I'm on the short side. But I don't think being short is a disadvantage. If a food crisis hits, I could last longer on the same amount of food. If war breaks out, my odds of getting shot go down, even if only slightly. And back in college I was in a dance club, where I learned that the shorter you are, the better you move. Tall people have more potential to look cool, but they're also more likely to flail. Tall people in particular seemed to have trouble controlling the ends of their arms and legs.
Of course, all of that was a joke. If I could choose my height, I'd choose to be tall. After a performance, the one who got asked for their number was never the one who danced best but the one who was tallest. What I wanted to say is that a trait that looks good is, in some ways, a weakness, and a trait that looks bad is, in some ways, a strength. Every design has trade-offs.
These days people seem to rank MBTI traits as better or worse, too. For example, T gives off the vibe of a robotic engineering student, while F is emotional and human, so F is supposedly superior. There's even the expression "T-bastard." Likewise, the planful J is seen as more competent than the spontaneous P, so there's a sense that J is superior to P. That's why P's say they want to be J's. They're joking, of course. Let's not get too caught up in MBTI.
What I want to talk about here is the ability to plan that's said to characterize J's. If you're reading this, you're probably a J, because this kind of writing seems like something J's would enjoy. The better you are at planning, the more likely modern society is to see you as a high performer. And honestly, that's true. Building strategies and making plans is a powerful skill. I read somewhere that most of the world's top CEOs are J's by MBTI.
But as I said, everything has a trade-off. There's something I paid in exchange for the ability to plan. It's anxiety. Planning is the work of designing the future. Curiously, the brain circuitry for thinking about the future is said to resemble the circuitry for anxiety and worry.1 This may even be why mental illness is more common among the highly educated.
Just as athletes have to watch out for all kinds of physical aftereffects, knowledge workers have to look after their mental health. This is especially true the more educated you are and the more mentally complicated your work is. Aerobic exercise and meditation are the standard picks for mental health. Since the ability to plan is the ability to think about the future, meditation, which brings your awareness back to the present, should be especially effective.
I've meditated on and off since 2018. In 2018, mindfulness meditation was trending on the narrative that it reduces brain fatigue. I tried Headspace and Calm and a few other things back then. But I didn't see any reduction in brain fatigue.
Only recently, five years later, have I understood what meditation does. Meditation doesn't so much reduce brain fatigue as build the habit of noticing the present. At least, that was its effect for me. It lets me tell when I'm overdoing it and check in on my body, notice my emotions more clearly, and, when thoughts about the future make me worried and anxious, come back to the present and feel reassured.
A habit I've recently managed to adopt is meditating while lying down. It's a really good habit. If you meditate lying down, you might fall asleep. Whether I meditate or fall asleep, I come out ahead either way. You could call it a game I can't lose.
I've talked about this through MBTI, but it also connects to the downside of high conscientiousness in the Big Five.
Footnotes
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If you want to learn more about this, see the book 우울할 땐 뇌과학 (Neuroscience for When You're Depressed). Anxiety in Inside Out 2 may have been designed on this basis, too. ↩