A lot of anxiety in life is both unwanted and involuntary.<\/p>\n
Often when I have an early morning flight, I can\u2019t sleep deeply. The worry about sleeping through my alarm clock has me waking up involuntarily, every hour or so. Even when I should have enough sleep to feel rested, I wake up groggy.<\/p>\n
I try to tell myself that the alarm clock will go off, I\u2019ve never slept through it before, so get some high-quality sleep now before you can\u2019t on a big flight. But somehow that line of reasoning rarely changes anything.<\/p>\n
Anxiety doesn\u2019t even have to be about a specific problem. I sometimes worry about being wrong in my writing. Advocating something which I later discover is wrong, or actually harmful. Perhaps even being called out by a higher source of expertise for charlatanism because I could have known better had I only done my research correctly.<\/p>\n
I can tell myself that what matters isn\u2019t being perfect about picking the right ideas to believe in, but being willing to change them in the face of new evidence. I can also persuade myself having higher sources of expertise disagree with you, or even being wrong about some things are unavoidable, and what matters is doing one\u2019s best.<\/p>\n
Sometimes recognizing an emotion\u2019s irrationality isn\u2019t enough to eliminate it. That\u2019s an obvious reality, and if you suffer from unwanted anxiety in your life, there are probably some good methods to handle that<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, despite the prevalence of involuntary anxiety, I think there\u2019s also a great deal of voluntary stress we inflict upon ourselves. Anxiety that comes, not because we can\u2019t help feeling worried, but because we believe we should feel stress.<\/p>\n An example for you might be school. You get stressed around exam time because you feel the pressure to pass your exams, but worry you might not be able to. This may arise automatically from the environment.<\/p>\n But then that feeling gets compounded because it also includes a belief that says, \u201cI should be stressed prior to my exams. People who don\u2019t feel stress during exams, get lazy, don\u2019t study, fail, drop out of school, can\u2019t find work and end up living on the streets, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n Well maybe it doesn\u2019t go that far. But there may be this implicit assumption that \u201cnot feeling stressed\u201d = \u201cundesirable life outcomes you want to avoid\u201d. Therefore it\u2019s not merely that you get stressed prior to your exams, but that any attempt to alleviate that anxiety would also be a bad idea because it would lead to these undesirable life outcomes.<\/p>\n I think it\u2019s that additional belief, which states that the feeling of anxiety and stress is necessary or good which makes a lot of anxiety more intractable. After all, there are probably a lot of ways you can deal with mild involuntary anxiety, provided you don\u2019t also believe that alleviating that pain is something unwise. Even if you do feel serious, uncontrollable anxiety, knowing it isn\u2019t vital to your success as an individual may give you the power to seek out treatment.<\/p>\n Given this, how much anxiety and stress do you actually need?<\/p>\n This has been a question on my mind a lot lately. I\u2019ve started watching some of Alan Watts television series<\/a> on Buddhism and Taoism. I\u2019ve also rekindled my previous interest in those eastern philosophies, which I had read years ago but drifted away from in my recent fixation on a more scientific view of the world.<\/p>\n While I\u2019m still a complete novice in these subjects, there seems to me to be a lot of good ideas related to this very question I\u2019ve posed. Namely, that Buddhism suggests that much of our suffering in life is due to this kind of voluntary anxiety. Taoism, similarly, argues that there is a natural way of things and we should follow along this, rather than try to actively resist it.<\/p>\n Rereading a lot of this writing has made me reflect on this kind of voluntary anxiety and suggest that perhaps most, if not all of it, is unnecessary to live a successful life. I haven\u2019t fully convinced myself of this conclusion yet, but I\u2019d like to share it tentatively with you, if only to spark a discussion which can improve my thinking about it.<\/p>\n The strongest argument I can think of, for the beneficial nature of stress, is that we evolved it for a reason. If negative emotions had no practical significance, they would never have been designed under selection pressure in the first place.<\/p>\n This argument is one I think weights heavily against any idea that some subset of our natural functioning range of emotions and beliefs is either entirely escapable or harmful. Either the experience is an unavoidable side-effect of our proper functioning (say, cognitive biases), or the experience is helpful in some subsets of experience, so eliminating it would be maladaptive (say, negative emotional states).<\/p>\n But such a line of argument only suggests that a certain experience might be beneficial, in part. I don\u2019t think it reasonably follows that the proportions in your life are necessarily correct. After all, we may recognize that anger or disgust have important functions (in preventing being taken advantage of, or engaging in activities that may make us sick), but that you can also feel these emotions too much, or in places where they aren\u2019t useful.<\/p>\n Similarly, I think a lot of stress and anxiety in modern life isn\u2019t strictly necessary. For one, we rarely face the life-or-death consequences that require an immediate fight-or-flight response. Second, because we can intelligently design systems to render stress unnecessary.<\/p>\n My sense is that stress is useful to prompt a specific action, to a specific threat, or to promote alertness during a brief period of danger. That\u2019s it. Any stress which doesn\u2019t facilitate these purposes is wasted and therefore any beliefs that stress is necessary must be limited to these contexts.<\/p>\n So take your final exam situation I mentioned previously. Here the stress can serve two purposes. First, it can prompt you to take action against a specific threat. In this case, the answer is obvious\u2014studying\u2014to prevent doing poorly on your exams. Once you feel this stress, momentarily, you should take action to create a specific studying plan and implement it. Stress beyond that point is wasted since you cannot do better than that.<\/p>\n Second, it can keep you alert in during a period of danger. But this function isn\u2019t relevant for exams because they are known in advance. They won\u2019t come jumping out of the bushes to maul you to death. So being in a constant state of alertness is wasteful. Indeed, it\u2019s probably actively harmful since chronic stress worsens learning and memory<\/a>.<\/p>\n Or consider my personal examples of stress. Worrying about my alarm clock is wasted effort. I\u2019ve already taken action by setting my alarm and there is no continued environment of unforeseen danger. Worrying about being wrong is also wasted effort. Once I\u2019ve taken what actions are within my power to prevent being willfully ignorant, there\u2019s nothing more I can do. Having any continued stress won\u2019t reduce even a tiny bit the chances of being wrong.<\/p>\n So this idea\u2014that fear, stress or anxiety should create a specific prompt to action, or promote alertness in a period of danger\u2014means that most stress isn\u2019t helpful. You need just enough to encourage the necessary action and no more. Since periods of persistent danger are much rarer today than in our ancestral environment, persistent stress is most likely a harmful overreaction. Like an allergy reacting aggressively to a harmless substance, you may feel persistent stress to a situation where dangers are actually minimal.<\/p>\n I might even go further and say that, provided you have the decisiveness to take action immediately upon perceiving a problem, virtually any stress is unnecessary. This is one reason I advocate for productivity systems that allow you to capture and process tasks, so even if you can\u2019t deal with something immediately, you can feel confident that it will be dealt with later. Systems like these can take the place of stress.<\/p>\n Given that, in the specific cases, stress is usually unhelpful beyond some minimal threshold to take specific actions to specific threats, then it certainly reasons that being stressed as a person is generally unhelpful to being successful in life.<\/p>\n This then corresponds to a more generalized belief that many people hold. Namely, if they didn\u2019t feel stress and anxiety, they\u2019d end up being one of those foolish, incautious people for whom entirely avoidable misery befalls.<\/p>\n Instead, you could replace that belief with a different one. Namely, it\u2019s possible to be successful as an individual with almost no stress. All that\u2019s necessary is simply to take the correct action to the specific threats, and avoid putting yourself in genuinely dangerous situations for long periods of time.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t idle theorizing, I believe there\u2019s good evidence that this is in fact the case for many successful people. Cal did great work in these two<\/a> books<\/a>, explaining the mysterious combination of extremely high achievement and low stress in students. I\u2019ve personally known examples of low-stress, high-achievement individuals. Correlation doesn\u2019t imply causation, but the existence of low-stress, high-achievement people does put water on the theory that high stress is a prerequisite to accomplishment.<\/p>\n Now obviously having this belief isn\u2019t enough. Anxieties in life can come involuntarily, and recognizing their irrationality may not be enough. But even mitigating the toxic belief structures that many of us hold which posits that frequent, persistent anxiety is useful, is an important first step.<\/p>\n What are your thoughts? This is an idea I\u2019ve only recently been exploring, so I\u2019m curious to see whether it lines up with your experience. Bonus points for anyone with good references to research that supports or contradicts my hypothesis!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A lot of anxiety in life is both unwanted and involuntary. Often when I have an early morning flight, I can\u2019t sleep deeply. The worry about sleeping through my alarm clock has me waking up involuntarily, every hour or so. Even when I should have enough sleep to feel rested, I wake up groggy. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12,680],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6156","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-discipline","7":"category-nc-productivity","8":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Should You Be Stressed?<\/h2>\n
Anxiety and the Tao<\/h2>\n
Is Stress Useful at All?<\/h2>\n
When is Stress Useful?<\/h2>\n
How Does This Belief Help?<\/h2>\n