ONE of the biggest complaints in modern society is being overscheduled, overcommitted and overextended. Ask people at a social gathering how they are and the stock answer（惯常的回答。）is “super busy,” “crazy busy” or “insanely busy.” Nobody is just “fine” anymore.
When people aren’t super busy at work, they are crazy busy exercising, entertaining or taking their kids to Chinese lessons. Or maybe they are insanely（疯狂地） busy playing fantasy football, tracing their genealogy or churning their own butter（字面意思是挤奶油，但闲的无聊才做这些）.
And if there is ever a still moment for reflective thought （深思熟虑）— say, while waiting in line at the grocery store or sitting in traffic（堵车） — out comes the mobile device.So it’s worth noting a study published last month in the journal Science, which shows how far people will go to avoid introspection.
这句话里的study后面有一个后置定语“published....in the journal Science”，后面还有一个由which引导的非限制定语从句“which shows...”，都是用来修饰名词study的。
“We had noted how wedded（wed结婚，黏） to our devices we all seem to be and that people seem to find any excuse they can to keep busy,” said Timothy Wilson, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and lead author of the study. “No one had done a simple study letting people go off（进行）on their own and think.”
The results surprised him and have created a stir in the psychology and neuroscience communities.In 11 experiments involving more than 700 people, the majority of participants reported that they found it unpleasant to be alone in a room with their thoughts for just 6 to 15 minutes.
一个很好的描述实验结果的句式，"In a expermient involving..., ...reported that they found it..."。在一个有...人参与的实验中，...发现...
Moreover, in one experiment, 64 percent of men and 15 percent of women began self-administering electric shocks when left alone to think(让他们自己去思考）. These same people, by the way, had previously said they would pay money to avoid receiving the painful jolt（痛苦的挫折）.
It didn’t matter if the subjects engaged in the contemplative(冥想) exercise at home or in the laboratory, or if they were given suggestions of what to think about, like a coming vacation;they just didn’t like being in their own heads.
这一段其实只有两句话。第一句是"It didn't matter+两个if引导的从句”，第二句是“they..."。这样一看，整个结构是不是更清晰了呢？
It could be because human beings, when left alone, tend to dwell on （思考）what’s wrong in their lives. We have evolved to become problem solvers and meaning makers.What preys on our minds, when we aren’t updating our Facebook page or in spinning class, are the things we haven’t figured out — difficult relationships, personal and professional failures, money trouble, health concerns and so on.And until there is resolution, or at least some kind of understanding or acceptance, these thoughts reverberate in our heads. Hello rumination（沉思）. Hello insomnia（失眠）.
“One explanationwhy people keep themselves so busy and would rather shock themselvesis that they are trying to avoid that kind of negative stuff,（红色部分是句子主干，剩下的部分都是进行解释说明的从句）” said Ethan Kross, director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan. “It doesn’t feel good if you’re not intrinsically good at reflecting.”
The comedian Louis C.K. has a riff（视频片段）that’s been watched nearly eight million times on YouTube in which he describes that not-good feeling. “Sometimes when things clear away and you’re not watching anything and you’re in your car and you start going, oh no, here it comes, that I’m alone, and it starts to visit on you, just this sadness,” he said. “And that’s why we text and drive. People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.（这就是人们为什么喜欢一边开车一边发短信了。他们愿意冒上性命的危险，因为他们连1秒钟都不想一个人呆着。这对他们来说太（特么）难了。）”
But you can’t solve or let go of problems if you don’t allow yourself time to think about them. It’s an imperative ignored（一个不可避免被忽略掉的东西）by our culture, which values doing more than thinking and believes answers are in the palm of your hand rather than in your own head.
“It’s like we’re all in this addicted family where all this busyness seems normal when it’s really harmful（这就像是我们都是这个上瘾的大家庭中的一员——对我们来说忙碌似乎再正常不过，但它真的是有害的。这里面的‘family’，不是真的指“家庭”而是指这类人的集合。）,” said Stephanie Brown, a psychologist in Silicon Valley and the author of “Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster — and Overcoming Our Fear of Slowing Down.” “There’s this widespread belief that（一个句式）thinking and feeling will only slow you down and get in your way, but it’s the opposite.”
Suppressing(抑制) negative feelings only gives them more power, she said, leading to intrusive thoughts, which makes people get even busier to keep them at bay（keep...at bay）. The constant cognitive strain of evading emotions underlies（潜藏于）a range of psychological troubles such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, depression and panic attacks（一系列关于心理问题的名词，可以积累一下）, not to mention a range of addictions. It is also associated with various somatic problems like eczema, irritable bowel syndrome, asthma, inflammation, impaired immunity and headaches（各种身体疾病）.
Studies further suggest that（句式）not giving yourself time to reflect impairs（损害） your ability to empathize with（与...有同样的感受，也就是我们常说的“同理心”）others. “The more in touch with my own feelings and experiences, the richer and more accurate are my guesses of what passes through another person’s mind（这句话就用了“the more...，the more...的句式来进一步说明了同理心的产生方式）,” said Giancarlo Dimaggio, a psychiatrist with the Center for Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy in Rome, who studies the interplay（互动）of self-reflection and empathy. “Feeling what you feel is an ability that atrophies（衰退）if you don’t use it.”
Researchers have also found that an idle mind is a crucible（严酷的考验）of creativity.A number of studies have shown that（句式）people tend to come up with（想出，提出）more novel（novel有“小说”的意思，不过这里是另一个意思，“新奇的”）uses for objects if they are first given an easy task that allows their minds to wander, rather than a more demanding one.
“Idle mental processing encourages creativity and solutions because imagining your problem when you aren’t in it is not the same as reality,” said Jonathan Smallwood, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of York, in England. “Using your imagination means you are in fact rethinking the problem in a novel way.”
Idle mental processing是一个非常有意思的概念。在计算机的操作系统里，它指的是CPU的空闲状态。用到这里就是指我们“大脑不再忙忙忙，而是放轻松”的时候了。
Perhapsthat’s whyGoogle offers its employees courses called “Search Inside Yourself” and “Neural Self-Hacking,”whichinclude instruction on mindfulness meditation,wherethe goal is to recognize and accept inner thoughts and feelings rather than ignore or repress them.（很长的一句话，把主干找出来后会容易理解很多）It’s in the company’s interest because it frees up（解放）employees’ otherwise embattled（严阵以待的）brain space to intuit end users’ desires and create products to satisfy them.
“I have a lot of people who come in and want to learn meditation to shut out thoughts that come up in those quiet moments,” said Sarah Griesemer, a psychologist in Austin, Tex., who incorporates mindfulness meditation into her practice（incorporate...into...把...融入）. “But allowing and tolerating the drifting in of thoughts（思绪的翻涌）is part of the process.” Her patients, mostly hard-charging professionals, report being more productive at work and more energetic and engaged parents.
To get rid of（去除）the emotional static, experts advise not using first-person pronouns（第一人称）when thinking about troubling events in your life. Instead, use third-person pronouns（第三人称）or your own name when thinking about yourself. “If a friend comes to you with a problem it’s easy to coach them through it, but if the problem is happening to us we have real difficulty, in part because we have all these egocentric biases（以自我为中心而导致的偏见）making it hard to reason rationally（理性地思考）,” said Dr. Kross of Michigan. “The data clearly shows that you can use language to almosttrick yourself into（骗自己去...）thinking your problems are happening to someone else.”
Hard as they sometimes are, negative feelings are a part of everyone’s life, arguably more so if you are crazy busy. But it’s those same deep and troubling feelings, and how you deal with them, that make you the person you are. While busyness may stanch（止血）welling sadness, it may also limit your ability to be overcome with joy.