Whether repressed or managed, avoided emotions don’t go away. They return in a pattern I call the “golden algorithm.” It goes like this:

1. Name an unwanted emotion in your life.


2. List the ways you try to avoid it.


3. Notice that every way you try to avoid it, you actually create it.

For example: I don’t want to feel like a failure —> I play it safe —&g... See more

“There’s an unspectacular mundane suffering that pervades the workplace,” Kanov told me. “But we don’t feel allowed to acknowledge that we suffer. We endure way more than we should, and can, because we downplay what it’s actually doing to us.”