I recently gave a workshop at EAG London 2024 on navigating mental health challenges in global catastrophic & existential risk fields. I discussed the most prevalent mental health challenges I encounter among those working on reducing x-risks, and how certain aspects of their work might contribute to these issues. We practiced exercises focused on shifting from avoidance-based to approach-based motivation, developing the ability to respond to difficulties with compassion, and building effective self-care plans. Below is the transcript of the workshop.
Today, I would like to talk with you about some of the ways in which working in the global catastrophic risk (x-risk) field might be psychologically challenging. The talk will be focused on x-risk, but I hope that everything I will be saying is relevant for roles beyond global catastrophic risks as well.
First, I will discuss some common mental health challenges. Then, given that this is a workshop, I will invite you to try out a few exercises that might be helpful for getting a better grasp of your mental health struggles, as well as how to address them. Most of all, I hope that we can begin a discussion about mental health in the global catastrophic risk community. I’m keen to hear if you have any ideas about what type of psychological support or mental health resources you or others in the community might find helpful, and I will share a short list of resources at the end of the workshop as well.
Before we begin, let’s do a very brief mindfulness practice, just to ground and gather ourselves a little bit to get ready for the workshop. If you're interested, please take a comfortable sitting position. Allow your posture to be straight, but relax and close your eyes gently, or simply lower your gaze softly.
Become aware of the sensations in the body as you sit, perhaps the sensations of pressure, warmth, touch, where your body makes contact with the seat, or where your feet make contact with the floor. When you’re ready, focus your attention on the sensations of breathing, perhaps on your nostrils, in your chest or in your belly, wherever you feel your breath most clearly. If focusing on the breath doesn't feel comfortable, feel free to focus your attention on any other part of the body and explore the sensations that might be arising there. If you choose to focus on the belly and the sensations of the breath, you might want to place one of your hands on your abdomen, and notice the changing pattern of breathing.
The gentle sense of expansion as you breathe in, and the gentle sense of deflation as you breathe out. Allow the breath to be natural, finding a comfortable soothing rhythm of breathing, that can support you throughout this workshop. Perhaps remind yourself that the breath can serve you as an anchor that you can return to whenever you need a break or whatever you need to ground yourself. When you're ready, you can thank yourself for this short practice, and open your eyes if they are closed.
I will begin by discussing three categories of mental health challenges that I encounter most commonly among people working on x-risks, and how some aspects of their work might be contributing to these challenges. But before I discuss them, I want to mention some of the positive aspects of this line of work that might have very beneficial effects for our mental health.
Many roles in the x-risk space involve grappling with profound ethical questions, contributing to efforts that might save millions of lives, preventing astronomical amounts of suffering from happening, or significantly improving the far future. That work can provide a deep sense of meaning and purpose in life. And I'm glad to say that as a therapist in effective altruism, I rarely encounter a feeling of being lost, a sense of no direction and purpose, which contributes to various psychological challenges, something I commonly worked on with non-EA clients.
I also think that working on existential risk is simply quite fascinating. The work involves exploring various research from multiple scientific domains. It's simply engaging, and stimulating intellectually, ensuring that the work stays rewarding and interesting. And it's not something to be taken for granted as many people struggle with feelings of boredom at work.
When we are trying to accomplish goals like reducing the probability of x-risk, that's typically not something we can accomplish on our own. Therefore, we often need to collaborate with like minded individuals who also are dedicating their professional life to something greater than themselves, which can give us a sense of belonging, community, camaraderie, and be a source of support when we need it.
So that being said, I want to now focus on the more tricky aspects of working on x-risks. The first category of mental health challenges I often come across relates to chronic stress, anxiety, and frequent feelings of being overwhelmed, as many roles in the space involve thinking about pretty grim scenarios that involve death, immense suffering, and all sorts of potentially catastrophic outcomes. That, of course, can be psychologically distressing in and of itself, especially because many people who end up working in this space are not motivated by simply wanting to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, but are sincerely motivated to reduce suffering and improve the world.
By definition, the stakes are high, but we are often pretty clueless about the right course of action to take. We often need to make decisions when facing tremendous uncertainty; the problems we are tackling are very complex, difficult, and require an understanding of multiple scientific domains. Sometimes, our choices might carry the risk of worsening the situation. Especially in rapidly developing fields like AI, some of us (depending on our timelines) might feel the pressure of time constraints, which adds to stress.
We can see how these factors can easily make one feel overwhelmed and can elevate our stress levels. And when that happens, we typically find it more and more difficult to fully relax and unwind. Some of us who've very deeply internalized the importance of focusing on reducing x-risk might struggle at times to find fulfillment and satisfaction from non-work related activities. This further contributes to a struggle to find satisfaction and enjoyment when trying to relax without a sense of guilt or unease. Prolonged exposure to these types of stressors might naturally lead to depression, burnout, or feelings of hopelessness eventually.
Additionally, things like the intractable nature of many problems in this space, lack of tangible feedback or unclear signs of progress might also pose additional difficulties for maintaining our motivation. In some cases, we might not see the fruits of our efforts within our lifetime. Sometimes we might also feel quite underappreciated and unrecognized; we might feel that some of our colleagues who are publishing on more mainstream topics are getting more status and recognition.
These aspects can understandably negatively affect our motivation, especially in the long term, as there is hardly any reward system. It also can be difficult to accept and cope given that we came to effective altruism to make a real difference, not just a hypothetical one. Perhaps many of you still remember the moment when you decided to dedicate your life to working on x-risk. I'm imagining that it might have been a very energizing and motivating experience. But perhaps as some of you delve deeper and realize how complex these issues are and how difficult it is to ensure that your efforts are actually making a difference, your feelings might have become a little bit more mixed, therefore affecting your mood or motivation at times.
Furthermore, I mentioned that working with others can definitely provide a sense of community; however, we do work with other human beings, some of whom will inevitably disappoint us. In this very small group of people who are trying to accomplish similar goals to ours, we may have strategic disagreements. This might leave us with a deeper sense of cluelessness, create some difficulties with obtaining funding, or simply deepen our sense that we are fighting against the world, mostly on our own.
Lastly, I want to discuss feelings of loneliness and interpersonal difficulties that might arise when working on x-risks.
People who work on x-risk might be seen by others as a doomer, someone who exaggerates the weight of the problems; understandably, that can make us feel deeply misunderstood, and can make it difficult to connect and build trust. As a result, we might struggle with finding friends or partners who really understand the importance of our work. Some of us might struggle with getting sufficient emotional support with work related difficulties, as some aspects of our job in this space might be confidential. Sometimes we might be afraid of burdening or distressing our loved ones, and we may want to keep some parts of our research just to ourselves. Especially in the last one and a half years, given that EA received a lot of criticism, especially around events involving FTX, or OpenAI. For some of us, that might lead to feeling a bit less comfortable being associated with the movement, feeling even more misunderstood, or contributing to feelings of disillusionment.
There is much more that we can say about this topic, but I want to make sure that we have time to discuss some potential practical steps we can take in order to improve our mental health. As we just did, it can be very important to examine external factors affecting the way we feel, our work environment, and the nature of our work. Another thing that might be helpful is to examine our unique individual makeup, the internal factors, and how those interact with the demands of our work.
For example, having a strong sense of responsibility, having a drive to make a positive impact, being detail oriented and ambitious; these are admirable qualities which are useful for working on x-risks. But when met with perfectionistic tendencies, they might sometimes contribute to overwork, neglecting self-care, and may ultimately lead to burnout. As we go through life, we collect all sorts of core beliefs, heuristics, and habitual ways of responding to stress and difficulties; those are very useful in many ways and completely natural. However, it can be helpful to reflect on whether our ingrained patterns might be interacting with our current work environment in a way that is making us more vulnerable to developing some of the mental health challenges that I discussed.
In this part of the workshop, I introduced a case study of Mike, a hypothetical x-risk researcher struggling with low mood, poor sleep, and overwhelming feelings at work. Audience members explored how Mike's self-comparison, negative self-talk, and unhelpful work habits contributed to his challenges. They then shared their own relevant experiences.
It’s difficult to give generic advice on mental health as different people will most likely benefit from very different things. I encourage you to experiment a lot with various mental health tools and strategies that you think may be helpful to improve your mental health; explore what really is helpful for you, even if the results might surprise you or if you don't know anyone else for whom a particular technique proved to be helpful.
With that in mind, I want us to explore three interventions which can be robustly beneficial for our mental health and can boost our psychological resilience, helping us across various mental health challenges.
The first is examining our day-to-day motivations. In the case of Mike, as we saw, his automatic thoughts revealed that he didn't feel safe when working most of the time. He seemed to be preoccupied with avoiding negative outcomes, like embarrassing himself, losing his job, and so on. This is typical for avoidant-based motivation, where we are driven by a desire to prevent a negative outcome from happening and move away from perceived threats. By definition, when we feel fear, we don't feel safe. Our threat system activates the fight / freeze response, narrowing our perspective and fixating us on trying to avoid danger. This reduces our ability to make wise, rational decisions, and it also prevents us from being playful, open minded, creative and steady. We need all of these qualities, not only to enjoy our work, but to actually do it well. It might seem paradoxical to aim for enjoyment, especially because working on x-risk may be distressing by nature. We are striving for a balance; we are not expecting to feel playful and safe all the time, and that's okay.
If you think that you might be driven by avoidance-based motivation at work, let's think about how we might want to address it. I want you to take a moment and think of a situation at work where anxiety or fear was present for you. You don't have to focus on anything particularly overwhelming, but maybe there is something that comes to mind.
If you've picked a situation that was anxiety provoking for you, notice; how are you framing the situation to yourself? What type of thoughts were on your mind? What were you preoccupied with? Perhaps there is someone who would like to share what they noticed with us.
With these types of thoughts, it’s easy to think, “no matter what I do, the outcome will be negative and I'm going to disappoint people I care about.” That can easily trigger our threat system and activate a fear response. One thing we can try to do in this situation is to simply reframe what we are focused on in a way that is more positive, and which engages a more approach-based motivation. Approach-based motivation, in contrast to avoidant-based motivation, is goal oriented, reward seeking and forward looking. It's associated with the reward system, and in some ways it’s the opposite to the threat system. Of course, sometimes, we simply will experience anxiety and fear in life, and that's completely natural. But it can be helpful to begin to notice whenever fear is showing up for you at work, as well as the types of goals associated with the fear.
You might want to reflect on your own at home; what are the most common work-related fears driving your behavior? You might prepare a list of reframings, and use it as these fears and anxiety-provoking thoughts show up. After using that list multiple times, you might notice that eventually, these new, alternative framings come more easily to mind.
What else can be helpful in order to build sustainable motivation? To me, approach-based motivation is well captured by enjoyment; when you enjoy your experience at work more often, you can prevent burnout and feel like you can do your job for a very long time. You might reflect on what word best captures what you want your sustainable motivation to be about.
Of course, maintaining sustainable motivation will look different for different people; it may be as simple as reflecting on how to make your work environment more enjoyable, perhaps by bringing something into the office that will make it more cozy and therefore more enjoyable to be in. Alternatively, some of us might want to surround ourselves with people who more naturally enjoy their working hours. Others might want to focus on building skills around boundary settings, and so on. I hope that you can continue to work with avoidance-based motivation on your own.
Let's move to the second intervention, developing self-compassion. To me, self-compassion is most of all about having the strength to tolerate difficulty and meeting our experience in a present and non-judgmental way, with kindness, wisdom, and genuine care. Sadly, receiving compassion from oneself can be very difficult for so many of us, and it might take a little bit of time until we work through our blocks and resistance to compassion.
Today, I want you to try out an exercise. The purpose of this exercise is to imagine meeting a work-related difficulty in the presence of a kind, compassionate, and accepting listener. This could be especially helpful for those who struggle with receiving self compassion.
The exercise is actually inspired by a series of practices developed by one of my clinical supervisors Dr. Tobin Bell, a researcher and compassion-focused therapist. As we know, mental imagery can affect our neural pathways and physiological responses, in the same way as real events. Mental images can affect our heart rate, muscle tension, hormone levels, and so on. By engaging multiple senses and cultivating a vivid, embodied experience of receiving kindness and care, we can potentially change our physiology, emotional states, and feelings of distress when faced with difficulty. This may be more effective than if we are only reframing our self-critical or catastrophic thoughts on a cognitive level.
My ideal compassionate supporter comes from a lovely movie about kindness; The Boy, the Horse, the Mall, and the Fox. If you don't know it, I can definitely recommend it, it's based on a book of the same title.
To begin, I want you to choose a difficult situation at work. It's best to choose something that is not too overwhelming, perhaps a mildly anxiety-provoking or frustrating situation. For example, you might focus on some aspect of your work that you find difficult at the moment, perhaps a strategic disagreement with your colleague, or not being able to find a collaborator. You might focus on your own doubts and fears about yourself in your professional life, like whether you're going to be able to give a good workshop.
Remember, if you feel overwhelmed or need a break at any point in the exercise, you can return to your anchor, or the soothing breathing that you established in the beginning of the workshop. Simply focus your attention on a single object to gather yourself; it could be the breath, or sensations in any particular part of the body.
When you're ready, take a comfortable seated position. Gently close your eyes or lower your gaze. Become aware of the sense of the body as a whole. Noticing a sense of groundedness and stability. Take a few slightly deeper breaths, slowing your breathing down with each out-breath.
The first step of this practice is to imagine a place where you would like to share the difficulty with your ideal supporter. This is a place where you feel safe and at ease; it could be a cozy room, an office, or a place in nature. Simply allow the space to be exactly as you need it to be. Allow the details of the space to form vividly in your mind's eye. If visualizing is challenging for you, focus on the feelings of comfort and security you associate with this imaginary place.
When you're ready, imagine your ideal supporter joining you in this scene with a heartfelt desire to help. They might appear as a person, a version of you, an animal creature, a cartoon character, or simply a compassionate presence. Let yourself be playful and open as you allow an image to emerge.
See if it's possible to sense your ideal supporter’s genuine care and warmth towards you. It might be through their tone of voice, facial expression, or body language. Imagine them embodying some key qualities of compassion, like kindness, strength, empathy, sensitivity, or wisdom.
When you're ready, begin sharing your difficulty with your compassionate supporter. Describe the details of what happened. What makes the situation difficult for you? How are you feeling? Notice that your ideal supporter is listening to you with genuine interest. Imagine them to simply be in a way that would make you want to open up to them and trust them.
Now, imagine your compassionate supporter demonstrating a deep understanding of your difficulty, approaching it with wisdom and maturity. Imagine your supporter recognizing that your struggles are a natural part of being a human and your unique conditioning. Remember that engaging with the suffering of others is an inherent aspect of your profession.
Allow yourself to be truly seen and heard. Explore the layers of what's painful for you, and allow the difficulties to be as big as they need to be. If it's difficult to accept your ideal supporter’s kindness, imagine how it would feel if you could accept it. Visualize your supporter extending their unconditional care even to the resistant parts of you.
Lastly, imagine discussing how to respond to the difficulty in a skillful way with your supporter. It might involve exploring ideas for self-care, preparation for a similar difficulty in the future, or simply allowing tricky feelings to be felt. And when doing so remember that your supporter truly respects your commitment to helping others and making the world a better place.
As we come to the end of this practice, reconnect with your soothing rhythm of breathing, or focus on your anchor once more. Imagine your supporter saying warm wishes towards you in a friendly tone of voice.
May you have wisdom and strength. May you live your life with ease. May you flourish.
When you're ready, slowly let the image of your supporter fade away, expressing gratitude towards them as they go. Open your eyes if they are closed, and thank yourself for this practice.
The final intervention I want to discuss with you today is how to build a skillful self-care plan and what makes it effective. Most of all, an effective self-care plan should reflect our non-blaming understanding of our unique psychological makeup and the circumstances we find ourselves in. It should also be realistic; sometimes we have great ideas that would indeed be helpful for our mental health. However, we simply cannot afford to spend all our time on self-care activities, and therefore a non-realistic plan won't be too helpful. The plan should also be flexible, allowing us to change the specific self-care activities according to our constantly changing needs, our health and environment.
Here are some of the factors that I think could be beneficial to consider when coming up with a self-care plan. The first one is about keeping track of early signs of trouble. Most of us can observe some warning signs whenever we are becoming overworked, especially if we had a history of burnout. We might be craving a particular type of food, we might have the tendency to isolate ourselves, or we become more irritable. In other words, I would encourage you to create a list of your early signs of trouble, and if you know them already, that's great. Then, you can simply just check in with yourself once a week, or once a month, depending on how stressful your life is at the moment. Then, you can simply pay attention whether you are recognizing any of these signs; as soon as you do, you can take appropriate action before the burnout or depression kicks in.
Another factor that can be helpful is paying attention to the ratio between activities which energize and nurture, compared to activities which deplete and drain our energy. Of course as adults, we have to do depleting activities. It can be totally fine if we have a period of time where most of the things we are doing are challenging and draining our energy. However, it is important to know your limits, and to develop a habit of thinking about your schedule in this way. As much as possible, we want to reduce the depleting activities, aiming for a nice balance between these two.
Consider experimenting and observing yourself for a week or two. You can literally write down all the activities that you were engaging in for a day and categorize them; which ones are energizing and nurturing? Which ones are depleting? Afterwards, you can honestly evaluate the ratio between them, and decide whether there is something you can change.
When creating a self-care plan, it’s important to include activities that can help you feel the way you want to feel more often. Especially when we are stressed out, anxious, burned out, or depressed, things won’t be feeling especially pleasurable; whatever we might want to do, we may be anticipating that it won't be enjoyable. However, it’s still quite important to do these pleasurable activities; we know that behavioral activation can be very helpful and effective with managing our low mood. You might think of activities that most of the time are pleasurable for you, and make sure that you engage in them, even when you don't feel like it.
Here we can also apply the concept of avoidance versus approach motivation as well. We might frame our self improvement goals in terms of, “I want to be less overwhelmed, I want to be less anxious,” and so on. Alternatively, we can reframe them as, “I want to smile and laugh at least a couple of times a week, I want to be more at ease.” These types of frameworks might also be helpful for giving us ideas; what activities do we want to make sure we engage in, in order to access the emotional state we want to be in?
Additionally, it can be quite helpful to plan activities that allow you to step out from a doing mode into a being mode. The main experiential difference between doing and being mode is how we relate to our thoughts, feelings, and the present moment. Doing mode is pretty handy; we need to be able to access it to get things done. Of course, we can also feel lots of excitement, and get into flow states in the doing mode. But as with the threat system, if we get stuck in the threat system that might have all sorts of consequences for our physiology and mental health.
Doing mode means being quite analytical, goal oriented, and future focused. In contrast, the being mode is a mode where we are simply being, as the name suggests. We're not striving for anything, we are not trying to achieve any goal, we are more naturally engaged in the present moment, open, accepting, curious, playful, and so on. You might want to think about the environments or activities that naturally can help you to switch into the being mode, and make sure that you spend some time there at least once in a while.
Lastly, with any intervention relating to mental health and in this case relating to self-care, think beforehand about the possible blocks. What are the parts of you that may be sabotaging your self-care plan? Most of us often know what we should do and what could be helpful, but actually doing it is, of course, a different story. We might think about the parts of ourselves that make it more tricky to use our self-care plans; the parts of us that are perfectionists, that are comparing ourselves to others, that are going on a guilt trip or simply being distracted. As a result, we are prepared to engage and negotiate with these parts of us as we deploy our self-care plan.
Here are some blog posts that you might find helpful; For example, Replacing Fear by Richard Ngo, might be helpful for addressing the avoidant-based motivation. The Replacing Guilt series by Nate Soares might be helpful for addressing guilt, which is a very common block to self-compassion among effective altruists.
Blog posts:
Here are a few workbooks and apps. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have requests for some specific mental health resources.
The first workbook, The Compassionate Mind, consists of compassionate mind training. It’s a series of lessons and techniques that can help you to develop the ability to be more self-compassionate. You can also use the Self Compassion app together with the workbook as it is designed.
The next one is The Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook. This one might be especially helpful for those struggling with over-control, loneliness, emotional inhibition, or perfectionism.
Next, the ACT Workbook for Perfectionism has some useful tools for dealing with perfectionism; ACT stands for Acceptance Commitment Therapy.
Don't Believe Everything You Feel is mostly CBT that can be helpful for reframing our catastrophic negative thoughts, helping us work with our automatic emotional responses that sometimes cause more trouble than we need.
Positive Affect Treatment for Depression and Anxiety can be especially helpful for finding activities that can serve as behavioral activation for those with depression, helping you find useful, pleasurable activities to deploy in moments of high stress. This is a workbook from a series called Treatments That Work by Oxford Press. There are over 100 different issues, most of which are CBT based. If you have, for example, an OCD problem and you are looking for a self help workbook, Treatments That Work is a safe series that you can turn to.
Lastly, The Motivational Interviewing Path to Personal Change is a workbook based on techniques from motivational interviewing that can help us to build motivation to make certain changes in our lives.
DBT coach is an app consisting of various DBT-based techniques. It might be especially useful for working with intense emotions, especially the section Managing Distress Tolerance. If you feel overwhelmed or if you’re struggling with intense anxiety, you might pull out this app and then you will have some suggestions about what to do in that moment when you feel like emotions are taking hold of you.
Waking Up is a meditation app. Some of you might have heard of it. There are many good meditation apps, I like this one because it combines meditations and various mini-lecture series and conversations with meditation teachers. In particular I would recommend the series on CBT, time management, and procrastination.
Executive summary: Working in global catastrophic risk fields can pose unique mental health challenges, but there are strategies and exercises that can help build psychological resilience and improve wellbeing.
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