TLDR: Be gracious to yourself. Enough can be enough even when it isn’t everything.
A note on pseudo-anonymity: I’m posting this without my name but with identifying info (read on). I don’t feel a need to hide from the community, and I expect it will make a difference to some readers that I’m a senior member of staff at a famous EA org. If you want to know who I am (and update accordingly or contact me), you can easily find out. But because not everyone is as open-minded as you are, and sometimes we need to work with people very different from ourselves to achieve our goals, I want to avoid this being what shows up in searches of my name in future.
Last year I suffered severe and chronic anxiety for the first time in my life, which eventually led to a deep depression. I understand it to have been caused primarily by work-related stress. (FWIW, I was diagnosed with an adjustment disorder.) I found the Anxiety Trap framework helpful for understanding, recovering from and (so far) preventing a repeat of my experience.
I was introduced to the concept by Randy Nesse and Rob Wiblin on the 80k podcast, but this is not intended to be a faithful rendering of that conversation or the scientific consensus (lol), rather my interpretation and implementation of what I heard. Neither Randy nor Rob used the expression anxiety trap. (It should go without saying none of this is legal advice.)
I’m also not suggesting there’s a silver bullet hiding here in plain sight, or a one-stop shop or a one-size-fits-all fix. There are, regrettably, many sources and manifestations of debilitating stress. I’ve experimented with making many changes in a short space of time, and because I can’t yet see inside the matrix, I can’t tease apart the effects of a new approach to planning my work week from the effects of swimming in the river from the effects of finding new friends and so on. My number one recommendation to anyone caught in the Trap reflects this: experiment. There is no playbook, and you can’t discover what will work best for you from first principles or from your desk. Golf stopped scratching my itch, but salsa succeeded, which is not what I or anyone else who knows me would have predicted.
All that said, here’s what I think has worked for me.
Trap
The Anxiety Trap lies in the gap between:
- Having impossible goals, and
- Believing it’s unacceptable to not meet those goals
There’s not much mystery about why effective altruists are prone to falling through the gap into the Trap (although of course this isn’t really one of the ways we’re unusual: our wonderful world is set full of these traps and folks of all stripes are stuck in them). At a high level, our goals are kinda insane. Utopia, anyone? Merely eradicating well-understood diseases is devilishly difficult. And we see clearly the costs of failure, which will mostly be borne not by us but by countless others: our willingness to stare at that, to take it seriously, and to try to take concerted action, are among the things I think do make us somewhat unusual.
When I was struggling, I asked a lot of people who work under pressure and experience stress, how do you cope? Many of them told me that when push comes to shove, they know selling a bit more paint at a slightly higher price doesn’t matter. But if you do in fact believe what you’re doing matters in some deep sense, then lol nothing matters isn’t available to you as a recourse.
So, what can we do about it?
- Define and prioritize delivering on realistic goals
- Accept that success looks like leaving many valuable goals unmet
Before we proceed, let’s be clear: this is not presented as a counterpoint to or an attempt to temper ambitious goals. It’s the best way I found so far to make ambitious goals achievable.
Limits
Prioritization and planning are foundational productivity tools the world over. But they’re also tools for achieving sustainability, if you let them. They work by turning recognition of our limits into a permission structure for respecting them, a framework for being able to tell and to trust when enough is enough, when it’s time to stop, switch off and sleep sweetly. They help create a sense of control, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of sufficiency, even while so many tasks are left undone and so many impactful opportunities are - necessarily - left untaken.
This framework happens to bring productivity and sustainability under one umbrella, but it doesn’t imply that productivity is the Real Goal, or that sustainability is strictly instrumental. It’s consistent with our wellbeing being worthwhile independent of our impact, and there are - according to me - perfectly valid reasons to prioritize it that do not cash out in the wellbeing of others (or in the aggregate). We are multi-faceted, and we are, whether we like it or not, the product of processes which did not produce perfectly impartial utility maximizing machines. We can make some progress in that direction. We can be proud of the progress we’ve made. But there’s no escaping the need to recognize and respect the limits of the machinery we’re working within, and no shame in it either.
Recognize your limits. We all have them.
Time, attention, energy, bandwidth, and so on. And we’re all different. I have less stamina than many of my colleagues but more than some others. If you can figure out your limits, you can stay within them (and if you can figure out where they come from, you can extend them). If you’re someone whose cup isn’t filled up by long hours spent playing whack-a-slack, then you have to make time for finding joy and emotional fulfilment elsewhere.
This is not about number of hours worked in the narrow sense. (My wise colleague Jessica has a neat taxonomy of burnout vs exhaustion, which runs more directly through sheer number of hours.) But it does need to cash out into your capacity to be productive pursuing your goals. Once you know your capacity budget, you can make reasonable and responsible decisions about which goals to spend it on.
Make tradeoffs explicit. You and people around you should be clear about what is and - crucially - what is not going to get done.
This one should be obvious: recognizing the necessity of regrettable tradeoffs is a core part of why we’re here; it’s right there in our EA principles. And yet it’s often harder to apply to ourselves and the question of how much of ourselves to give today than it is to apply it to the question of vitamin A or bed nets. The bind is the same, though: the limits on our capacity mean we have to make hard choices about what good to leave undone.
Prioritizing doesn’t just mean making a ranked list of everything it would be good to do and working your way down it. It means drawing a line and focusing ruthlessly on what’s above it. (And substituting out things that started above the line when new top priorities pop up.)
Danger lurks under the implicit goal of do as much as you can. We are mostly not tackling snakes and ladders problems, racing to 100 and then we’re done. Functionally what we’re often trying to do is more like the pursuit of infinity: however much we do today, this week, this month, there will still be an indistinguishably large amount left to do in pursuit of our ultimate goals. Hacking away at an infinite list, one task after another, still leaves an infinitely long list, so our relationship to what’s left undone isn’t going to be much changed by doing just one more thing, despite the fact that the next thing is usually going to be a good thing to have done in isolation. Whether we do one thing or 10 things, the challenge is still making peace with all the good things undone.
The only way to turn an infinite list from impossible to possible is to make it finite, through ruthless prioritization. Defining success as achieving the top priorities within your capacity, rather than achieving as much as possible, makes it easier to recognize that success looks like not doing lots of things it would have been good to do in the ideal world we don’t live in.
Respect your limits. Sometimes you gotta say no, to others and to yourself.
There will no doubt be times when it’s appropriate to go beyond your long-term sustainable limit. But it’s important to be intentional about when those times are, how far you go, and how often. It’s easy to assume we’ll know when we’re done, either because our bodies will tell us or enough will be accomplished. But in the moment, amid stress and competing demands, it’s hard to notice that, all things considered, not doing one more thing might be better than doing it.
One way I’ve tried to silence the siren call of Just One More Thing is making my daily default stopping at a certain time, rather than having to decide afresh each evening, and scheduling something which requires me to not be working. Monday, yoga, Tuesday, salsa, Wednesday, touch rugby. None of them are too embarrassing to skip at short notice, but they force me to make an intentional decision about whether in today’s circumstances staying at my desk beats cancelling. Sometimes the answer’s yes and sometimes it’s no, and sometimes I get it wrong, but I regularly notice that I make a different decision than I would have without the prompt.
Again, this is not about keeping my number of hours worked to a quota, but creating a structure for honouring the pre-commitment a better, calmer, more considered version of me made to respect my limits.
Limits and prioritization are conventional management advice, but it’s not enough, from a sustainability perspective, to go through the motions. Believing enough is enough in our best, calmest and most considered moments is a good start, but ultimately we need to feel it all the way down in our lizard brain.
Acceptance
I lose sight of my limits easily, despite seeing them so clearly some of the time. Often I struggle to accept them. I lie awake agonizing about the work half done, despite having seemingly believed a couple hours ago that enough was enough. But I’ve been practicing, and I think it’s been working.
I mostly don’t practice at work, in the sense of intentionally learning and honing the skills of recognizing and respecting my limits. Work is where I put them into practice. Instead, I’ve been doing things I enjoy, which provide social support and validation from people whose relationship with me doesn’t begin or end with my work or its impact. And things which, despite there being no stakes, put me in a position where I’m not yet as proficient as I could be, and would like to be. Yoga, salsa, touch rugby. And then I try to notice - and there are a lot of opportunities - every time some part of me says, you should be better at this! Why aren’t you better at this?!
Sometimes I fail to notice, and only catch myself minutes or more into a spiral of self-criticism, ranting about how if the 74-year-old two mats along can get his leg that side of his shoulder, there’s really no excuse for my 34-year-old limbs to be so useless. But more and more often, when I catch this, I think to myself, why would you be able to do this, let alone do it immediately and impressively? It’s hard, and you’ve never done it before. On a good day, it’s obvious to me that the only thing to put in the gap between how flexible it’s possible to be and how flexible I am is amusement, because it’s so evidently ridiculous to expect myself to be outstanding at everything, or frankly anything, but especially hard things I’ve never done before. And then my man two mats along and everyone else in the shala is looking over wondering why is that lanky guy laughing?
The mantra I’ve made for myself, in collaboration with my many coaches, is Grace and Space:
- Grace, to react without judgement, and
Space, to pause, breathe, centre, and smile, within seven seconds or less
I’m looking at it now, written in big bold letters on the whiteboard behind my monitor (just above “SLACK IS NOT A BREAK”). It helps to be reminded regularly, but there’s no substitute for practice. And increasingly often, when a stressor slides across my screen, I succeed, noticing the flash of fear, and getting quickly to accepting that this might just be one of those problems I cannot solve immediately or alone. And so it goes.
Doing hard things is hard, as one of my catchphrases goes. Doing things you care about means you care more. Doing things with high stakes for others raises the stakes for yourself. Those sentences and the dynamics they describe seem trivially true at first glance, but their sentiment is the source of high expectations and heavy pressure.
I already knew this coming in. I understood myself to be trading an easy life for an opportunity to improve the lives of others, and the currency of that transaction is cortisol. Could I have predicted that an existential crisis would befall EA and CEA (where I’m Chief of Staff) six months after I arrived? Of course not. But while that turned the dial up to Hard Mode, I expect the underlying dynamics would have been similar regardless. I see that every day in people dedicated to demanding work no one would characterize as crisis response. We are, after all, all always in triage.
If your own wellbeing isn’t one of your top priorities today and tomorrow, you’re very likely doing it wrong.
You are not alone in this. Our community is built around our collective attempt to solve the world’s most pressing problems. One of the ways it can do that is helping us solve our personal problems, to make our extraordinary efforts sustainable. Together, we can continue to make well-calibrated cortisol sacrifices at the altar of impact, but none of us should be martyrs. In most conceivable cases, our potential future impact is too great to gamble away in reckless pursuit of what happens to be right in front of us right now. We should be trying to build things that last, and outlast us, which will require us to stick around long enough to try and fail and learn and grow and try again.
So we can and should talk about the price we’re paying, and how we can help each other drive those costs down. I hope posts like these contribute to conversations like those.
Thank you to Toby and the Forum team for prompting me to post this with Draft Amnesty Week, and to my many coaches who’ve guided me so graciously along the way. Here are some more recommendations from more reputable sources, which I found informative and inspiring:
I think it takes a lot of courage to post this on the forum—courage that has the potential to have an impact how EAs approach (their) mental health and fully account for the consequences of pushing past personal boundaries in the name of impact. The Anxiety Trap you describe feels very familiar, and your reflections resonate with me. I’d love to add a few thoughts.
Space, Grace, and the Weight of Responsibility
I appreciate your framing of space and grace—qualities that overwork and self-criticism tend to erode, yet paradoxically, they are essential for sustained impact. When anxiety takes hold, perception narrows and hence does our view and our take on the world. The world becomes a harsh list of unmet goals, and the mind latches onto the flawed logic that working harder is the only way to balance the equation. But, as you describe so well, the equation doesn’t balance—at least, not like that. The gap between the immensity of suffering and the belief that we must do more is a dangerous place to stand. Many EAs fall into it, subconsciously assuming responsibility for suffering, as if by sheer force of will, they alone can stop it. The world has failed to exert control over its injustices—so the mind convinces itself that we must. A great way to resolve cognitive dissonance, but it has a price that takes it toll.
The Unspoken Role of Anger
I appreciate your call grace towards oneself, but I wonder what if sometimes we have a little too much of non-judgement towards the world. We are often far harsher on ourselves than on the world. Almost as an act of respect, we refuse to blame external forces, instead internalizing the weight of every injustice we fail to prevent. And yet, anger at injustice can be a protective force, keeping us from expecting the impossible from ourselves. Too often, though, because anger doesn’t fit our self-image as rational, nonjudgmental optimizers, it has nowhere to go—except inward.
The mind, unable to direct this frustration at an amorphous, chaotic world, turns it against the self. If I just worked harder, if I just sacrificed more, if I just did one more thing… And yet, as you so clearly describe, this is the very mechanism of the Anxiety Trap. The illusion of control. The belief that relentless striving will somehow fix what is unfixable.
The Cost of the Trap
But trying to close the gap through sheer effort doesn’t just lead to exhaustion—it actively harms our ability to do good. The body stings with the weight of all the things left undone. The guilt of knowing that every hour we take for ourselves is an hour that could have helped someone else. But as you emphasize, sustainability is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. Burning out does not serve the world. Pushing through anxiety at all costs does not maximize impact; it shrinks it.
Your post illustrates why enough must be enough, even when the work is infinite. Not because the work isn’t important, but because it is. The very people who are most dedicated to fixing the world are often the ones most at risk of being consumed by it.
Letting Go Without Losing Sight
So how do we hold onto our ambition without being consumed by it? Your post offers an answer: we prioritize. We make trade-offs explicit. We set boundaries not to limit our impact, but to protect it.
But I think there’s something deeper, too. We allow space for joy and lightness, not just as self-care, but as strategic necessity. Creativity, resilience, and long-term motivation come from a place of psychological safety. We must recognize that guilt, exhaustion, and self-sacrifice are not badges of honor—they are warning signs.
A Final Thought
The world does not operate by the logic of eliminating suffering as efficiently as possible. That misalignment can be maddening. But rather than letting that frustration paralyze us—or worse, turn inward—we must accept the limits of what one person can do. Not with resignation, but with resolve. We must recognize that our capacity to create change depends on our ability to sustain ourselves.