Why We Keep Digging When We're Stuck In A Hole : NPR

when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing... scarcity... leads you to take certain behaviors that in the short term help... in the long term only make matters worse... robs people of insight... in a hole, we sometimes dig ourselves even deeper...

human brain is wired to respond to scarcity by tunnelling in on the thing that's missing ... [no] mental capacity to attend to anything else ... poor often consumed with finding solutions to immediate problems... not thinking about problems that are a few weeks away ... the underlying problem can become worse ...

Scarcity... is a trap ... poverty makes everyone less capable... sugar cane farmers ... post-harvest, when they're well-off, they have much more impulse control... scarcity can actually lower how you perform on an IQ test...

being overworked and exhausted can produce a form of scarcity too ... rob you of insight...about how your own mind is changing ... pencil time ... to do nothing... Avoid tunnel vision. Keep difficult things in one part of your life from contaminating everything else. Be present...

easy to say... [with] loneliness and poverty ... There's no escape mechanism ... scarcity creates traps from which many people may not be able to extricate themselves... stop preaching to those in poverty ... respond to them the same way we respond to mistakes made by airline pilots ... fault tolerance ...

an invitation to an event two months [from now] ... ask ... would I attend the event if it were tomorrow? ... life is not going to be any less hectic two months from now.