Basic Sense of Adequacy When You Don't Get it all Done

Function: The BIS is responsible for sensitivity to punishment, non-reward, and novel situations. It regulates avoidance behavior.
Emotional Responses: It is associated with feelings of anxiety, fear, and apprehension. When activated, it can lead to cautious or inhibited behavior.
Neurobiological Basis: The BIS is thought to involve brain regions such as the hippocampus and amygdala, which are associated with processing risk and fear.

Basic Sense of Adequacy When You Don’t Get it all Done The trouble is that what we think we’re doing, whenever we’re busying ourselves trying to pay off productivity debt, is working diligently towards a moment in the future when everything will feel OK: when we’ll have staved off catastrophe once and for all, or fulfilled our potential, or justified our existence. (The details vary widely, because the ways in which people are screwed up varies widely, too.) Whereas what we’re actually doing is reinforcing a psychological pattern in which we take our basic sense of adequacy to be dependent on making the best use of our time.

And that’s an unwinnable battle, because as long as you remain alive, more time is always going to be opening up, day after day – time that, according this logic, you’ll have to use as effectively as possible too. So even though the whole endeavor is motivated by a desire to finally relax, in fact you never get to relax, until you’re dead and your time is no longer being replenished. (And being dead is a little too relaxed for my tastes.)

The alternative – easier said than done, I know, but I’m not sure there’s a third option here – is to contemplate the possibility that peace of mind, and your general sense of adequacy as a human being, might be things that you started with, as opposed to things you started without, and then needed to achieve through your efforts.

Oliver Burke #lit