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This week we talk to Brigid Schulte about being overwhelmed
Brigid Schulte is an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post and Washington Post magazine. She was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize. She is also a fellow at the New America Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the She The People blog and has written for Style, Outlook, and other outlets.
She writes about work-life issues and poverty, seeking to understand what it takes to live The Good Life across race, class and gender.
Her recent book is called Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
In This Interview Brigid and I Discuss…
- The One You Feed parable.
- How being overwhelmed never goes away.
- What “The Overwhelm” is.
- How it’s not the amount of stress but how we feel about it.
- Busyness as a badge of honor.
- That the perception of stress causes the pre-frontal cortex to shrink.
- The internal and external pressures to do too much.
- The guilt of the working mother.
- How idleness used to give social status and now busyness provides the social status.
- The definition of leisure.
- The two qualities of leisure: choice and control of time.
- Contaminated time.
- Avoiding spiraling down the drain of negativity.
- How the average high school student experiences a higher level of anxiety than a 50’s mental patient.
- That America is the most anxious country in the world.
- The challenges of ambiguity.
- Learning to handle ambiguity.
- Having a broader perspective on how to manage our time.
- Remembering that we choose how we spend our time.
- Planning the most important tasks in our life first.
- How there is a lot of room for the little stuff if we get the big stuff done first.
- Starting on the big tasks first.
- Focusing on the one most important thing to do each day.
- Pulsing- a practice of managing our work cycles.
Brigid Schulte Links
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