Blogger Pamela Slim has a habit of writing during the quiet late-night hours, along with a sense that she can't write unless she's got a fat stack of Oreos next to her. Digging into the dieting tips of Martha Beck, she finds that her compulsive sweet tooth stems from the same place as her deadline anxieties. Her solution is to basically sit down and calmly think through why she's not doing that badly whenever the late-night longings pop up:

The starved and frightened brain drives overeating and low metabolism. The calm and secure brain drives a very different set of biological motivators and consequences. In other words, when your brain is fixed, you eat less and burn off excess as heat, whereas the "famine brain" caused by stress and hunger- including dieting — really does make you consume more and store more as fat.

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Whether you've set personal goals for the new year or you're self-employed, sticking to deadlines that you've assigned to yourself can be difficult. Freelance writer Thursday Bram discusses how he gets his work done on a deadline in the face of somewhat arbitrary deadlines. The post focuses mostly on freelance work, but the ideas are just as applicable to things like New Year's resolutions or other personal goals. For more on sticking to your self-assigned deadlines and accomplishing your goals, check out how this editor motivates himself to stick to his resolutions.

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