可以毁掉你日常生活的10件事情(上)

Bad habits are easy to form and difficult to break, as the saying goes. And judging by the latest scientific research, nearly all of us are sleepwalking along in a zombie states of incessant bad habits that are threatening to completely ruin our lives.

坏习惯是很容易养成的，而且很难改变。根据最新的科学研究显示，我们所有人几乎都游离在坏习惯之中，这些坏习惯足以毁坏我们的生活。

We don't mean stuff like sleeping in late and having one too many coffees, either. We mean each and every one of us is doing simple, everyday-seeming stuff that research says is killing us. Don't believe us? Take a look at the following list of deadly behaviors, and you might recognize more on there than you're comfortable with.

我们并不是在说晚睡和喝大量的咖啡这样类似的事情。我们的意思是说我们每个人所做的一件简单的事情都有可能会使我们丧命。难道你不相信吗？看看下面的致命行为的名单，你会认出许多你自己感觉比较舒服的行为方式。

rastination

10.拖延

Hands up, those of you who are reading this while they should be working. Don't feel bad. We all do it. What's more fun: chilling out on a Top 10 website or getting those figures ready for your boss, amiright? But get a little too far into the procrastination matrix, and you'll find putting stuff off isn't just lazy. It's actively wrecking your future chances of happiness.

把手举起来，你们之中这些此时应该工作而却在阅读的人。不要觉得不好。我们很多人都这样做过。更有趣的是：在前十网站或是将得到的数据提交给你的老板时沉住气，你准备好了吗？ 虽然这有点算不上是拖延症，但你会发现它不仅仅只是懒惰而已。它正在自主的破坏你未来的幸福机遇。

The 'procrastination matrix' is a term coined by Tim Urban, who recently did an entire TED Talk about procrastination. He's considered something of an expert in this field, having written countless articles and given countless talks on it. And he's convinced it's holding people back so badly, it's basically an illness.

拖延症这个词来自于蒂姆-厄班的术语，他最近在TED做了一个有关拖延的演讲。他被认为是这个领域的专家，写了许多篇文章和做了许多相关的会谈。他坚信拖延会使人们变得糟糕，这基本上算是一种疾病。

See, Urban's theory is that procrastination can creep in and affect your whole life, even while you're supposedly being productive. So you might think you're watching cat gifs while you build up the energy to tackle that report for the job you hate, but Urban would see that as double procrastination. In his 'matrix,' doing the job you hate is also procrastination – putting off looking for a job that you might love. By wasting time at work, you're ensuring that you also waste too much time eventually doing the work; meaning you never have time to get on in life and realize your potential.

厄班的理论说拖延可以混进并影响你的整个生活，甚至是在当你有所成功的时候。所以当你打起精神来处理你的工作报告时你可能会认为你是在看猫的插图，而厄班则把这视作双重拖延。在他的理念中，做自己讨厌的工作也是一种拖延—— 推荐你找一份自己喜欢的工作。在工作中浪费时间，也使得你需要浪费更多的时间来完成这份工作；这意味着你从未在生活中通过时间发挥自己的才能。

Put it this way, when you finally get before St. Peter, would you rather say: "I did a job I loved and had time to raise a family" or "I spent my whole life rage-reading articles on the internet"?

换而言之，在你最终到达圣彼得之前，你会说：“我在做一份自己喜欢的工作，并且有时间养家”或“我把我的一生都用在了网上阅读文章”。

ying about the Future

9.担忧未来

Sometimes, we take a leap of faith and wind up falling flat on our faces. It's embarrassing, and most of us learn very early on to 'look before you leap'. But that kind of foresight can easily go from being something we deploy only when we need to, to something that consumes our waking lives. So, so many of us spend hours upon hours planning for future contingencies that will never come to pass. And science says it's leading us straight into horrific depression.

有时候，我们满怀信心地进行一次飞跃，结果却是脸先着地。这是很让人窘迫的，从小我们就被教育：做事情要“三思而后行”。但是只有当我们需要某种用来消遣清醒的人生的东西时，这种远见会让我们很容易得到所需的东西。因此，我们中有许多人要花几个小时的时间来规划未来的突发事件，这是永远行不通的。科学研究表明它会使我们陷入可怕的抑郁症之中。

Human minds like patterns. It's astonishingly easy to train yourself into a pattern of thinking, especially in your formative years. The trouble is, this means we can start spending more and more time planning for the future, to the extent that we slide into worrying. And worrying has been proven to underlie a whole host of negative disorders, from anxiety, to depression, to eating disorders.

人类的思维类似于一种模式。训练你的思维模式是相当容易的，特别是在你的成长阶段。可问题是，这意味着我们需要开始花费更多的时间来计划未来，而且在一定程度上我们可能会变得焦虑。而且焦虑已被证实是一系列消极疾病的诱因，从焦虑到抑郁再到饮食失调。

In short, by obsessively picking over possible future events, you can train yourself into a lasting mental illness.

总而言之，过度的执著于未来可能发生的事情，你有可能会把自己变成一个长期性的精神疾病患者。

thinking the Past

8.回忆过去

It's the most-natural trait in the world. Thinking about the past. Nearly all of us do it on a daily basis. Sometimes, those memories might be happy ones we hold dear. At other times, we may find ourselves ruminating on an instance of loss or failure. Unfortunately, we've got some bad news for you. Scientists have found that looking to the past can be just as bad for your mental health as obsessing over the future.

回忆是世界上最自然的特质，我们几乎每天都会回忆过去。有时，这些记忆可能是我们珍视的快乐。也有些时候，我们会反思自己的过错和失败。但不幸的是，我们给你带来了一些坏消息。科学家们发现像沉迷于未来一样耽溺过去对你的心理健康是有危害的。

As with worrying, rumination can easily train our brain into obsessive behavior. We get to the point that the simplest things trigger a slew of negative memories, and that in turn can create a cycle of endless dwelling on the past. Like worrying, this rumination has been linked to depression and anxiety and even poor performance at work. Frighteningly, you can accidentally train yourself into it with astonishing ease.

正如我们所担忧的，反思会让我们的大脑陷入强迫性的运转。我们得出一个观点，越是简单的事情越容易触发一系列消极记忆，反过来它又会产生一个无休止的耽溺过去的循环。让人比较担心的是这种反思会引发抑郁、焦虑，甚至是工作状态不佳。而且令人恐惧的是，你有可能在不经意之间就做了这件事。

Ed Watkins at the University of Exeter has previously asked subjects dealing with depression to ruminate for five minutes. He found that simply asking them to dwell on the past for a brief time period worsened their symptoms noticeably. In fact, the link between thinking about the past and future depression is so strong researchers can use it as a predictor of future mental health.

埃克塞特大学的艾德沃特金斯曾让治疗抑郁症的受试者回忆过去五分钟。他发现，这样会使受试者的病情明显恶化。事实上，回忆过去和诱发抑郁症之间是有很强烈的联系的，研究人员会把它作为预测未来心理健康的一种方式。

ing the News

7.看新闻

For those of us who work with internet connections – or simply like to keep up with the world – reading the news is a basic part of any day. Maybe you visit the Guardian website, or scroll through the BBC, or pick up a print copy of the LA Times, or something else entirely. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that you should probably stop. Now. Because research has shown that the news is probably killing you.

我们的一些工作与互联网息息相关——或是单纯的想和世界保持一致——阅读新闻成为了每天必不可少的一部分。也许你会访问《卫报》网站、浏览BBC，或是阅读洛杉矶时报报纸。但这都无关紧要。重要的是你应该停止这一行为。因为现在已有研究得出结论，而这个信息也可能会扼杀了你。

The issue arises from both the sensationalism of modern news and the age we live in. Every day, we read headlines about airliners crashing into the Mediterranean, or ISIS exploding a bomb in a Belgian airport, or rioters cutting loose in America's inner-cities. Although these things likely don't affect us directly (at least hopefully), our bodies nonetheless act like they represent an immediate danger. A scary story triggers your limbic system, sending your entire body out of whack. You can wind up as tense and physically compromised as someone suffering chronic stress.

这个严重问题来自于现代新闻的轰动效应和我们生活的时代。每天，我们都会阅读到信息，客机坠入地中海、ISIS组织在比利时机场引爆一枚炸弹、暴徒在美国市中心制造骚乱。虽然这些事情可能不会直接影响我们（至少希望如此），但我们的身体却本能的体现出遇到危险的特征。一个恐怖事件会激发你的大脑边缘系统，让你的全身感到失常。你会像遭受慢性压力的人一样，紧张感和危机感加剧。

Our bodies haven't evolved to keep up with a 24/7 global news cycle. We're still biologically at the stage where hearing about a disaster meant it was probably heading your way. As a result, news can instill in us anything from anxiety, to a compromised immune system, to excess aggression.

我们的身体还没有进化到可以跟上全天候全球新闻周期。从生物学角度说我们会将从其他地方听到的灾难当作自己可能会遇到的。因此，新闻会给我们灌输一些忧虑的信息，对免疫系统造成损害，增大压力。

g Email

6.使用电子邮件

By this point, virtually every single person in the developed world has an active email address. Most jobs are impossible without one, and social interactions are becoming increasingly harder. Yet just because something is everywhere doesn't mean it's healthy. After all, it's not so long ago that 90 percent of people smoked cigarettes. While email won't give you lung cancer, it totally can screw up your brain.

有关这一点，在发达国家几乎每个人都拥有一个十分活跃的电子邮件地址。大多数的工作不可能不使用电子邮件，社会的相互作用变得越来越难。然而，不能因为一些东西的广泛性就意味着它是健康的。毕竟，不久之前90%的人都吸烟。虽然电子邮件不会让你患上肺癌，但它完全可以毁坏你的大脑。

Email – and most social media updates – follow the same pattern as slot machines, known as 'variable interval reinforcement schedule.' In both cases, they reward you when an action is performed. With email, by giving you a brand new message from your friends to open; with slot machines, by dispensing money. But with each case, the initial behavior is only rewarded at random, unpredictable times. In other words, email activates the same areas of your brain as gambling. And if you've ever witnessed a gambling addict freak out at a losing streak, you know this isn't a good thing.

电子邮件和大多数社交媒体的更新一样，都遵循着如老虎机一样的相同模式，被称为“变时距强化方式”。在这两种情况下，当某一行为被执行时他们会给你奖励。电子邮件是给你一个你的朋友公开的全新的信息；老虎机是发放钱。但是每一种情况，最初的行为都是未知时间的随机奖励。换句话说，电子邮件就像赌博一样激活了你的大脑区域。假如你曾经目睹过一个连败的赌徒，你就会知道这并不是一件好事。

Because of this, people who constantly check social media updates or their emails are prone to the same irritability, loss of concentration and anxiety as gamblers. Way back in 2008, it was estimated that this causes obsessive people a loss of 8.5 working hours per week. With the emergence of smartphones and so-on since then, we imagine it's only gotten worse.

正因为如此，经常检查更新社交媒体或电子邮件的人很容易像赌徒一样易恼怒、缺乏注意力和焦虑。早在2008年，据估计它就导致沉迷的人每周损失8.5小时工作时间。随着智能手机的出现，并且从发那时起，我们推测这种情况只会变得更糟。