The Art of Impossible

Third, it will help if you are doing something that is at the edge of your abilities, but not beyond them. If the goal you choose is too easy, you’ll go into autopilot—but if it’s too hard, you’ll start to feel anxious and off-kilter and you won’t flow either.

This is why taking productive action is particularly helpful when you are feeling down, unmotivated, or apathetic—when your brain’s SADNESS pathway is dominant. You can give yourself permission to feel those feelings but not dwell on them or take them as destiny. Instead, you shift the focus to taking just one action, bringing your feelings, whatev

Whatever else happens, stay busy. (I always lean on this wise advice, from the seventeenth-century English scholar Robert Burton, on how to survive melancholy: “Be not solitary, be not idle.”) Find something to do—anything, even a different sort of creative work altogether—just to take your mind off your anxiety and pressure. Once, when I was strug