Hi, I'm Sam and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning.

I hope you had a good weekend and I hope your week is off to a great start.

So over the weekend, I got really caught up in planning a trip that I'm taking soon.

And I spent so much time looking for the perfect hotel and the most affordable options

for transportation and I ended up not booking anything.

As I was trying to book a rental car, I searched for the best deal, looking up coupon codes

and switching between multiple open tabs, trying out different codes with various companies.

I felt a rush as I entered one code for 15% off and it worked.

My next thought was, maybe I can find one for 20%.

This was the beginning of what I called the optimization vortex that I get sucked into sometimes.

I amt up my searching, opening more tabs and copying and pasting more codes at a feverish

pace and at some point, I paused.

I noticed the frantic energy that was sucking me into this familiar cycle.

I noticed sensations in my body, like a feeling of tunnel vision, not seeing what was going

on around me and I felt a clenching in my jaw.

I could tell that I was holding my breath.

And this brought to mind a habit of mine that is both really helpful at times and also

annoyingly stifling.

So I've come to notice that in many situations I'm looking to optimize.

This means that I'm always thinking about how conditions, habits, behaviors and situations

can achieve their full potential.

Being an optimizer means I look at anything from a pancake to a workplace and think about

...