and instead showing up as my true self.

It happened during a business interview when I ended up talking about death. Not quite what the interviewer was expecting! They wanted to talk with me about email marketing. But it felt right at the time and I'm glad I went for it.

When you start to show up as your true self, it can be a little jarring—and not only to others, but also to you. Pretending is easier! At least it seems so at first. But as you get more used to being yourself, pretending starts to feel unnatural.

Interestingly, being more like your true self can end up putting other people at ease as well. No one wants to pretend; we just do it because it seems like we’re supposed to.

Do you feel like you have to pretend in social interactions? Sometimes we do it to protect ourselves, but it can be exhausting.

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When people say "Just be yourself"—well, it’s not usually that simple. I think some of the people who offer this advice have never questioned whether the self they present to the world is actually who they are or just who they think they're supposed to be.

Real self-knowledge, it turns out, takes time. You have to excavate your real personality from everything you've learned to present and project. There might be underlayers of cultural conditioning or even trauma responses that masquerade as your self.

So it’s not easy!

But It’s Also Worth It

The more you understand, oh, this is who I am, who I want to be, who I am becoming ... the more you feel like yourself. You more you recognize yourself.

• It gets easier to say yes to things you want to do but were afraid of being judged or shamed for

• It gets easier to say no to things you would have agreed to out of obligation

In short, learning to be yourself is indeed worth the effort. It’s even a fun process! At least much of the time.

It’s just not always easy. It's not simple or immediate and it might require some investigation. You might need to change something, and change is hard.

Either way, the next time you hear someone say, “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken,” you can remember: “That's a good idea in theory, but in practice, it takes time.”

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I don’t know about you, but I often think of exactly the right thing to say in a conversation about an hour after the conversation ends. Sometimes it’s ten minutes later, or sometimes it’s a whole day later, but either way the effect is the same.

This extended response time is especially common for me whenever it’s a conversation where the stakes feel high: a conflict of some kind, perhaps, or when I’m around a bunch of smart people and feel like I should have something to contribute.

I was recently in the second situation, in a room filled with smart people who all had quick-witted remarks and helpful commentary during a group discussion. I sat there and said almost nothing the whole time, even though the group was talking about topics that I know a good bit about. What was wrong with me?

That’s why, when I heard this statement recently, I felt both affirmed and understood:

“If you’re a deep thinker, you might not be a quick thinker.”

Sure, it would be nice to be both a quick thinker and a deep thinker, but now that I’ve thought about it (for a long time, haha) I can see that many of us tend to fall into one of the two groups. And I’m certainly not on the quick side of the divide!

Maybe it’s a core feature of being sensitive, and sensitivity is a gift—it’s not something you want to change or undo. Still, most positive traits come with tradeoffs, and this might be the natural companion to a tendency toward introspection. If you think deeply, you might not always think quickly.

The upside is that deep thinkers often bring thoughtful perspectives that cut through surface-level chatter—we might speak less frequently, but when we do, it tends to be worth hearing.

How do you feel about this idea? Are you more of a quick thinker or deep thinker? Take your time if you need. 🙂

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If you're a people-pleaser, this might help. You already know that time is limited and you can't do everything—but you still struggle to say no to every request that comes your way.

You understand the concept of boundaries. Maybe you’ve even practiced “saying no” in your head. But when someone actually asks you for something—especially if they seem to really need your help—all that knowledge goes out the window.

This happens because most advice focuses on the mechanics of saying no, not the mindset behind it. We're told to "just say no" or "set boundaries," but we're not given a framework for why saying no is often in everyone’s best interest.

So here's a different approach: instead of asking "How can I say no?" start by asking "What's the cost of saying yes?"

• What will you no longer be able to do?

• What time and energy will you give away?

• Does taking on another commitment get you closer to the goals you already have?

Simply put:

What is the cost of saying yes?

An example: a colleague asks you to help with their presentation this weekend. The cost of saying yes is you'll miss your planned rest time, feel stressed about your own deadline on Monday, and likely do lower-quality work on both projects. Suddenly, saying no doesn't feel selfish—it feels responsible.

When you say yes to something you don't have capacity for, you're not actually helping anyone. You're setting yourself up to be stressed, potentially resentful, and less effective. Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is say no.

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P.S. Another way to think of it: Instead of "Can I do this?" ask "Should I do this?"

See also

What does “I forgot” mean? Perhaps it’s not such a literal statement, at least much of the time. Among other things, I forgot can mean:

“I cared too much and got overwhelmed.”

“I was trying to protect myself from disappointment.”

“I was scared I’d do it wrong, so I froze instead.”

“I knew it was important, and that made it harder.”

“I didn’t know how to say no, so I said nothing.”

“I was ashamed I hadn’t done it yet.”

“I didn’t forget, I postponed it 37 times in my head.”

“My capacity and my intention don’t always match.”

“I needed help, but didn’t know how to ask.”

Keep This in Mind When You (and Other People) Forget Things

All of the items on this list have been true for me at different times, so I try to keep them in mind whenever other people forget to do something. Are these people dropping the ball on purpose? Are they secretly trying to sabotage themselves by promising something they won’t be able to fulfill?

Well, maybe, but most likely it’s one of the other things. They probably aren’t sitting there thinking up ways to be annoying or let others down.

It doesn’t mean we should stop striving to be conscientious. It just means: sometimes a little grace goes a long way. Both for others and for yourself.

Maybe a good perspective shift for someone this week?

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P.S. The Executive Function Online Summit for Parents (TEFOS) kicks off later this week. It’s free to join live (you can purchase the recordings) and you’ll hear from several dozen experts. Highly recommended for all parents and teachers!

See also

This week I’ve been thinking about emails. I know it sounds boring, but I actually think about emails a lot.

I wrote a whole chapter in Time Anxiety about my difficulty in responding to people. I called it “The Inbox of Shame” because, well, it should be obvious.

Overall, my favorite method for solving this problem of mine—or at least “dealing with it somewhat”—is to take on the role of an actor. I wrote about that idea more in this post:

I’m still a big fan of that method. This week, though, I’m using a different mental model that I’ve been working on. The model is:

Every time you communicate, you have the chance to give someone a gift.

That’s it. You are a gift-giver, or, if you don’t find it too woo-woo, a light-bringer. You are bringing light to someone! Or at least you have the ability to, if you so choose.

Consider that most person-to-person communication is a bid for attention in some way, or alternatively an attempt at persuasion. The person communicating wants something from another person, either directly or indirectly.

So when you’re on the receiving end of communication, think about what the other person wants. What would make them happy? What would brighten their day? What would create ease for them?

Then you respond with that in mind. You help them feel at least a little better than they did before receiving your response. You give them a gift.

How do you do this, exactly? It’s a little tricky to explain. If done the wrong way, it can seem insincere or overly sentimental—which is definitely NOT the idea.

Perhaps the best way to apply the method is to start in your mind. You don’t have to make grand gestures or say things like, “Hey person, you’re amazing, thank you for writing me, here’s a reply to make you feel special.”

In fact, you probably don’t say any of those words at all. You just keep the core concept in mind, and that framework will influence what you actually say.

One trick is to pause before sending a new message or reply and ask “What’s the point of this communication? Does it shine some light somehow?”1

Question: Does this apply only when you give people what they want?

Answer: Not at all!

I don’t mean to suggest you become a codependent, email-responding doormat, ready to agree to anything that people ask of you. In most of my inbox sessions, I have to decline a fair number of requests. But that’s okay! It’s still possible to leave people feeling better even when your answer to their direct request is a no.

The same principle applies: somehow, there’s a way to make people feel better through almost every communication, and that should be your goal: to give them a gift. For example, instead of just saying, “No, I can't do that,” you might say “I can't take this on, but it sounds really cool and I hope you find someone great for it.”

Again, it’s not meant to be woo-woo, sappy, or excessively sentimental. I just mean it in very practical terms—

Every email is a gift.

Every message can bring light.

Be the light-bearer.

Try it.

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P.S. Three Quick Clarifications

[1. Is failing to reply to messages really such a problem? For me it is! Maybe for you it’s not. But it does cause me a lot of distress.]

[2. Why not just ignore email entirely? Trust me, sometimes I do. 😉 But the problem with “a world without email” is that ultimately email is just a mode of communication that exists between real people. So if you turn it off or ignore it completely, you are turning off communication between real people.]

[3. I should note that I’m writing about real messages—not AI-written pitches, spam, newsletters that keep coming even though you didn’t subscribe, and all the other meaningless content that fills your inbox. Real messages from real people! The others are easy to delete or filter.]