4 small ways you’re ruining your life

We've all been the "Night Guy" Seinfeld describes. Caught up in a night of debauchery (or aimless Internet browsing), we don't stop to consider how "Morning Guy" will feel the next day.  

One of the worst pitfalls people fall into, according to Redditor conjectureandhearsay, is "staying up way too late, thinking you'll be just fine for the morning."

We find ourselves caught in this trap because we divide our present and future selves into two different people, psychologist David Nussbaum wrote in his book, Big Think.

"When we think of ourselves in the future, the neural circuits that we recruit can be the similar to the ones that we use to think about others, not about ourselves," he wrote. "So Night Guy goes out drinking with his friends and Morning Guy gets stuck with the hangover."

To beat this habit and avoid an endless cycle of staying up too late and sleeping in, Nussbaum suggested picturing yourself in the morning or writing a letter to your future self. This way, Morning Guy and Night Guy can get acquainted. 

Sometimes, we let our lives pass without accomplishing what we want because we fall victim to "thinking that there will always be more time," as heiza said. 

Redditor PinkBoxDestroyer added, "Then one day you find 10 years have got behind you" as the thread transitioned into a recitation of the lyrics to "Time" by Pink Floyd. 

"You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today," Pink Floyd sings, describing the mentality that prevents us from checking items off our bucket lists.

Unfortunately, as author Henry David Thoreau once wrote, you can't "kill time without injuring eternity." 

Many books, movies, and songs teach the lesson that we should live each day like our last because we don't know how much longer we or the people we love will be around. But when faced with the demands of everyday life, spending time with our families or chasing our dreams can get pushed to the bottom of our to-do lists. 

If we really lived every day like our last, we wouldn't get anything done. But there's a happy medium between adopting that philosophy and wasting time.

As Muffin_Spectre said, "Waiting to do something because you may have the opportunity in the future can be one of the biggest mistakes you ever make."

Whether you take so long deciding what dish to order that the restaurant closes, or you spend so much time choosing an apartment that someone else snags your first choice, sometimes an uncertain decision is better than no choice at all.

JackinTheBeanstock quoted journalist Hunter S. Thompson to illustrate this point: “A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”

If you're indecisive by nature, psychologist Steven Berglas recommended in a Forbes article that you can beat indecision by trusting your instincts, avoiding excessive research that leads to information overload, narrowing down the factors to just a few top priorities, letting go of the fear of being wrong, and, if worst comes to worst, flipping a coin. 

"Indecision is all about avoiding 1) the choice between two negative alternatives, one of which has to be adopted, or 2) the choice between two fairly equal courses of action," he wrote. "In both cases, the solution may well be heads or tails."

Don't feel bad if you've fallen into any of these traps. As the length of the Reddit thread shows, there's a whole bunch of people right there with you. But if you can help it, you're better off learning from Reddit than learning the hard way.