When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(36)

Start by identifying something about yourself that fills you with regret, shame, or disappointment. (Maybe you were fired from a job, flunked a class, undermined a relationship, ruined your finances.) Then write down some specifics about how it makes you feel.

Then, in two paragraphs, write yourself an e-mail expressing compassion or understanding for this element of your life. Imagine what someone who cares about you might say. He would likely be more forgiving than you. Indeed, University of Texas professor Kristin Neff suggests you write your letter “from the perspective of an unconditionally loving imaginary friend.” But mix understanding with action. Add a few sentences on what changes you can make to your life and how you can improve in the future. A self-compassion letter operates like the converse corollary of the Golden Rule: It offers a way to treat yourself as you would others.


5. Wait.

Sometimes the best course of action is . . . inaction. Yes, that can feel agonizing, but no move can often be the right move. Slumps are normal, but they’re also short-lived. Rising out of them is as natural as falling into them. Think of it as if it were a cold: It’s a nuisance, but eventually it’ll go away, and when it does, you’ll barely remember it.





5.


ENDINGS

Marathons, Chocolates, and the Power of Poignancy

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.





—ORSON WELLES





Each year, more than half a million people in America run a marathon. After training for months, they rise early one weekend morning, lace up their shoes, and race 26.2 miles in one of the 1,100 marathons held annually in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, cities and regions host about 3,000 other marathons, which draw well over one million additional runners. Many of these participants, in the United States and across the globe, are running their very first marathon. By some estimates, about half the people in a typical marathon are first-timers.1

What compels these newbies to risk battered knees, twisted ankles, and the overconsumption of sports drinks? For Red Hong Yi, an artist in Australia, “a marathon was always one of those impossible things to do,” she told me, so she decided to “give up my weekends and just go for it.” She ran the 2015 Melbourne Marathon, her first, after training for six months. Jeremy Medding, who works in the diamond business in Tel Aviv and for whom the 2005 New York City Marathon was his first, told me that “there’s always a goal we promise ourselves” and that a marathon was one box he hadn’t ticked. Cindy Bishop, a lawyer in central Florida, said she ran her first marathon in 2009 “to change my life and reinvent myself.” Andy Morozovsky, a zoologist turned biotech executive, ran the 2015 San Francisco Marathon even though he’d previously never run anywhere close to that distance. “I didn’t plan to win it. I just planned to finish it,” he told me. “I wanted to see what I could do.”

Four people in four different professions living in four different parts of the world, all united by the common quest to run 26.2 miles. But something else links these runners and legions of other first-time marathoners.

Red Hong Yi ran her first marathon when she was twenty-nine years old. Jeremy Medding ran his when he was thirty-nine. Cindy Bishop ran her first marathon at age forty-nine, Andy Morozovsky at age fifty-nine.

All four of them were what social psychologists Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield call “9-enders,” people in the last year of a life decade. They each pushed themselves to do something at ages twenty-nine, thirty-nine, forty-nine, and fifty-nine that they didn’t do, didn’t even consider, at ages twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight, and fifty-eight. Reaching the end of a decade somehow rattled their thinking and redirected their actions. Endings have that effect.

Like beginnings and midpoints, endings quietly steer what we do and how we do it. Indeed, endings of all kinds—of experiences, projects, semesters, negotiations, stages of life—shape our behavior in four predictable ways. They help us energize. They help us encode. They help us edit. And they help us elevate.


ENERGIZE: WHY WE KICK HARDER NEAR (SOME) FINISH LINES

Chronological decades have little material significance. To a biologist or physician, the physiological differences between, say, thirty-nine-year-old Fred and forty-year-old Fred aren’t vast—probably not much different from those between Fred at thirty-eight and Fred at thirty-nine. Nor do our circumstances diverge wildly in years that end in nine compared with those that end in zero. Our life narratives often progress from segment to segment, akin to the chapters of a book. But the actual story doesn’t abide by round numbers any more than novels do. After all, you wouldn’t assess a book by its page numbers: “The one-hundred-sixties were super exciting, but the one-hundred-seventies were a little dull.” Yet, when people near the end of the arbitrary marker of a decade, something awakens in their minds that alters their behavior.

For example, to run a marathon, participants must register with race organizers and include their age. Alter and Hershfield found that 9-enders are overrepresented among first-time marathoners by a whopping 48 percent. Across the entire life span, the age at which people were most likely to run their first marathon was twenty-nine. Twenty-nine-year-olds were about twice as likely to run a marathon as twenty-eight-year-olds or thirty-year-olds.

Meanwhile, first-time marathon participation declines in the early forties but spikes dramatically at age forty-nine. Someone who’s forty-nine is about three times more likely to run a marathon than someone who’s just a year older.