Ask HN: How to stop anxiety from too many choices?
The obvious answer here is to reduce choices. However the past few months I am struggling hugely with anxiety which is rendering me incapable on some days to make any real progress on my goals; startup, learning & side projects.
When the pandemic began, and we lost our clients I have found myself in a constant state of ideation and future thinking, but once I start one of these (semi-pivots) I get worried that there is a better idea and go back to the drawing board.
How does one stop this process?
106 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadYou should try to weigh the pros and cons of your options as best you can, of course. You should also try to break down your tasks into achieveable goals as much as possible so as to build up your confidence as you achieve them and lessen your anxiety.
But at a certain point, you can only know and project so much about your options unless you actually try them. When you choose something, dont quit when you start to doubt if theres a better way. You aren’t actually equipped to make that evaluation until you have tried and succeeded/failed with your current path. Its a good thing to fail, it teaches you a lot going forward.
I think the real problem you need to address is your difficulty accepting risk, which i suspect is tied to a fear of failure. Start trying to convince yourself that mistakes are good things.
When choosing a path, plan benchmarks where you can step back and evaluate concrete work up until that point. Only consider changing your path if you have concrete evidence to prove that you’re going astray. And ask others for their opinions along the way, don’t do it all alone
Good luck
The ego is most likely framing the entire situation as ‘What is this grand pivot that, if executed properly, will change everything?’. Very pretentious, don’t let your ego frame things in that manner.
“Being where you are is bliss, thinking about where you want to be is suffering.”
Hence why meditation to observe your thoughts and observe if you react to thoughts is a useful practice for training yourself to be more in the present moment - because there's no gift like the present!
The OP is effectively saying ‘I don’t have to do any work, because in the future I will have the perfect idea that will be worth working on’.
That’s the root issue that needs to be tackled, plenty of other posters have given frameworks for doing so (breaking things down, etc).
But we must keep the root cause in mind, because it will always pop up in other scenarios, e.g ‘It’s okay if I never followed up with this girl/guy, because one day I’ll meet a better girl/guy’, or, ‘I don’t have to care too much about this person, because he/she won’t be around in a few months’, etc.
It’s all part of the same framework, be vigilant.
I try to strike a balance between enjoying the moment and enjoying the change too.
This is something I learned from my former boss (director of research): Don't try and evaluate your experiment before it's finished. See it through before checking your hypothesis.
My trick is externalize and slow down ideas.
Instead of immediately pursuing ideas, enter small descriptions of them in a journal. That tends to cut down on the effort to remember them.
Also set an inverse deadline, that you are not going to start anything before the inverse deadline (and maybe even after).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
You don't have to stick with the result, but just try it on mentally for a second and feel your response. If your immediate response to the decision that had been made for you is negative, then discard that choice entirely.
Or ask the debug rubber duck.
* Have an ideas journal. Write new ideas down there, and don't start with any of them in less than two weeks. This lets you get over the initial enthusiasm - and perhaps new better ideas will push less useful ones out of the way in that time. If something stays at the top of your list for weeks, then perhaps it is useful.
* If you are having trouble deciding between a small number of fixed options, roll the dice. The very fact that you are having trouble deciding means that (within the information available to you right now) all choices are equally good. And sometimes when you see the dice rolling and know that the decision will happen now you realise which one you want.
The old Mr. Bean's method to choose which shirt to carry on holiday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEJ8V_Cnx6I&t=79
life is also really hard so try to have a sense of humor along the way - this is all one big game :)
Stay nimble down the road and reconsider if you made the right decision, but with a bias to sticking it out with what you chose. It's better to make the wrong choice and realize it soonish than to make no choice at all.
I have a problem getting distracted by new shiny ideas, so I don't allow myself any real pivots until I at least get past the MVP state. I tell myself to finish and launch it, even if nobody uses it, just to prove I can finish stuff.
There is a book called Paradox of Choice[0] on this topic. Author has a couple of videos about the book as well [1].
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy8R5TZNV1A
Edit: Obviously, talk to your doctor/psychiatrist etc, I am not a physician.
It also helps to have someone who works on a similar thing, to exchange thoughts, vent frustration, and perhaps receive encouragement.
1) Perseverance
2) Medication
My recommendation is to seek out a mental health professional to provide you a medical solution, which is a treatment regiment and not necessarily pills. I would consider a pharmaceutical answer only as a last resort and if the condition is severe, as determined by your mental health professional.
That being said perseverance, resiliency, is perhaps the best treatment path if you free to make major life changes and your anxiety is not a crippling mental health disorder. I have encountered many people who have had, in my opinion, a rather boring and easy life thrust into a world of making decisions they are not prepared for. The resulting scenario is a variety of relatively minor mental health ailments, which is a coping disorder more than anything else.
This has been studied to death in the military, largely as a result of the military's higher than civilian average suicide rate. The primary reason suicides are higher in the military, and in law enforcement, is that there are default behaviors limit and deter suicidal ideation, such as fear of death. Many military members and law enforcement learn to overcome that fear and so are less restricted from suicide as a matter of behavior alone. Once those factors are taken off the table and suicides are examined purely from the statistical data correlation the largest demographic is young white males from suburban middle-class families. The demographic with the lowest suicide rate are black females from lower-income households of any age. The data suggests the primary differential factor is proximity and frequency of hardships prior to entering the military, as in learned coping mechanisms.
Coping mechanisms are skills that can still be learned as adults, but only if you are willing to accept that there is a current problem state and that some change is required. This is why there are stories of people going on extreme out of routine adventures, which result in something they might describe as a religious experience.
In my own experience, having done this a few times, I find that I have exchanged one set of anxieties for others I didn't realize were ever present. I am embarking on my 5th military deployment and my 8 or 9th multi-month family separation due to military. My marriage and bold with my kids are strong and being away is no longer a point of anxiety. We have simply figured out how to make it work well for us. I used to be anxious about learning professional skills and getting a better corporate job, but after having gone through that a few times and playing the corporate game I am confident in my capabilities don't really care to play this game. Now, I am anxious to be work as a corporate developer from the boredom, limited responsibilities, low stress, long periods of downtime, and so forth. I see the things my coworkers stress over and I remember being stressed about those things many years ago and the familiar uncertainty of work, but its just not a big deal. I suppose I should have been careful what I wished for.