When you’re upset, it’s worth considering what your situation would look like to someone who deals with that kind of crisis professionally.

I advised college freshman for seven years, and I still remember the first time a student cried in my office. I don’t know which of us was more shaken! After that had happened a few times (not that it happened often, mind you), I learned to take it in stride and focus on helping the student solve their problem. Exposure to the situation helped me gain perspective and lessened my own discomfort.

Start anyway.

Feelings get a lot of attention in the modern world, and that’s great! We’re emotional beings, like it or not, and our feelings help color our lives. But it’s easy to give them far too much credit—to assume that feelings reflect reality, for instance, or to let them determine how we spend our time.

Take work, for instance. It’s tempting to let our feelings dictate when we do our most important (and most difficult) work. Faced with an imposing task, we ask ourselves, “Do I feel like working on this?”

Most of us are in planning/reflection mode this time of year, and as 2021 begins, we’re eager to make lasting positive changes in our lives.

Motivation levels are high on January 1st. We’re jazzed to eat better, exercise more, and generally improve our lives. But motivation never lasts. How do we plan accordingly?

By making good behaviors easier.

Take someone who has decided to eat a salad every day. How can they make this happen? Vaguely planning to “eat a salad every day” is unlikely to work (ask me how I know).

What a year. 2020 has been so difficult that it’s hard to find anything nice to say about it.

Has it taught us, as a society, how to deal with true hardship? Maybe, but plenty of us already knew.

Has it made us count our blessings? Forced us to appreciate what we have? Helped us see ourselves in a historical context—subject to plagues, just like every other human society that’s ever been?

Next week, I’ll take my twice-annual Think Days. I’ve been doing this since 2018—two days every six months for nothing but reading, journaling, and thinking.

Ahead of time, the idea always feels frivolous and not worth the time. Clearing two full days from one’s calendar is a lot to ask! Afterwards, it feels essential. I achieve so much clarity during those unbroken hours of thought that I wonder how I made any progress in life before I started taking Think Days. Indeed, most of the major positive changes I’ve made in the past 2.5 years have come as a result of Think Days.