Top 10 Practices for Resetting Your Time, Space, Body, Inner Critic, and Social Life | Laurie Santos and Gretchen Rubin

What It Covers

Yale psychologist Laurie Santos and author Gretchen Rubin join Dan Harris to outline ten evidence-based strategies for escaping stuckness, covering self-compassion frameworks, personality-based habit formation, time management, sensory engagement, physical health, prosocial behavior, decision-making, and social connection as tools for regaining momentum and agency.

Key Questions Answered

• •Resistance as diagnostic data: When persistent avoidance, procrastination, or dread accompanies a task, treat it as a neurological signal rather than a character flaw. Santos describes this as an emotional alarm system indicating misalignment. Instead of pushing through reflexively, pause and interrogate what the resistance reveals about whether the goal, method, or direction still serves you — especially when you are tripling down on the wrong path.
• •Three-part self-compassion protocol: Kristin Neff's research-backed framework involves three sequential steps: mindfully noticing your current emotional state without judgment, normalizing it through common humanity (recognizing that struggle is universal, not personal failure), and applying self-kindness by speaking to yourself as a skilled coach would to a struggling athlete — problem-solving and curious, not indulgent or dismissive. This approach measurably reduces procrastination.
• •Four Tendencies framework for habit formation: Gretchen Rubin's personality model categorizes people as Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, or Rebels based on how they respond to inner versus outer expectations. Obligers — the largest group — require external accountability structures to meet personal goals. Questioners need evidence and rationale. Rebels respond best when given full autonomy. Matching your habit strategy to your tendency dramatically increases follow-through when trying to establish routines that support getting unstuck.
• •Time affluence over time management: Harvard Business School researcher Ashley Whillans finds that subjective sense of time abundance — not actual hours available — predicts well-being as strongly as employment status. Two practical hacks: spend discretionary income to buy back time (outsourcing tasks like lawn care or meal prep), and create a "time confetti wish list" — a pre-planned menu of five-to-ten minute activities like meditation or texting a friend to deploy during fragmented pockets of time.
• •Cardio as antidepressant equivalent: Meta-analyses of multiple studies show thirty minutes of daily cardiovascular exercise produces mood and mental health benefits comparable to prescription antidepressant medication. Santos pairs this with sleep as the two most neglected body basics during periods of stuckness. Insufficient sleep amplifies emotional reactivity and decision paralysis, while a single night of adequate recovery can shift threat perception dramatically — making previously overwhelming problems feel manageable without any external circumstances changing.
• •Prosocial action restores agency: Controlled studies consistently show that performing acts of kindness for others — donating money, making introductions, picking up litter — boosts mood and, counterintuitively, creates a subjective sense of having more free time. Volunteering time makes people feel more time-affluent, not less. This works because taking action for others generates evidence of personal agency, which directly counters the helplessness that characterizes being stuck, making it easier to then take action for oneself.