# Miscellaneous thoughts on handling a stressful life

I've had several stressful periods in my life, where I was working
very hard and felt overwhelmed. I anticipate that some of the
conditions that led to me having to work very hard are happening again
and likely to happen for the next few months. As much as possible, I
want to avoid the feeling of overwhelm, and cope with the challenges
in my way as well as possible.

I decided to write some of my heuristics, and thought I might as well
make it public. I'm no expert on this topic, so this is not medical
advice, and it may not be suited to people in situations very
different from mine.

The scope of this post is limited to self-conversation. I didn't go
into a lot of the interpersonal aspects that emerge in collaborative
work. That might deserve a separate post, that I'm not ready to write
yet (but check out my [Chris Voss negotiation MasterClass
review](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CRAzG386t3suSqDgd/chris-voss-negotiation-masterclass-review)
for related ideas).

I'm going to use simple language and also just say many things without
offering justification. I'll probably fail to give credit to people
(on and off LessWrong, from recent history or ancient history) who
thought of these things before I do. Think of this not as an exercise
in persuasion but as a snapshot of my thoughts.

Some of the ideas here might also be helpful in helping people around
you cope with their stress and anxiety.

## Listening to the cognitive basis of one's stresses

One of the common responses to a feeling of stress or anxiety is to
try to calm it down, to smooth it out, or to suppress it. For
instance, if one part of your mind is saying "what if I mess up this
presentation?" the suppressing counter-narrative would be "you won't
mess up this presentation!"

I've found that suppressing stresses is not the best way of dealing
with them, even if it's effective at achieving the short-term
goal. And that's for two reasons: (a) the issue isn't resolved, so it
could recur, and (b) if the stress was conveying real information,
suppressing the stress means we fail to use the information
effectively.

If you're super-agitated due to an anxiety, some initial amount of
calming may be needed to get out of that super-agitated state, but
once you can think somewhat coolly, engaging the anxiety is better,
Being charitable to one's anxieties and [using principles of
negotiation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CRAzG386t3suSqDgd/chris-voss-negotiation-masterclass-review)
to draw out what's driving them is helpful.

### Being prepared to accept or reject the underlying claim that's making you anxious

If you're stressed that "maybe I'm not prepared enough to give this
presentation" then the exploration of that concern should have a
[litany of Tarski
flavor](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski) to it: "if I'm
not prepared to give this presentation, I want to conclude that I'm
not prepared to give this presentation; if I am prepared to give this
presentation, I want to conclude that I am prepared to give this
presentation." In most cases, neither outcome would be catastrophic,
but there can still be a lot of anxiety and second-guessing of oneself
and desire to reach specific conclusions. I found that coming with an
open mind helps me explore the decision-making better and also feel
more justified confidence in my decisions.

NOTE: It's probably important to strip out hyperbole surrounding the
claim before digging into it. For instance, "maybe I'm not prepared
enough to give this presentation" could be hyperbolically exaggerated
or made overly specific to something such as "maybe I'm too stupid to
give the presentation" or "maybe everybody will laugh me out of the
room when I give the presentation." Pick the most steelmanned version
of the claim that is most worth addressing.

## Overwork or underfun: too much or too little?

Having to work very hard over some time periods can be difficult and
fatiguing for broadly two reasons: too much work, or too little
fun. Going beyond the work/fun trade-off, this applies more generally:
too much of one activity crowds out other activities.

The simple solution of "take a break, have some fun" can *often* work,
but many versions of it could be impractical precisely in the
situation of maximal stress. For instance, if you're working hard
because you have a lot that needs to be done on tight deadlines, "take
a break, have some fun" may just not be practical advice. Or at any
rate, you may be severely limited in how much "break" and "fun" you
can have without falling behind even further on work.

What I've found helpful in such situations is to understand what is
overwhelming me -- whether it's the overwork or the underfun
part. Because the strategies for addressing the two parts can be
slightly different.

### The underfun case

In many cases, I've found that the underfun part is easier to address,
and can give quick wins in otherwise difficult situations.

For instance, I've found that I've had so little "fun" (I'm using the
term loosely here to refer to the sorts of activities crowded out by
work) that even an extra 30 minutes of fun could dramatically increase
my number of fun minutes while barely making a dent in my work. This
kind of realization is very useful in cases where longer breaks aren't
practical, and it's often helped me refresh myself and get through
difficult work times.

In fact, even if it's not possible to cut down on work *at all*, I can
choose to get a little bit of fun by cutting against other things --
such as exercise or sleep. Making that kind of trade-off may not be
sustainable, but in a relatively extreme situation of tight deadlines
where it's hard to reduce work, drawing on other reserves of time for
fun could be crucial to lifting my mood.

### The overwork case

There are also situations where the blocker really *is* overwork. If a
few hours of fun don't make me feel more relaxed, that's probably
what's going on. The solution in these kinds of cases usually hinges
on addressing the work challenge head on. It could range from just
"grinding through the work to the finish line" to "making structural
changes to cut down on the work in the present and the future" or
anything in between.

An example of structural change is hiring -- you notice that you're
genuinely overworked, so you hire somebody to do part of your work.

One way this feels qualitatively different from the underfun situation
is that in the underfun situation, it's stopping work and having fun
that makes you feel better. In the overwork case, what makes you feel
even better is identifying a "way out" of the overwork.

### Mixed real-world situations

Real-world situations often involve a mix of overwork and underfun. My
general heuristic is that, when I'm feeling too overwhelmed with work,
I take a short break for some fun, then after the break I reassess how
I'm feeling. If the break worked, great. If it worked directionally,
but not enough, maybe a little more of a break! At some point when I
feel sure that having more fun is either not helping or not feasible,
and I still feel overwhelmed with the work, I go with the overwork
strategy.

## Past, present, and future

A lot of our experiences are related to the *present moment*, i.e.,
how pleasant or unpleasant the work we're doing right now happens to
be, and how it connects to our feelings. However, our thoughts and
feelings are also influenced by the *past* (via introspection) and the
*future* (via anticipation).

In general, a more balanced perspective across the past, present, and
the future seems best for a higher quality of decision-making. Also,
acute stresses or anxieties can sometimes be driven by excessive focus
on one of the past, present, and future, at the expense of the other
two. Taking all three into consideration can paint a more holistic
picture that might alleviate the most acute forms of stress and
anxiety, while also absorbing useful insights from whatever caused the
stress or anxiety.

### Extremely unpleasant present

Sometimes, the present-moment task feels very unpleasant or
difficult. It's very hard to change that reaction to the task. For
instance, if you're not used to hard physical labor and don't enjoy
it, moving a bunch of boxes around can feel very unpleasant.

The fact that the present is extremely unpleasant raises an important
question: what *future* benefits justify this unpleasantness?
Probably, if you're doing this task despite its unpleasantness, you
already have some sort of answer. It's *possible* that when you
decided to do it, you hadn't fully considered the unpleasantness of
the task, so *maybe* you want to revise your answer now that you know
just how unpleasant it is to do. Or maybe, even after acknowledging
the unpleasantness, you still want to go ahead with the task. Either
way, by explicitly thinking about the future and how it trades off
against the present, you can understand better whether you want to do
the task, and feel more at peace with your decision.

You can also draw upon the *past* if you've done similar stuff
before. If you did similar stuff before in the past, and felt similar
unpleasantness, you can reflect on what the overall end-to-end
experience was. At the end of it, did you feel that it was worthwhile
to go through the unpleasant experience? That sort of introspection
can inform the decision-making.

### "How long will this go on?" -- a bleak future

In other cases, the stress arises not so much from the present moment
being *very* unpleasant, but from the (often justified) fear that
there will not be much improvement over time. So even though it's only
slightly unpleasant, the prospect of being stuck with it for months or
years is what drives the negative emotions. For me, this has been the
dominant pattern of my stress and anxiety, because (fortunately) the
proportion of my work that is extremely unpleasant, purely looking at
the present moment, is small.

The strategy for dealing with this can vary a little bit based on
specifics. First, in some cases, it's helpful to remember that the
*present* isn't that bad in and of itself. So whereas the long-term
consideration is important, it's also important not to let that
consideration make one hate the present moment more than its intrinsic
unpleasantness.

Second, it may be helpful to draw upon the *past* to get a sense for
how long this kind of thing takes to settle down. The insight from the
past could go either way: it could justify the fear that this will
keep going on, or it could assuage the fear by showing that this sort
of situation tends to resolve quickly. The past can also give insight
into what works and what doesn't work in terms of getting out of
moderately bad situations.

Based on these insights, you could then chart a path out of your
slightly-unpleasant situation, that might involve some upfront costs
for long-term benefits. Similar to what I mentioned when talking about
overwork, hiring can be such a solution. Other similar solutions that
involve upfront work include automation, offloading work to others,
and gracefully ending some streams of work (with the appropriate care
in sunsetting things).

### Scars of the past

There are times when bad past experiences (that may or may not
properly translate to the present context) cause stress and anxiety,
especially if we fear that history is going to repeat itself. The
textbook example here is childhood trauma. But I'm thinking even of
more local things, like how remembering the pain of doing a similar
task last year fills you with dread for what it'll be like this year.

Drawing on past experience is definitely important, but it's also
worth remembering how the *present* is different than the past. One
big difference is that you have *learnings* from the past that can be
applied to the present. The benefit of such learning can vary a lot;
some tasks become much easier the second time just from knowing what
to expect, while some tasks feel about as bad each time. So reflecting
on what kind of task this is can help.

Other than your own learning, you also benefit from the learnings of
others, that might have translated to improvements in their own
behavior and in the technology and tools available. For instance,
maybe doing end-of-year accounting was a stressful time for you,
particularly because you were dealing with poor records and buggy
software, and your business partner and you did a lot of snapping at
each other. One year later, you have a better sense of how to approach
things, you and your business partner have been keeping better
records, and some of the software bugs have been fixed. So in
expectation it'll go better this year.

It may however turn out upon reflection that things *haven't* improved
from the past to the present. In such cases, yes, you may have to
re-experience some of the pain of the past. But you can also use this
realization to think about how you can do a better job in the *future*
-- what sort of changes (better accounting system, better records,
etc.) would make you less fearful of doing this task next year?

## Sources of value

Oftentimes, our subjective experience of what we're doing connects not
just with our moment-to-moment experience of it, but with the value we
assign to it. A lot of times, this value is assigned instinctively and
intuitively, and feels hard to change or redirect. The way we assign
value can vary a lot from person to person. Here I talk about some
aspects of my own value system.

### Purpose

All else equal, I prefer to do things that *feel purposeful* to
me. Feeling purposeful has some correlation with objective measures of
impact, but not a perfect one; in particular, certain kinds of
activities just naturally feel more purposeful than others. For me,
the rough rank order is as follows:

1. Producing stuff for public consumption, that I expect to be
   available for people to consume in the long term: In my current
   situation, this boils down, mostly but not exclusively, to content
   creation. For instance, writing this blog post!
2. Helping other individuals produce stuff for public consumption.
3. Helping other individuals and entities (e.g., a company I work for)
   achieve their goals, even when they don't directly boost public
   production or consumption.
4. Making things more efficient and freeing up time, i.e.,
   technological progress, broadly construed.
5. Learning and understanding the world.
6. Being healthy, happy and satisfied.
7. Being physically fit, for the instrumental value of making me more
   able to stay healthy, happy, and satisfied, and achieve my other
   purposes.

In *general*, people experience a sense of purpose from helping
others, and in that respect, I'm pretty normal! However, the specific
rank ordering, that puts production-for-public-consumption above
helping other individuals, reflects relatively unusual traits of mine
(though these are not that unusual relative to the LessWrong
community!). The formation of this sort of rank ordering has been
informed by introspection and thinking, and even some calculations,
but the point is that my intuitive feeling of happiness at producing
public content is in most cases *not* driven by calculations done for
that specific instance.

### Pleasure

There is a bunch of things that give me pleasure, but don't directly
feel purposeful, though they may also align with things that give me
purpose. A few examples:

1. Exploring a knowledge area: This ties to the purpose of learning
   and understanding the world, and insofar as I can create a [digital
   trail](https://issarice.com/outline-of-the-style-of-social-science-research-that-vipul-naik-advocates),
   also aligns with production for public consumption (e.g.,
   [subwiki](https://vipulnaik.com/subwiki/)). Insofar as my
   exploration can be used to directly help others, it also aligns
   with those sources of purpose. But the aspects that give the most
   pleasure don't always align with the aspects that feel most
   purposeful. For instance, advanced pure mathematical areas give me
   the most pleasure, but (now that I am no longer in math academia)
   don't feel purposeful for the most part.
2. Engaging with music, ranging from listening to music to [composing
   music](https://vipulnaik.com/music/).
3. Watching videos (TV shows, movies, YouTube) or reading books or
   articles for a mix of [entertainment and
   self-education](https://ese.vipulnaik.com/).
4. Chatting with friends and acquaintances (this is broadly
   competitive with 2 and 3, but it has greater coordination and
   transaction costs, so in practice this falls a little lower on the
   rank order).

### "I shouldn't be wasting my time on this" -- dealing with things that don't align with purpose or pleasure

There are often things that I need to do, that score low for me on
purpose and pleasure. I historically found that I resent doing those
things, and feel in ["not okay"
mode](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/21/everything-okay/) when
doing them.

An example, that perhaps many others can relate to, is finances and
taxes. There's a relatively bounded amount of work I *need* to do on
these fronts (and sharply diminishing returns beyond that bounded
effort). The present-moment experience of working on finances and
taxes isn't great, but it's not terrible; I would say it is roughly at
par with how I experience large parts of my day job.

However, working on my taxes did not light up any of my purpose
receptors or pleasure receptors! So I did it, but unhappily, feeling
like I just need to get done with it and get back to "ok mode" with my
usual tasks. There was a part of me that also feared that maybe I'll
get sucked into this stuff and just spend too much time on it,
compromising my values.

I think I've been able to overcome this in recent years. I now spend a
little more time on finances and taxes than before, but most of the
extra effort was one-time setup. The main epistemic shift was to see
finances and taxes as something I took pride in being on top of -- and
getting done efficiently without wasting a lot of time on it. So
rather than the two extremes of avoiding it (which I had been doing
previously) and relishing and spending a lot of time on it (which I
feared), I set it as my goal to set up systems where I would be on top
of all the basic stuff and not have pending work that I was
procrastinating on. This was a bunch of setup work in early 2020, but
it's served me well.

One example of a concrete change: I now spend my New Year's Eve and
New Year's Day doing a bunch of end-of-year finance and tax
calculations. Even though all the exact data isn't in by then, I'm
able to do enough approximate calculations to get a good sense for
what the process of tax filing will look like, and where I stand
financially. I also spend about 15 minutes at the end of each month
tallying up my balances and identifying my spend. I probably don't
*need* to do this, but it costs so little in terms of time compared to
the sense of being on top of things with minimal effort.

## Going meta: the writing of this post as an example

The act of writing this post is an illustration of some of the ideas
in the post! At the time I decided to write the post, I was feeling
overwhelmed with work, so it was a case where I was feeling some
combination of overwork and underfun (the "work" here refers not just
to day job but to a totality across various obligations). As I
recommend in the post, my first step here was to take some time off
for "fun" and see how recharged I feel.

The things that are most fun for me tend to be things that align with
my experience of purpose and pleasure. Writing this post addressed my
highest source of purpose: creating stuff for public consumption that
can be accessed in the long term. It also had some overlap with other
sources of purpose (learning and understanding the world, being happy,
healthy, and satisfied). It also fit somewhat but not too well with my
sources of pleasure. Also, it was timely since it connected with some
things I anyway need or want to figure out for myself.

Hence I'm writing this post, and after spending less than two hours
writing the post, I feel moderately recharged, which suggests that
underfun was a significant part of my sense of overwhelm. I shall now
get back to my work!