You can turn off unread counts, which helps a fair bit. You'll know there's something unread, but there's less anxiety about the volume of things that are unread. Combined with a willingness to use Mark All Read without having looked at everything in a feed has made it pretty usable for me.
I've never really thought about it much. I'm just looking back and noticing that once I hadn't checked in for a week, I didn't want to check in. I was procrastinating about checking my feed reader instead of procrastinating by checking my feed reader.
