This world of polluted attention creates the opportunity to sell silence back to us, at a profit. - Oliver Burkeman

Once you stop struggling to get on top of everything, to stay in absolute control, or to make everything perfect, you're rewarded with the time, energy and psychological freedom to accomplish the most of which anyone could be capable.

...it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions — or, at the very least to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.

rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones.