I'm on the shorter side. But I don't think being short is a disadvantage. If a food crisis hits, I'll last longer on the same rations. If war breaks out, my odds of catching a bullet drop, if only slightly. And back in college I was in a dance club. What I realized while I was in it was that the shorter you are, the better you move. The taller you are, the higher your potential to look impressive — but also the higher your odds of flailing around. Especially the taller you get, the harder it is to control the ends of your arms and legs.
Of course, all of that was a joke. If I could choose my height, I'd want to be tall. Because after a performance, the person who actually got someone's number wasn't the one who danced well — it was the tall one. 🤣 What I wanted to say is that a trait that looks good is, in some respect, a weakness, and a trait that looks bad is, in some respect, a strength. Every design comes with trade-offs.
These days people seem to rank MBTI traits as better or worse, too. For example, T feels like a robotic engineering major while F is emotional and human, so F is superior. There's even a slang term for a T who lacks tact. And the planner, J, is a better worker than the spontaneous P. Hence the perception that J beats P. So the Ps say they want to become Js. It's a joke, of course. Don't get too deep into MBTI.
What I want to talk about today is the ability to plan, said to be a J trait. I'd guess plenty of you reading this letter lean J. Probably a lot of INxJs. The better you are at making plans, the more likely you are to be seen as a high performer in modern society. And honestly, that's true. Devising strategy and building plans is a powerful ability.
But here's the thing. As I said, everything has a trade-off. There's a price you paid in exchange for the ability to plan. That price is 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. (If you want to dig into this, take a look at the book The Upward Spiral. Anxiety in Inside Out 2 may well have been designed on this basis.) Perhaps this is part of why mental illness rates run higher among the highly educated.
Just as athletes have to watch out for all sorts of physical after-effects, knowledge workers have to take care of their mental health. Especially the more educated you are and the more cognitively demanding your work. The go-to practices for mental health are aerobic exercise and meditation. And since planning is the ability to think about the future, meditation — which brings your awareness back to the present — is likely to be especially effective.
I've meditated on and off since 2018. Back in 2018, mindfulness meditation was having a moment under the narrative that it reduces mental fatigue. I tried Headspace and Calm and various other things. But I never saw the mental fatigue actually go down.
It took five more years — only recently — for me to understand what meditation does. Meditation doesn't so much reduce mental fatigue as build the habit of noticing the present. At least that's what it did for me. It lets me register the state of my body when I'm pushing too hard, notice my emotions more clearly, and come back to the present and settle down when thoughts about the future turn into worry and anxiety.
A habit I've successfully adopted lately is meditating while lying down. This one is genuinely great. If you meditate lying down, you might fall asleep. Whether I meditate or fall asleep, either way I come out ahead. You could call it playing a game you can't lose.
This thread also connects to the downsides of high conscientiousness in the Big Five.