Anxiety, the gap between reality and expectations

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Anxiety is the difference between reality and expectations. It is the pain, while stress is the suffering. The pain of anxiety is designed for threatening circumstance drawing your attention for a problem requiring urgent attention. This narrows your perspective allowing you to focus on a resolution. However, like many autonomous systems anxiety can be over triggered, and handled poorly without deliberate action.

Anxiety

Reality

  1. Psychiatrist calls this the difference between the desire to control, and the fact it’s uncontrollable.

Expectations

Your expectation is what you want to achieve (aka control). You assumed you had control over this, but being in control is a simplification (though a very useful one). In an extreme example, regardless of what you want to control, you may be hit by a bolt of lightning, and you’ll lose the ability to control it.

Instead of desire to control, aspire to have the maximum influence over the outcome. A few models can be applied to help.

Expectations is often achieving desired fixed position.

  1. First, broaden the desired end state - from Getting to Yes, convert your position into a desired outcome (What do you really need to solve).
  2. Second, focus on your circle of influence - Focus on your circle of influence not circle of concern (What will I do to improve the situation)
  • By changing your desired reality from “I need X to happen” to “I will influence to get closer to my desired outcome for X”, you are focused on your true need, and converting to action. This reduces Anxiety as the desired reality is now equal to your expectations, and you can focus on influencing

Paradoxically, by focusing on your circle of influence, you increase your influence, making you more effective in achieving the desired outcome.

Naively, you can conclude someone gave up and is shirking responsibility by ‘settling’ for influence not control. However, assuming you are exerting your maximum influence, this is the closest you can get to achieving your desired outcome, being upset because you can’t achieve the impossible, doesn’t help anyone.

Now, to be responsible, you need to communicate when there is a change in outcome, and apply WIN/WIN, Seek First to Understand, Synergy and Getting To Yes to adjust and keep everyone informed.

Closing the gap

So increasing your perspective. When it comes to the remodel stress, expand. Sure, right now there is pain, but look how small it is in the bigger picture, on the expected value through everything else is still very high, and that’s likely the optimum point.

A way to automatically increase perspective is humor, it breaks us out of our reverie, and lets us laugh (TBD, positive vs negative stress). A flip side of this is, if you notice you’re not laughing, nor enjoying other parts of life, you need to expand your perspective.

Interesting, I picked up a mantra, “This too shall pass”, with the idea of smoothing out the highs and the lows, the Psychiatrist observed this is the Buddhist impermanence idea, which BTW is not apathy. So this is helpful as it reducing suffering, which is attachment, to cut attachment, the good isn’t as valuable, and the bad isn’t as concerning. Yup, I wonder if switching my mantra from this too shall pass to more, how does this look in a larger time frame?

Perspective

Perspective can be imagined in two dimensions - X=time and Y=Co(t).

Co(t) The amount of things being considered. This can be from a single insult to your life. The units on this are unclear, for now, lets normalize from 0 to all the things you can be considering across all aspects of your life.

SIDEBAR: Mu(t) is a concept I explored long ago Measuring in the moment happiness (InMoHap). It’s not the perfect measure, but might be more useful than Co. for this convo.

So Co(t) is how much we are considering at time.

Therefore, perspective is the area of the graph being considered. This is likely a dominant factor in Mu(t)

  1. Because anxiety narrows your perspective, you need to actively fight against this, both proactively, and in the moment when it strikes.

  2. So the key is to maximize the area, and it gets small when you stop thinking of the past, and the future, also actively pruning the breadth of your thinking.

  3. Proactively reminder to look at a larger time frame.

Narrows perspective to resolve immediate danger

Anxiety, being pain, reduces the perspective, and this leads to the suffering of stress

  1. Detection, as it’s a sub concious process that happens
  2. Remind ourselves of the larger time dimension and then many aspects of our lives.

Caring vs Mattering

When something happens, we have an unconscious emotional response. The intensity of this response is a subjective experience, how much we care. (Sometimes through conditioning, we have emotional triggers which make us care highly and become hypersensitive to the stimulus)

The objective analog to caring is how much it matters. To maintain consistency your brain automatically assumes how much something matters is the same as how much you care. For example:

Imagine you are parking, and someone takes your spot. You have an intense emotional reaction, you care deeply, and react like this matters deeply. However, from an objective standpoint, the total cost is likely low minutes of impact.

Even though mattering is objective, it needs to be “measured” in a system, which (like perspective) has a time dimension, and an amount of other things to take into account. For example:

For example, imagine your kid doesn’t want to go to bed on time, and they push back to you saying go to bed with no, it doesn’t matter. In the span of 4 hours, it matters as it damages the relationship and frustrates the relationship. In the span of 20 years, it’s irrelevant. In the context of all the bond a parent and child have, it’s also irrelevant. (There’s perhaps a subtlety here for discipline and habit building)

Caring and mattering for others

Speaking of the mind assuming caring and mattering are equivalent, think about a time someone you really trust and respect (spouses are a great example) tells you the thing that’s causing you a deep emotional response doesn’t matter. This usually makes it much worse not better.

The gentle act of helping others assess how much things matter

  1. Acknowledge how they’re feeling. It’s very real.
  2. Assume their assessment is correct, and seek to understand it.
  3. Ask permission to discuss understanding how and why they care so much.
  4. Listen to why they are feeling strongly, it’s essential you understand (Habit 5 - Seek First to understand)

Depending on the depth of the relationship and the reaction so far, it might be a good time to stop, or a good time to continue. If you continue

  1. Ask permission to ask questions to clarify how much it matters.
  2. Use the non threatening 3 W’s (but not Why/How).
    1. When - What time range
    2. Who - Who will be most impacted
    3. Where - What parts of “all properties” will be affected.

Detection

  • Poor sleep
  • Lack of humor
  • Rumination in the idle loop

Antidotes

  • Change Perspective
  • Caring vs Mattering

Quotes

  • Stress is the difference between expectations and reality
  • Laws of physics always win.
  • Anxiety is practicing failure in advance.
  • Worry is not preparation, nor does it make you better.
  • Anxiety is “keeping a problem in the foreground”. This sucks up your CPU, and means you can’t spin down your CPU.
  • Instead the answer is commit to disk all open decisions, and then kick it out of the foreground till ready (this is the GTD solution).

Anxiety Protocol from What I learned so Far

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Personal Examples