Samatalis Haille, MA LPCC

0728 Liban is adjusting to the end of daylight saving time in Minnesota, where clocks fall back an hour each November, as they do across much of the United States. The change is more than a matter of resetting clocks: it is associated with measurable disruption to sleep and the body's daily rhythm ([psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d…), [pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…](pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…)). On a recent morning Liban woke near 4:00 a.m. and read the clock as 5:00. About three hours passed, but by his estimate only 30 to 45 minutes went to project work, though he still made progress on several problems. The rest went to transportation, household chores, and browsing the internet to learn about Somalia. He judged the time poorly used. His diagnosis is that the first minutes of the day set its direction. He now intends to spend the first thirty minutes after waking on evaluation and planning. He will review the previous day for what went well, so he can do more of it, and what went poorly, so he can do less of it, and only then move through the day systematically. Research supports this habit. In field experiments by Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano, and Staats, trainees who spent a few minutes writing about the day's lessons scored about 23 percent higher on their final test ([hbr.org/2014/07/dear-diary](hbr.org/2014/07/dear-diary)). Amabile and Kramer's diary studies of knowledge workers found that visible progress on meaningful work, including small wins, was the strongest driver of motivation and mood. Concrete if-then plans also reliably improve goal achievement (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, sciencedirect.com/science/ch…).[16][82] Morning news browsing is a poor way to start. Johnston and Davey found that fourteen minutes of negative news increased anxiety and sadness and made personal worries worse. Survey evidence also links problematic news consumption to poorer mental and physical health. Liban's conclusion is not that the news is the problem but that its timing is: the news can wait until the day has been reviewed and planned. Starting tomorrow, the first thirty minutes after waking are for review and planning.[43][44]

Walking Out of Fixation: Liban’s Step Count and Decision-Making Liban began spending long periods walking and noticed that his decisions got better. When he sat, he often stayed with a problem he could not solve long after more effort had stopped helping. When he walked, he more readily reached a conclusion: there is no further solution, the best possible has already been done, and it is time to move on. From this he concluded that, at least for him, fixation is tied to sedentary habits. The research supports part of this. A meta-analysis of 117 incubation studies found that setting a problem aside improves problem solving, with an average effect size of d = 0.29. It also found that an undemanding activity during the break can help more than rest alone (Sio & Ormerod, 2009). Walking is that kind of activity. In Stanford experiments, 81% of participants scored higher on a creative-thinking test while walking than while sitting, and they produced about 60% more ideas on average. Walking helped less with problems that have one correct answer: only 23% of participants improved on that type of test (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014). Liban has noticed the same pattern in his breaks. Unless he is tired, the best break is not resting or napping. It is doing an undemanding task, such as organizing the office or cleaning. In his view, this lets attention keep working in the background, so that an unconscious process takes up the problem and later delivers a solution. One experiment supports this. In a study of 145 participants, people who spent a 12-minute break on a simple task let their minds wander more than people given a demanding task. When they returned to problems they had already worked on, they improved significantly more than people who did the demanding task, rested or took no break. Those who rested or took no break showed no measurable benefit. The undemanding-task group did not report thinking about the problems more on purpose, which suggests the progress happened outside deliberate thought (Baird et al., 2012). Researchers have not settled how this unconscious processing works. Liban then looked for large studies linking higher step counts to cognitive performance. A 2026 study in Scientific Reports followed 3,093 adults aged 18 to 93 in the All of Us Research Program. It measured their daily steps with Fitbit devices for up to 14 years and then tested their cognition once. The researchers sorted participants into three groups, averaging 5,108, 8,875 and 14,161 steps a day. The two more active groups scored higher than the least active group on tests of sustained attention, distraction control and delay discounting, a test of self-control and reward-based decision-making (Okusaga et al., 2026). After adjusting for age, education, income, marital status and birthplace, sustained-attention scores were about 1.76 points higher in the 8,875-step group and 2.17 points higher in the 14,161-step group than in the 5,108-step group. Activity was also tied to better scores on each test, with coefficients of β = 0.31 for sustained attention, β = 0.26 for distraction control and β = 0.05 for delay discounting. Lower blood pressure explained only 4.8% of the link between activity and self-control. The authors say the effects were small and that their observational design cannot show cause and effect. Liban draws a distinction between two of these abilities. Attention is awareness of what is happening around and within oneself. Concentration is the ability to stay with one task for a long time. Higher activity was associated with both, and shorter-term evidence points the same way: one 20-minute walk improved children’s inhibitory control and their control of attention (Hillman et al., 2009).

From this, Liban has used walking and undemanding breaks to improve his thinking and applies them across his life: to drop problems that cannot be solved, to concentrate on the ones that can, and to make steadier progress toward his goals. His view that sitting causes fixation is still a personal observation. The research supports walking and light activity as ways to break an impasse, but it does not show that sitting causes fixation. References Sio & Ormerod (2009), Psychological Bulletin: psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-…] Effect size from the incubation meta-analysis: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…] Oppezzo & Schwartz (2014): pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2474…] Stanford Graduate School of Education: ed.stanford.edu/news/study-f…] Baird et al. (2012), Psychological Science: metalab.psych.ucsb.edu/sites…] Okusaga et al. (2026), Scientific Reports: link.springer.com/article/10…] ScienceAlert interview via Yahoo: yahoo.com/news/science/artic…] Medical Xpress: medicalxpress.com/news/2026-…] Medical News Today: medicalnewstoday.com/article…] Hillman et al. (2009): pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…]

Day Eight: Repeated Error and the Case for Binding Commitments Liban has noticed that repeating a mistake means the lesson was not learned, so self-mastery, the ability to resist temptation in the moment, seems to him an illusion. Research partly supports this view: Milyavskaya and Inzlicht found that progress on goals depended on meeting fewer temptations, not on effortful self-control. Today is the eighth day of the challenge. Liban woke between 6:00 am and by 7:30 he had read many posts, reports, and analyses without learning anything new or finding anything to be curious about. Allcott, Gentzkow, and Song estimate that self-control problems account for about 31 percent of social media use.[aeaweb +1] His conclusion is that social media should be blocked by default whenever he has particular work to do. When he uses social media for a particular piece of work, he should stop within two hours. Research, joining social-media programs, preparing for them, or collecting data from them should not go past three hours in one stretch. Blocking distraction is not enough, though; he must also put himself where doing the work is the only option. Bryan, Karlan, and Nelson describe commitment devices as arrangements that make certain future choices more costly, and such a device can force a task through a fixed deadline, a person waiting for the result, or a place where only the task can be done.[ac] Further reading: bps.org.uk/research-digest/g…] carleton.ca/mental-health/20…] selfdeterminationtheory.org/…] brookings.edu/articles/digit…] pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…] houdekpetr.cz/!data/public_h… ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK59…]