Deal With The Small Things In Life That Make You Uncomfortable — The sooner, The better

Recently, a line circulating online struck a deep chord with me:

“You must deal with the small things in life that make you uncomfortable—as early as possible.”

I wonder if you’re like me, as if afflicted by a “disease” that makes small tasks impossible. For example:

Your laundry was finished ages ago, but you put off hanging it until the next day—so you’re rushing out the door to work in a panic, and your mood turns foul.

You bought a piece of clothing online that doesn’t fit and want to return or exchange it, but it feels like such a hassle—so you leave it sitting there until the return window closes and it becomes dead stock.

You’ve been meaning to clean up your cluttered computer desktop, but sorting files feels time-consuming—so you end up wasting far more time hunting for documents every time you work.

Put simply: small tasks pile up like a mountain; you feel restless and uneasy, yet you tell yourself none of them is urgent—they can wait.

But the moment you make up your mind and actually do it, you discover the task was simple all along—and afterward, you feel a steady, grounding sense of calm.

Hanging the laundry takes five minutes. Booking a courier pickup takes a few seconds. Cleaning your desktop takes ten.

In her book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, scholar Anne Helen Petersen defines this phenomenon as “errand paralysis”: the permanent inability to get up and do the small things on your to-do list.

Generally, these small tasks share a few traits:

• They’re trivial—not especially urgent, not especially important.
• Doing them brings little sense of accomplishment, but they have to be done.
• They aren’t actually hard—once you start, you can finish them quickly.

Crucially, they’re almost unrelated to your “life’s main focus,” and they don’t visibly advance your big goals (like earning money or managing relationships).

And yet, once you finish them, it feels as if the vines tangled around your heart have been cut away, and you grow noticeably lighter.

Some people even find that after clearing the small stuff, they’re energized—and go on to tackle the “big” things they’d been putting off, like an annual health checkup or car maintenance.

So why do we resist dealing with the small things that make us uncomfortable?

And how do we overcome this “small-task procrastination” and experience the rush of doing it the moment you think of it?

Today, Kelly is here to talk it through with you.

The Small Things Are Everywhere—and Seem Impossible to Finish

Most adults’ days are built from the following (estimated times):

• Work: 9 hours
• Sleep: 7.5 hours
• Eating: 2 hours (including cooking)
• Showering and washing up: 45 minutes

Take those away from 24 hours, and roughly 5 hours remain.

Five hours sounds ample—enough to watch two films, read a book, take the dog for a long walk.

So why does it so often feel like the day is over and you’ve done nothing?

Because within those 5 hours, you may need 2 to 3 hours for life’s little tasks.

Folding laundry. Restocking daily necessities. Paying utility bills online. Clearing hair out of the drain. Replying to messages…

These tasks look simple, requiring almost no thought—and yet they still irritate us.

Because if we don’t handle them, they seem to inject nasty surprises into an otherwise calm life:

Seeing a messy wardrobe is mentally exhausting. Skip the utility bill, and your phone keeps pinging reminders. Leave a message unanswered and the other person may get upset.

So one task isn’t finished before another arrives. As the pile of to-dos in your head grows, your “self-efficacy”​ keeps dropping—until you have no motivation left for anything unfinished.

In Anne Helen Petersen’s view, this is especially common:

“Rising economic pressure and ever-more-advanced information technology are eroding people’s lives. This is especially true of Gen Z, who are helpless in the face of everyday chores, focusing entirely on work and personal goals, yet not knowing how to mail a package or find time to see a dentist.”

The small things are everywhere. They look simple. But leaving them piled up still produces a damaging psychological state.

Unresolved chores occupy your brain’s “RAM,” leading to scattered attention and decision fatigue.

They also push you into self-blame—”I can’t even handle something this small”—which breeds more and more internal friction.

It’s like an old battery: even if you charge it several times a day, the power drains fast.

Why Do We Resist Handling Chores?

Psychologically, our resistance to small tasks hides a deeper conflict between cognition and emotion.

1. Chores feel like a bad deal: high effort, low reward

MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely found that when a task’s psychological cost exceeds 50% of its benefit, 90% of people choose to procrastinate.

In other words, in many people’s minds, chores simply aren’t “worth” the time.

Take booking a courier pickup for a return.

Many feel their time is precious, while arranging the pickup means coordinating schedules, packing the item, and handling possible mishaps (like the courier not showing up on time).

Communication costs and physical effort rise, and the refund in the end might be only ten or twenty dollars—so you think, “Better to leave it for now; it might come in handy later.”

This cognitive bias—overestimating expected costs, underestimating actual returns—makes the brain automatically tag chores as “not worth doing.”

Before this year’s Spring Festival, I wanted to take my cat to the pet store for a bath. But the moment I thought about booking in advance and calming an uncooperative cat before getting her there, it felt like too much trouble.

2. Imagined difficulty is enormous: exhausting yourself before you start

After going back and forth, I decided to wait—I’d book two weeks before the holiday.

That dragged on for over half a month. Three days before the holiday, I finally called—only to be told they were fully booked.

To give my cat a comfortable New Year, I called six pet stores before finding an opening an hour’s drive away, spending far more time, energy, and money than necessary.

On the way there, I sank into self-blame: if I’d booked a month earlier, I wouldn’t have had to drive so far. There are two pet stores downstairs, a few minutes’ walk away.

Psychological research shows that procrastinators tend to burn emotional resources early—during the “imagining the task” stage.

“According to the cognitive resource model, when individuals focus excessively on the negative aspects of a task during the task stage, they consume large amounts of cognitive resources. This over-consumption further reduces both efficiency and willingness to execute.”

Take my cat’s bath. I’d decided that “the process is a hassle,” which silently built enormous psychological pressure.

Once I actually did it, it wasn’t that bad. Getting the cat into her carrier took under ten minutes—but in my head, I’d already rehearsed the chaotic chase scene for half an hour.

And the moment I lifted my clean cat out of the carrier at the store, my mood was wonderful.

Beforehand, though, I’d completely ignored that future joy, focusing instead on a pile of difficulties I’d invented myself.

3. Falling into the perfectionism trap

For perfectionists, this is even easier to explain. They want to handle even small things flawlessly.

When organizing a wardrobe, they may give up because they can’t find the “right” storage boxes. When cleaning the room, they may stall because the tools aren’t good enough.

This obsession with perfection is precisely what sinks us into procrastination.

Yet over-pursuing perfection costs more mental energy. Psychology experiments show that a task at 95% completion generates more anxiety than one at 50%.

Hence the popular “procrastination killer”:

“If you want to do something, just start—even if you do it badly, even if it’s not perfect at all. A rough beginning beats a perfect hesitation.”

How to Overcome “Small-Task Procrastination”

These four methods are worth saving.

1. Rebuild your thinking: redefine the value of small things

Trivial chores are annoying, but they’re an indispensable part of life.

Because it’s in these small fragments that we feel we’re actually living well.

• Only in a freshly cleaned room do you feel truly “refreshed.”
• Only by treating that decayed tooth early can you comfortably eat whatever you want.
• Going downstairs for soy sauce is a bit of a bother—but braising a good plate of ribs nourishes both your stomach and your mood.

Redefining the value of small things helps us live more fully in the present and add more beautiful experiences to our days.

Small things may be insignificant—but these droplets are what make up the whole of life, letting us feel its warmth and texture.

2. Break tasks down: make the complex simple

Douban user @momo shared a highly effective method: turn each seemingly difficult small task into a spreadsheet entry, with a solution and notes attached.

For instance, when you’re at loose ends: read something actionable, read a long article, tally up your recent expenses.

She found that making vague, hard-to-name “uncomfortable little things” visible eased her anxiety. It let her see directly what she was worried about—and once written down, the tasks turned out to be neither as terrible nor as difficult as she’d imagined.

Beyond that, we can break a seemingly complex small task into simple steps, which makes it feel more doable.

For example, break “clean up the computer desktop” into:

1. Delete all .tmp files (2 minutes)
2. Drag images into the “2025 Photos” folder (3 minutes)
3. Sort remaining documents by date modified (5 minutes)

If you’re a “J” type in MBTI, you can further sort by habit or priority (urgent/normal) and by scenario (work/housework).

3. Set up a “chore clearing day”

Set aside a fixed hour every day or every week specifically for the chores you’ve been avoiding—and make it a habit.

You can use apps to help: set reminders on your phone, check in with a community or on social media, and use external accountability to push yourself into action.

4. Attach a “dopamine trigger”: turn aversion into anticipation

If you genuinely dread certain small tasks, try designing an immediate reward for them.

Listen to your favorite podcast while hanging laundry (and only while doing it). Order your favorite milk tea after assembling the bookshelf.

Building in a reward gives you a rush of immediate pleasure and satisfaction upon completion, increasing your motivation to handle small tasks.

Once your brain gets used to releasing dopamine for them, chores become “the necessary path to something you’re looking forward to”—and you start to enjoy them.

Closing: The Hidden Gifts Behind the Tedium

Endless small tasks really are tedious—but behind the tedium, surprises often hide.

Every small thing you resolve unlocks a new possibility in your life:

• Maybe formidable hands-on ability;
• Maybe the capacity to sustain an important relationship;
• Maybe the courage to no longer fear difficulty.

The chores that once made you frown are, at heart, a psychological contest.

When you choose to face them directly, you’re telling yourself: “I am capable of taking charge of my own life—I need no one else’s permission.”

From today on, let’s act together and build the habit of “doing it while you’re at it.”

In solving small things that exist only for ourselves, may we feel a love that refuses to cut corners—and taste the ease of being inherently complete.

Happiness is a capacity. I believe you will have it.