Things I worry about

I noticed that there is often a huge discrepancy between the things I worry about and the things that actually pose a problem for me. As an example, I could not sleep last nights since I was worried about where to park my car on vacation - do I have to get up at 6 to move the car before it gets towed, will it fit in a certain garage, if it doesn’t which car parking is available, and how much do I have to pay to leave it there for a few days? Those where the things that kept me up.

Things that are important

Also, I knew that I had a deadline for an important stipend I wanted to apply for the next day. I spent most of the next days morning worrying about the car (it fit in the garage, so problem solved), and then at the end of the day came back to the application for the stipend - just to find out that its deadline was already at midday, meaning I missed it, and will in the best case have to wait for half a year to apply again.

So, in the grand scheme of things, I worried extensively about a much smaller, but more imminent problem (the car), while having the much broader task also just broadly (the stipend application) in mind. The obvious takeaway from this is that one should try to look past the perceived imminance and induced worry about a problem, and try to moderate it with its overall importance. This would have led me to spend more time on thinking about the stipend, which had less perceived imminance, but a much larger importance/impact.

Putting things into perspective

This also requires a better general judgement of importance and imminency. I’d argue that an important factor here is that the novelty of a problem greatly influences its perceived importance - the new problem of the car had to be solved now, while the stipend problem was known to me for quite a while.

But when

Therefore, my takeaway is to keep track of and re-inspect the large-scale goals you have, and check occasionally if your previous evaluation was correct and thorough (mine wasn’t). This also coincides with one of the (many) lessons I took from HPMOR (https://www.hpmor.com/), which was to reinspect decisions you have made from time to time, since circumstances or facts you once assumed change quite frequently, and often influence the decision you once made. At least for me, more often than not, I could correct a decision I made, which I would otherwise just have taken for granted by default. As a trigger for this inspection, I’d think that a regular once-a-month interval could be used, or just whenever a small problem has come up you are currently worrying about. To use the occurence of a small problem as occasion could also help with putting the event into perspective, and maybe worrying less about it- but as a drawback, you could miss important deadlines since its occurence is dictated by chance. Maybe a combination of both the regular and chance approach works best- you only have to stick to it.