Spencer Greenberg on staying sane while trying to save the world

People today think they’re in this unprecedented era of uncertainty. But I also think back and I think, you know what, my grandfather thought Nazis were going to take over the entire world.

In the early ’60s, people thought the world was going to be destroyed by nuclear weapons, and they were deeply afraid of that. Our ancient ancestors, like 20,000 years ago: imagine there was some tribe nearby, and one day could just show up and kill you and everyone you love and everyone you’ve ever cared about, and your entire world will cease to exist.

This is not a unique thing. Humans in history have dealt with this. They found different ways to deal with it, and some of those ways have been very functional, where they’ve been able to act in the face of incredible adversity.

— Spencer Greenberg

If you genuinely believe that humanity could be wiped out by AI or a pandemic, what is the appropriate amount of fear to feel?

“As much as possible” can seem like the only reasonable answer. If the world is on fire, surely feeling calm just means you haven’t internalised the situation. When you’re trying to prevent human extinction or end factory farming, taking a weekend off can feel morally indefensible.

But fear is an alarm designed to provoke short bursts of drastic action, not a state humans can productively inhabit for months or years. Guilt turns out not to be such a great engine for productivity, either. So what is the best way to sustain motivation to work on the world’s most pressing problems in the long term?

Host Luisa Rodriguez and guest Spencer Greenburg tackle this question from many angles — talking to therapists, running a survey of people working on existential risks, and pulling relevant lessons from Spencer’s new book, The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life. Drawing on all these sources, they put together a plan for how to make an impact without grinding yourself to a pulp.

This episode was recorded on June 12 and 15, 2026.

Our production team includes:

Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Ollie Bignell, Andrés Escobar, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
Music: CORBIT

The interview in a nutshell

Spencer Greenberg — founder of ClearerThinking.org and coauthor of The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit for Improving Your Life (released today!) — talks with Luisa Rodriguez about the psychological toll of working on existential risk, AI safety, factory farming, and other high-stakes problems.

Drawing on a recent survey his team ran, he argues that grinding yourself down is self-defeating even on its own terms, and that the way out runs through understanding your actual psychology rather than forcing an idealised one. He and Luisa discuss practical, evidence-based tools from his new book, The 12 Levers that can help with the most common challenges.

The distress is widespread

In Spencer’s recent survey of approximately 80 people working on existential risk, AI safety, animal welfare, and other high-impact causes:

Most respondents experienced psychological challenges — the median person reported six different problems.
More than half (52%) said these challenges at least moderately hurt their effectiveness, while 45% had considered cutting back or leaving.
The most common problems were:
- Difficulty switching off from work: 68%
- Imposter syndrome: 60%
- Burnout: 59%
- Guilt: 56%
- Anxiety or worry: 54%
Less common — though still significant — were loneliness or isolation (32%), hopelessness or depression (29%), interpersonal difficulties (28%), and fear of death (22%).
Few appeared to be experiencing clinical anxiety or depressive disorders. The more typical problem was chronic strain: people remained functional, but struggled to rest, sustain motivation, and maintain boundaries.

Constant fear and vigilance don’t make you safer or more effective

Existential risks may genuinely be enormous, and working on these issues can flip the brain into a permanent low-grade emergency state — including hypervigilance, doomscrolling, and an inability to stop.

Spencer argues that the appropriate response is not to remain permanently hypervigilant. Fear prepares us for short bursts of urgent action, not years of effective work. Staying in that state continuously harms health, judgement, rest, and ultimately performance.

Doomscrolling is a particularly unhelpful form of vigilance:

Most updates do not reveal a fundamentally new danger; they simply reactivate fear about something the reader already knew.
Constantly checking can teach the brain that staying safe requires permanent monitoring, which reinforces rather than resolves the anxiety.

To address unhealthy news monitoring specifically, Spencer recommends:

Selecting a few trusted information sources and checking them deliberately. A reliable monitoring system gives you permission to switch off without fearing you will miss something essential.
Replace scrolling with “glad you did it” activities that meet the same need — which might be rest, connection, or distraction — but leave you feeling restored rather than depleted.

Guilt can motivate people, but “clean fuel” is more sustainable

Like an athlete, someone trying to maximise their long-term contribution needs genuine recovery. Working at maximum intensity continuously is how you lose the race, not win it. Grinding flat-out is a naive model of maximising output, as failing to accept your limitations actively undercuts the goals you care about.

Spencer recommends:

Distinguish between “dirty fuel” and “clean fuel.”
- High achievers often rely on “dirty fuel” (beating themselves up, guilt, fear of judgment). While effective in the short term, it carries massive psychological costs and is ultimately unsustainable.
- “Clean fuel” leverages curiosity, social collaboration, excitement, and positive rewards.
Break boom-and-bust cycles. Swapping between frantic sprinting and deep burnout is an ineffective strategy. The “magic dial” is a useful thought experiment: if you could choose how much fear or guilt to feel, would you leave it at its current level, reduce it to zero, or choose something in between? Most people do not actually endorse either constant distress or complete indifference.
Acknowledge your human limitations. Humans have dozens of evolutionary drives (such as energy conservation and social acceptance) operating alongside rational principles. Denying human limits is counterproductive; seeing yourself accurately allows for incremental, realistic self-improvement.
Explore your true motives. The desire to work harder may not come purely from altruism: status, approval, fear of disappointing people, or wanting to feel special can masquerade as concern about impact. Understanding these motives makes it easier to choose healthier strategies.
Tune the “productivity equation.” Spencer’s productivity equation is roughly time × efficiency × importance. Adding hours is often the crudest way to increase output — and can reduce efficiency enough to backfire. Remind yourself to think about alternatives to “more hours” to achieve your goals.
Don’t wait for a crisis.
- Declining motivation, persistent stress, or sleep problems are reasons to intervene early, not inconveniences to tolerate until everything collapses.
- Among survey respondents who tried them, therapy, medication, and talking with friends or family were especially likely to be named among the most helpful interventions.

Acceptance and action beats denial or terror

On coping with fear of death and human extinction, Spencer recommends acceptance, carefully defined: not resignation, but ceasing to mentally rebel against reality so you can act — for instance, even in the direst of circumstances, one can imagine emulating a likely-terminal patient who accepts the odds and does everything to improve them.

The alternatives are worse:

Denial may feel reassuring, but may prevent effective action.
Permanent terror keeps the danger salient, but impairs the person trying to address it.

In contrast, acceptance and courage allow someone to recognise the stakes while choosing the emotional state most conducive to useful action.

Spencer argues if you are not certain humanity is doomed, then there’s room for hope and reason to act. He also notes that past generations faced comparably existential threats (Nazi conquest, nuclear war) and still found ways to act rather than being paralysed.

Survey respondents sometimes reported that beginning concrete work actually reduced their anxiety: agency was more bearable than passive dread.

People have multiple genuine values, and neglecting them creates burnout

Spencer’s personal life philosophy of “valuism” says we should identify what we intrinsically value, take effective action to create what we value, and try to balance those values, rather than subordinating everything to a single moral objective.

People generally value reducing suffering and improving the world — but also relationships, pleasure, truth, achievement, and their own wellbeing — but values also vary a lot from person to person.
If one important value is consistently neglected, it tends to pull harder and impose a growing psychological cost. Spencer thinks this is one route to burnout among people who organise their entire lives around impact.
Even someone committed to an objective moral theory must understand their actual psychology. Pretending to have no personal values does not make those values disappear. Spencer recommends a free tool to determine what your intrinsic values are so they can remain top of mind for high-impact workers.

When values conflict, Spencer suggests changing the parameters in small thought experiments until it becomes clearer where the balance lies: identify the different wants or values in conflict, acknowledge what each is trying to protect, and make a deliberate choice — without pretending the losing value never mattered.

Highlights

Isn't anxiety the rational response to x-risk?

Luisa Rodriguez: There are plenty of things that I worry about in my day-to-day life that I give more worry than I think they deserve. But these problems are exceptionally big, and probably deserve more worry than we give them. If we were actually going to have worry that was proportionate to the size of the issue, how much anxiety is the right amount of anxiety?
Spencer Greenberg: There’s a lot to unpack there. And if you go to cognitive behavioural therapy, let’s say for anxiety, an exercise sometimes that you’ll engage in is one where you consider the evidence. So they’ll be like, “You’re worried about this thing. You’re worried about how your friend didn’t text you back. What’s the underlying thought there?” Maybe the underlying thought is like, “Maybe my friend doesn’t like me anymore.” And then they’ll be like, “OK, why don’t you consider the evidence for and against?” You’ll consider the evidence for and against, and often people will feel better after that, and it will help them have more realistic thinking.
And there’s a temptation, I think, if someone goes to a friend who doesn’t buy into these [existential risk] ideas, or even goes to a therapist who’s used to practicing that technique, where they’ll be like, “Consider the evidence.” And that’s actually really unhelpful in this situation, because chances are, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve already thought a lot about the evidence — and if someone’s like, “Consider the evidence for and against this problem that you think is a horrible problem being really bad,” you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve thought about the evidence, and I think it actually is really bad.” So that’s not the way to go in these kinds of situations, right?
But I think it’s also important to ask the question, what is hypervigilance, and what’s the point of it? Effectively it’s a state that’s preparing you to take drastic action. Like there’s something dangerous that’s coming: you’ve got to go, you’ve got to act. Unfortunately, it’s really not a healthy state to be in all the time. It’s not good for your body, it’s not good for your mind. It can literally mess up things like digestion, because it actually affects your digestion when you’re in a hypervigilant state.
You know, I like to think about professional athletes here. Do professional athletes want to be stressing their bodies all the time? If you’re training to be in the Olympics, and all you care about is the goal of winning the Olympics, are you just stressing your body to the absolute limit? The answer is absolutely no, because that is not the performance-optimising move. The performance-optimising move involves genuine rest; it involves variation of things. You’re not always working just on that one skill set. You’re going to have off days. You’re going to have days where you’re practicing other things or doing cross training or whatever — and that’s even if you just care about optimising for the goal.
So I think we have to be realistic about like, what is this state, what is it doing for us? And what kind of beings are we realistically?

The alternative to doomscrolling

Luisa Rodriguez: Why do you think people are so inclined to doomscroll?
Spencer Greenberg: Well, it’s a bit of an irony, because often people go to social media as a form of avoidance or as a form of attempting to unwind, right? So they’re like, “I don’t want to think about this thing. I’m stuck on this thing. Let me open up social media.” Or like, “I’ve just been working hard, let me unwind.” And the irony is that they end up often in this sort of hypervigilant state when they’re on social media, where it’s like not even necessarily doing a good job of getting them to relax, or maybe they’ve avoided this one thing and now they’re stressed out about this other thing they’re looking at. So it often doesn’t serve the purpose that it’s intended to.
This actually connects to an idea from our book, The 12 Levers. In our beta testing, we were having people read the book. This idea is one of these ideas that our beta testers just kept bringing up, like this was an unlock for them.
It’s this idea that we call “glad you did it” activities. The idea is that often we do things that are serving some need, or that we believe are serving some need — like rest, relaxation, et cetera — but when we actually really get down to it, we could swap them with a different activity that serves the same need, but afterwards you’re like, “I’m glad I did that.” You’re not like, “That was a giant waste of time.”
I think a mistake people often make is that they try to swap out those activities with things that don’t serve that need. So you as a human have a need to rest, but what you might be doing to rest is going and scrolling social media — which, you know, maybe it is a little bit restful, but maybe it doesn’t even serve that person very well, and then afterwards you’re probably like, “Why did I do that? That was not a good use of time.”
Well, what else is restful? What else shares that same need? Maybe walking your dog or going for a walk in nature or having a call with a friend or whatever it is. And maybe it takes a little bit more planning to make that happen; it’s not quite as mindless — but if you could swap it out with something that serves the same need at least as well, hopefully better, but where afterwards you’re like, “I’m glad I did that; that was a good use of time,” it can not only serve our needs better, but actually make life more meaningful and fulfilling, and I think be more restorative so you are more ready when now you have to go take action in the future.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, nice. I can imagine that’s in contrast to what maybe I’d be tempted to do if I had this problem of doomscrolling. I’m actually not a doomscroller. I am a scroller, but I’m not a doomscroller. I think I’d be tempted to be like, “A virtuous thing would be to work” or do something that’s a good use of time according to unrealistic values. It feels like a really key thing about this is it’s meeting the rest need; it’s not meeting the goal of “be a more productive person all the time.”
Spencer Greenberg: Exactly, exactly. And that’s a mistake people constantly make. They’re trying to swap one need for another, which often doesn’t work. You need to do meaningful work, that’s great, but you’re trying to replace your need to rest, and it doesn’t satisfy your need to rest. It’s a different thing. And actually, you can kind of grind yourself to a pulp and make it hard for you to function if you’re never letting yourself actually satisfy that rest need. Or if your “rest” is not actually restful, like you’re actually stressed out doing your rest because you’re scrolling stressful AI news or whatever it is.

Why guilt isn't an optimal source of motivation

Luisa Rodriguez: Where does motivation come from? Does it come from guilt or shame, or does it come from excitement and opportunity, feeling like you get to play a role in shaping the world? Not like, “I failed at my duty and obligation to help the world a little bit more.” How do you actively influence how your own brain thinks about these things? Because I think I very much live in my own world that it’s just true that if you aren’t doing more, you should feel guilt. It feels kind of crazy to me that you’d be able to change that. …
Spencer Greenberg: A lot of really high-achieving people use what [Stephen Zerfas] calls “dirty fuel,” which is essentially we beat ourselves up or are really harsh on ourselves as a way to get really good performance. And the irony of it is often it does work for people, but it has tremendous psychological costs, and also it can be unsustainable. It might actually be bad in the long run where they burn out or actually don’t achieve their goals because of the psychological costs. And then there’s this idea of “clean fuel,” which is other ways to motivate yourself that don’t have the psychological costs, or even have psychological benefits.
I think a lot of this goes back to people figuring out how to get themselves to behave the way they want. So I don’t know your own situation, but you can imagine, like when you were younger, you’re trying to get yourself to do a good job or be excellent, and then you develop these psychological strategies. And you kind of observe that, when you apply the psychological strategy of like, “I’m not doing enough” or whatever it is, you get better performance out of yourself.
And this happens to all of us. We learn these psychological strategies to get things done. The thing about those is that they’re kind of scary to get rid of, because that’s how we get things done. Like, if I didn’t have the taskmaster whipping me, then I’m not going to achieve my goal, right? That’s how I’ve always gotten it done.
So I don’t think we can just be like, “OK, I’m just gonna swap wholesale: I’m using a totally new psychological strategy.” But I think taking a little bit of a more playful approach, saying, “Let me experiment around small things with other forms of motivation.”
And there are actually a lot of forms of motivation. Being human, there are a lot of ways we can motivate ourselves. One of them is telling ourselves we’re never doing enough or feeling guilt, but we can have other forms of motivation. We could have social motivation: maybe I’ll collaborate with someone, and that will motivate me. We can have reward-based motivation: if I do this, I’ll give myself this cool reward. Et cetera, et cetera. There are many forms of motivation. I could try to develop a feeling of excitement around this project in particular. I don’t think there’s like a switch we can flip, but we can experiment in small ways on lower-stakes things on other ways to motivate ourselves, and see if it actually works as well or even better, and is “cleaner fuel,” as Zerfas would say.

The magic dial

Spencer Greenberg: Boom and bust — where you get really freaked out and you work really hard, and then you feel burned out and you need to take a rest — is just not the most effective way to achieve your goals. It’s not the most effective way to achieve altruistic goals, but it’s also not the best way to achieve your other values, like being happy.
So it’s just like a bad strategy. Not to criticise people that do it. It’s completely understandable why you would do this, because you feel afraid, so you push really hard, but then that’s unsustainable and you burn out, right?
But I think the first thing to accept is just on a cognitive level, this is not a healthy and not an effective strategy. And then if you accept that, then the question is like, which of those emotions are serving you, and when they’re not serving you, what can you do about that?
I think it is interesting to think about how would you want to act in these difficult situations? What would the ideal version of you do? Let’s say you think that there’s a really high chance that existential risk is on the horizon. Suppose you believe that. Would you want yourself to just be freaked out 100% of the time? Is that actually the ideal version of you? And what is the ideal version of you? How often would you be freaked out, and to what degree? And what would that fear do for you?
I think when you kind of do that thought experiment, you realise that actually just being freaked out all the time is like, on some level it feels maybe proportionate to you, but it’s actually not what you would want of yourself. And the ideal version of you wouldn’t be in that state.
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think I am still a little drawn to that is just the correct way to feel. It’s proportionate to the truth. I think the thing doing some work is that it just is very sticky for me that fear and guilt will make me work on the problem to the level that I would like to believe I could work on it. …
Spencer Greenberg: Imagine you had a magic dial and you could control how much of different emotions you would feel. Let’s take your fear: where would you dial that dial? Would you just leave it? You’re like, “No, I actually feel the optimal amount of fear”? Would you dial it down to zero?
[Patients] sometimes feel like therapists are trying to push them down to zero. Not that that’s achievable, but they might feel that, and they may actually have resistance to that because they might feel like zero is not the right level, right? …
Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. This one’s really helpful, because now it’s totally clear to me that I would turn it way down. I wouldn’t turn it to zero, but I think much nearer to zero than it is now.

Humans have always lived with existential fear

Spencer Greenberg: I also think back, and I think, you know what? My grandfather thought Nazis were going to take over the entire world, and he had pretty good reason to fear that, and he went and fought against them, right? And then you think back, you know what? In the early 60s, people thought the world was going to be destroyed by nuclear weapons, and they had pretty good reason to actually think that, and they were deeply afraid of that.
And then I think back even further to our ancient ancestors, like 20,000 years ago, and imagine there was some tribe nearby that had destroyed other tribes and was much more powerful, and one day could just show up and kill you and everyone you love and everyone you’ve ever cared about and your entire world ceased to exist.
My point here is not to undermine these feelings, but just to say this is not a unique thing. Humans in history have dealt with this. There’s something human about this. And they found different ways to deal with it. And some of those ways have been very functional, where they’ve been able to act in the face of incredible adversity, and other ways dysfunctional, where they let the fear actually disable them from being effective.

If you're certain we're doomed, you're overconfident

Luisa Rodriguez: A thing that I’ve found helpful, and I’m curious if it kind of tracks with any of the techniques that you’ve put together in the book, is I’ve found it helpful to be like, we’re talking about different probabilities of different outcomes — and I would be very surprised if there’s absolutely no chance that we succeed at our goals. I think there’s some chance at least that things could go well.
And I find it helpful to think about how I’m going to help in the set of worlds where this is a tractable problem. I’m not going to help in the set of worlds where it isn’t tractable and we’re doomed from the start. I’m also not going to help in the set of worlds where it isn’t a problem at all. But in the set of worlds where what we can do could make a difference, I’m going to play a part, and that’s really meaningful.
So I let go, and I feel sad about the worlds where I couldn’t have done anything at all to make a difference, but I act as if I’m in the worlds where I can — because that’s all I can do, really. I don’t know. Do you have reactions to that?
Spencer Greenberg: If you’re certain that we’re doomed, then I would say you’re overconfident. And if you’re not certain that we’re doomed, then there’s hope and there’s something to focus on. There’s something to try to act on, there’s something to try to do to make the world better. So we don’t need really high probabilities of success to feel hope or to have something meaningful to contribute to.