It’s 5 p.m., and you’ve just realized that report you’ve been putting off is due tomorrow. It’s time to buckle down and open your computer. Actually, you should probably make dinner first. You usually like cooking, though it’s hard to enjoy with this work hanging over your head, and oh—it’s actually pretty late! Maybe you should just try again in the morning. This is the cycle of procrastination, and I promise you, we have all been there.

Procrastination is when we avoid a task we said we would do, for no good reason, despite expecting our behavior to bring negative consequences. Obviously, it’s irrational to do something you expect to harm you. But ironically, procrastination is the result of our bodies trying to protect us, specifically by avoiding a task we see as threatening.

We’re most likely to procrastinate tasks that evoke negative feelings, such as dread, incompetence, and insecurity. Because procrastination is motivated by our negative feelings, some individuals are more susceptible (易受影响的) to it than others. People who have difficulty regulating their emotions and those who struggle with low self-esteem are much more likely to procrastinate. However, it’s a common misconception that all procrastinators are lazy. When you’re feeling lazy, you’re more likely to sit around doing nothing than distract yourself with unimportant tasks. In fact, many people procrastinate because they care too much. Procrastinators often report a high fear of failure, putting things off because they’re afraid their work won’t live up to their high standards.

Whatever the reason for procrastination, the results are often the same. Procrastinators are likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, ongoing feelings of shame and physical ailments (轻病) associated with high stress.

So, how can we break the cycle of procrastination?

Traditionally, people thought procrastinators needed to cultivate discipline and practice strict time management. But today, many researchers feel the exact opposite. Being too hard on yourself can layer additional bad emotions onto a task. What we really need to do is to address and reduce these negative emotions.

Driving to Palm Springs two years ago, I met a snowstorm. A car suddenly changed the direction     1     (avoid) hitting mine and drifted (漂移) towards the side of the cliff. Meanwhile, some drivers     2    (sit) in different cars rushed out. They     3    (take) off the chains that had protected their own tyres and put them on that car’s tyres     4    (rapid). Just as the car was about to be lost off the cliff, those drivers stepped up, letting their kind hearts go beyond the snowstorm.

How to Stop Overthinking

We all have times when we worry, whether it’s about work, health, family, relationships or a host of other reasons. But is there a point when you may think and worry too much?

Overthinking is an unhealthy habit that typically causes more stress by focusing on the negative instead of coming up with logical solutions. For example, we may start worrying about a specific situation at work, which leads to worrying about money or losing jobs.

But why do we tend to overthink? This is often due to cognitive errors, which are basically errors in logical thinking, such as all-or-nothing thinking and overgeneralisation. Although overthinking is hard to break, Natacha Duke, a registered psychotherapist, outlines strategies that can help.

“Healthy distraction can be useful,” says Duke. Activities like reading and taking a walk can help keep our stress levels down. They can reduce our baseline level of anxiety and make us less likely to overthink.

Duke adds, “Keeping a daily journal can help us actively manage stress before our feelings expand out of control.” As we practise journaling our emotions and thoughts, it becomes easier to identify when we’re starting to worry. Stopping worrying early will ultimately help us feel better and stay focused on what matters most to us.

Some people constantly think about questions like “What if I lose my job?” or “What if I get sick?” While having these thoughts is normal, it becomes a problem when we focus only on the worst-case situation. “For every ‘what if’ worry, change this to an ‘if then’ statement where you come up with ideas to deal with the worry or the worst-case situation,” says Duke. “Focus on having a concrete plan in place.”

So, face the problems, then challenge and reframe them. Finally, we will develop effective ways to cope with overthinking.

7 . We love to mimic the routines of the rich and famous, but they may be no more insightful than random behaviors. Beethoven, for example, counted exactly 60 coffee beans for each cup, which he used to power his composing.

Why do successful people follow unusually specific habits? And why are we so keen to read about them and mimic them in our own lives?

The answer lies in a powerful psychological process called “superstitious learning”.     1    While it is mostly correct, it sometimes mistakes coincidence for causality (因果关系) ― leading us to attribute success to something arbitrary (主观的) as the color of our notebook, rather than our own talent or hard work.

That is not to say the resulting habits are completely lacking in benefits.     2    

If superstitious behaviors arise as a by-product of our ability to form associations, then you would expect more superstitious people to perform better on implicit learning ― the brain’s ability to non-consciously pick up patterns ― and this was exactly what Elena Daprati, a neuroscientist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata found. “Superstitious individuals generally pick up on the cue and use it,” she says.

    3    Creative tasks are especially common with uncertainty ― which may explain why thinkers like Beethoven adopted specific behaviors to get their thoughts flowing.

Often, the rituals that we acquire take very little effort.     4    Although the initial association with success may have been illusory (幻想的) the positive mindset that it produces really does improve our performance the next time so we do it again and again.

    5     If the action costs nothing and helps you to feel a bit more in control of your day, it’s perfectly rational to continue.

8 . Quantum ( 量子 ) computers have been on my mind a lot lately. A friend has been sending me articles on how quantum computers might help solve some of the biggest challenges we face as humans. I’ve also had exchanges with two quantum-computing experts. One is computer scientist Chris Johnson who I see as someone who helps keep the field honest. The other is physicist Philip Taylor.

For decades, quantum computing has been little more than a laboratory curiosity. Now, big tech companies have invested in quantum computing, as have many smaller ones. According to Business Weekly, quantum machines could help us “cure cancer, and even take steps to turn climate change in the opposite direction.” This is the sort of hype ( 炒作 ) that annoys Johnson. He worries that researchers are making promises they can’t keep. “What’s new,” Johnson wrote, “is that millions of dollars are now potentially available to quantum computing researchers.”

As quantum computing attracts more attention and funding, researchers may mislead investors, journalists, the public and, worst of all, themselves about their work’s potential. If researchers can’t keep their promises, excitement might give way to doubt, disappointment and anger, Johnson warns. Lots of other technologies have gone through stages of excitement. But something about quantum computing makes it especially prone to hype, Johnson suggests, perhaps because “‘quantum’ stands for something cool you shouldn’t be able to understand.” And that brings me back to Taylor, who suggested that I read his book Q for Quantum.

After I read the book, Taylor patiently answered my questions about it. He also answered my questions about PyQuantum, the firm he co-founded in 2016. Taylor shares Johnson’s concerns about hype, but he says those concerns do not apply to PyQuantum.

The company, he says, is closer than any other firm “by a very large margin ( 幅度 )” to building a “useful” quantum computer, one that “solves an impactful problem that we would not have been able to solve otherwise.” He adds, “People will naturally discount my opinions, but I have spent a lot of time quantitatively comparing what we are doing with others.”

Could PyQuantum really be leading all the competition “by a wide margin”, as Taylor claims? I don’t know. I’m certainly not going to advise my friend or anyone else to invest in quantum computers. But I trust Taylor, just as I trust Johnson.

10 . Toward the end of my senior year in England, I watched my peers line up in front of the Career Services building. Waiting for their interviews for jobs, all seemed to be dressed the same — the men wearing navy jackets, the women dark dresses. I thought back to my first day on campus four years earlier when we all wore different colors and dreamed of different futures. It was as if our years of study, instead of enhancing our individualities and imaginations, had reduced them to sameness.

It was not a unique scene. All over the world, education supplies the economy with workers who will increase productivity. But this now threatens our very survival. If the entire world reaches the levels of consumption seen in high-income countries today, we’ll need multiple planet Earths to supply the resources.

The sustainable development goals call for turning education into a force for sustainability, but the opposite is often true: the ways we think about education undermine our ability to deal with the environmental crisis. As an education researcher, I see many children going through rote learning — Indian pupils repeating the sentences written by their teacher on the blackboard, a South African child yelled at by the teacher for failing to recite the text. Rote learning and discouraging individuality in children are still at the root of what it means to be educated across much of the world.

On the other hand, our focus on technological solutions to the environmental crisis is driving our approach to education. More students at British universities are studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) than ever before, including a 400 percent increase in enrollment in AI courses over the last 10 years. Compared to STEM, social sciences and humanities are often underfunded and seen as less important. But this approach is counterproductive because non-STEM subjects are crucial to develop our ability to reimagine the world.

We even put our hope in solving the environmental crisis on AI. We make good use of energy networks, track land use through satellite imagery and predict extreme weather. But AI, like our other technologies, can only treat the symptoms (症状) of the environmental crisis, not the causes. These lie in lack of sensitivity to our impact on the planet.

Unlike AI, children are naturally imaginative. Nurturing imagination means seeing inspiration in children’s imaginations. In an education system that celebrates imagination, arts and creativity are as important as math and science. The environmental crisis is not a crisis of technology or science, it is a crisis of imagination. If we let children be our guides, we might just be able to imagine our way to survival.