The tabs you never closed
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You’re not exhausted from what you did today. You’re exhausted from everything you haven’t decided.
On the morning of April 6, 2007, Arianna Huffington went on CNN to do a news segment, came home, and sat down at her desk. She was two years into building The Huffington Post. Eighteen-hour days, four hours of sleep, running from board meetings to TV appearances to speaking events without pause.
She felt cold. She stood up to get a sweater.
And she collapsed. Her face hit the corner of the desk on the way down. She broke her cheekbone and woke up on the floor in a pool of her own blood.
For two weeks after, she went from doctor to doctor. MRI, echocardiogram, CT scan. They were looking for a brain tumor, a heart defect, something to explain why a healthy woman just dropped. The diagnosis, when it finally came, was almost embarrassing in its simplicity: exhaustion. Her body had shut everything down because she wouldn’t.
Most people tell this story as a cautionary tale about overwork. Get more sleep. Take more breaks. Arianna herself has spent the years since building Thrive Global around exactly that message. But I’ve been thinking about her collapse differently lately, and I think the real lesson is one most of us are missing.
What she was actually carrying
Arianna wasn’t just doing too much. She was carrying too much she’d never resolved.
Think about what an eighteen-hour day looks like when you’re building a media company from scratch. It isn’t eighteen hours of focused work. It’s eighteen hours of context-switching between things that each demand a decision. Hire this person or not. Run this story or not. Take this meeting or not. Approve this budget or not. Say yes to this speaking engagement or not. Hundreds of open questions, cycling through her mind every day, most of them never fully closed.
A psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik figured out in the 1920s that the brain treats every unresolved task like an unpaid restaurant check. It holds the tab open, keeps it active, keeps pinging you with reminders whether you want them or not. The moment something is decided, the brain releases it. But until then, it runs in the background, eating up resources you don’t know you’re spending.
Arianna wasn’t just tired from working. She was tired from the thousand tabs her brain refused to close.
And I’d be willing to bet you know exactly what that feels like.
The hum
Arianna had a thousand open tabs. I didn’t think I did, until I counted.
About a year ago, I sat down to do focused work and couldn’t. My brain felt full before I’d started. So I did something I’d never tried before. I opened a blank page and wrote down every unresolved thing I was carrying.
Every email I’d been meaning to answer but hadn’t. Conversations I knew I needed to have but kept postponing. Projects I hadn’t committed to or killed. All the times I’d said “I’ll think about it” when the honest answer was just no.
Seventeen things.
None of them were emergencies. Most would have taken less than ten minutes to resolve. But I’d been hauling all seventeen of them around for weeks, and I hadn’t realized how much they weighed until I put them on paper.
Researchers at Florida State found that it’s not the unfinished task that drains you. It’s the absence of a plan for it. When people in the study simply wrote down when and how they’d handle something, the nagging stopped. They didn’t have to do it. They just had to decide about it. The decision itself closed the tab.
That’s the part nobody talks about. You can work twelve-hour days and feel energized if every hour has clear purpose. But you can work four hours and feel destroyed if your brain is simultaneously running a dozen things you haven’t dealt with.
That low-grade exhaustion you can’t quite explain? The fog that rolls in around 2pm even though you slept fine? It might not be burnout. It might just be too many unpaid checks.
Karen Horney, the psychologist, called it the “Tyranny of the Shoulds.” Every open tab becomes another should. I should respond to that. I should make that decision. I should have that conversation. The distance between should and did becomes a hum you can’t locate but can always feel.
The most expensive tab
I went through my seventeen open tabs on a Thursday afternoon. Took about ninety minutes. Some required an awkward text I’d been putting off. A few meant admitting I’d over-committed and needed to back out. One took nothing more than writing “I’m not doing this” in my notebook and sitting with the weird relief that followed.
By that evening I felt lighter than I had in weeks. I hadn’t accomplished anything new. I’d just stopped carrying things I was never going to act on.
A yes closes a tab. A no closes a tab. Even “I’m never going to do this and I need to stop pretending” closes a tab. Your brain doesn’t care which one you pick. It just needs the check settled.
You probably know which tab has been open the longest. It might be the one you’ve been avoiding because the honest answer is no and you don’t want to say it. Or the one where you already know what you’d do if you stopped overthinking it. I’d bet there’s one you keep open just because closing it would mean admitting something you’re not ready to admit.
That last one is the most expensive tab you’re running.
Arianna Huffington’s body settled her checks for her. Face-first into a desk in 2007. She’s talked about it hundreds of times since, always circling back to the same realization: she didn’t have to let it get that far. The tabs could have been closed one at a time, any afternoon, at any desk. The weight would have lifted the same way it did for me on that Thursday. No drama. Just the strange lightness of a decision finally made.
You don’t have to finish everything on your list. You just have to decide about it.
What’s the tab you’ve had open the longest?
Thank you for reading,
— Scott
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