How Depression Helped Me Conquer the Loss Aversion Bias

Every day I make more decisions about what I’m not going to do than what I am going to do.

The next time you’re meeting up with a group of people pay attention to how long it takes the conversation to turn to how busy they are. Extra points if at least one person complains about being overly busy. The hectic lifestyle is our cultural norm. Try to not talk about being busy. I dare you.

Unfortunately, I can’t do busy. It will send me straight down a dark depression spiral. In order to stay healthy, I have to make sure there is a lot of open space in my days. This means I’m almost never too busy. And most of the time I’m not what you would even call busy. I do a lot of stuff every day, but I don’t do even more. I used to be as crazy busy as the next person, but then a bout of really bad depression made it impossible to maintain. I was forced to deal with my loss aversion bias in the most dramatic ways: I had to stop doing basically everything.

The loss aversion bias is people’s preference for gains over losses. We have a preference for solving problems by adding something rather than subtracting. Loss aversion is one of the major reasons people become exhausted and burned out. When I hear someone talk about how overly busy and stressed out they are, I know the next thing they’ll say is probably going to be about how they’re adding even more to their plate.

No one ever says they’re jettisoning things. They may talk about carving out time to be mindful, resting more. But that’s adding something, right? That’s one more thing to put on the to-do list. Or they may talk about how they’ve “failed” at accomplishing something. But almost never do they ever say they’re letting things go on purpose, joyfully. People prefer to figure out how to do everything more efficiently, using productivity hacks. Better time management, better sleep, better diet—we can do it all if we find the right ingredients to add to our life.

When you have mental health challenges you learn over time how to prioritize tasks, whittle life down to the essentials. When you are forced to jettison everything, you begin to understand what really matters. You become inured to and even accepting of the loss of productivity because you’ve learned to recognize extraneous stuff that you don’t really have to do, were doing only because you thought you had to, or were giving in to external pressures. Over time you figure out how to divide your goals into those that really do enhance your quality of life, and those that decrease it. And you jettison the latter,because you have one overarching goal: feeling good enough that you want to be alive in this world. Everything else follows from that.

I honestly think that on my better days my quality of life and happiness may be on par with or even greater than what I see in people who don’t struggle with mental health issues. Sure, I have some bad times, but they’ve taught me to slow down, open up space for myself, let go of all the pressures. I’ve been forced to learn the important lesson that if you want to get the most out of life, you have to give up more than you add.

This goes against instinct. Why? Because when you lose things, you feel bad. Adding things gives you that nice dopamine hit. Adding things is condoned, busyness makes you seem accomplished and important. Doing less? On purpose? I can tell you that in conversations about busyness I am always the only person who talks about not getting stuff done in a positive way, as something I intentionally practice. Maybe people think I just must not have ambition or the responsibilities they do; possibly they think I’m lazy. True, not true? Who knows. Comparing two people’s lives is that whole apples and oranges thing. What I do know is that every day I make more decisions about what I’m not going to do than what I am going to do. This is the way I choose to live. And I believe that most people have the capacity to make empowering choices for themselves regardless of life circumstances.

Does this way of life mean I lose out on things? Absolutely. Does it mean I sometimes disappoint people? Yep. And that is hard, but it gets easier over time. Because what I gain is so much better than anything I ever got from adding to my burdens in a misguided attempt to solve them. Every time I “lose out” on something because I’ve made a decision to pursue quality of life over productivity, busyness, and giving in to external pressures, I feel better. It becomes a bit like ripping off a Band-Aid. There’s always a sting, but you kind of start to look forward to it, because that fresh air hitting new skin is the feeling of freedom.

The Protagonist Bias and Creative Rejection

The truth is, almost nothing is personal.

Dealing with rejection is part of being creative. If you’re putting your work out there in the world, inevitably you’ll experience rejection of some kind. Our protagonist bias can make dealing with it more difficult. This is a bias that emerges from seeing ourselves as the protagonist of our own life story. It can make us take things personally when the truth is, almost nothing is personal.

Humans are meaning-makers. That’s what we do all day long. We interpret what we see and experience by creating a story from it. The story is how we understand the sequence of events, and anchors us in linear time. It’s causal by nature: something happens that has effects, which then have more effects. Even if we’re not consciously aware of the story we’re creating, our brain is constantly doing this for us in the background.

Understanding our lives through stories has its benefits, but there is one major drawback. It positions us as protagonist, and gives rise to an illusion that everything that happens to us is somehow about us. This is reinforced by the stories we see and read for entertainment. The basic plot of a novel or TV show centers on the experiences of a protagonist, and all events are connected to them either in that the protagonist makes them happen or is impacted by them.

As the star of our own story, we suffer from the bias that what we experience is personal. When we hear people laughing in our vicinity, many of us have a knee-jerk reaction that they’re somehow laughing at us, even when we know it’s extremely unlikely. We’re interpreting everything from our own perspective, and it’s a natural and adaptive trait to assess things in terms of what they have to do with us. But it also leads to many faulty assumptions.

The truth is that almost nothing outside of ourselves has to do with us. That is to say, our own reactions belong to us, but the outer circumstances that elicit them do not. Knowing this can help immensely when it comes to dealing with how people receive our creative work. We may feel that people’s reactions to our work have to do with us, but they don’t. Not at all. Two different people can see entirely different things in our work. Their reactions are 100% to do with them and their own internal mindscapes.

Not taking people’s reactions personally is difficult, though, even when we know they aren’t. That’s because we identify with our own work. We see it as an extension of ourselves. This is where we need to detach. We need to make a hard break between our work as it belongs to us during creation, and our work out in the world where it belongs to consumers. Once we put it out there, it’s not ours any longer. It has a life of its own. Many writers I know don’t read reviews, either negative or positive, to help them make this break. What people think about their books doesn’t have anything to do with them.

The one sticky area is when you have work out specifically for critique, which is often part of the creative process whether it occurs within the confines of a critique group or when you have your work on submission. I’m not going to lie, critical feedback can suck, because you can’t make that hard break. You have to listen to and parse feedback in these cases. But the same rule applies: any feedback is ultimately 100% about the person giving it. It’s not the truth, it’s just an opinion. But it can be very difficult to deal with critical feedback and I advise choosing critique partners and other feedback opportunties with extreme care. Remember: ultimately your creative process is yours. You get to decide what it looks like and what kind of feedback you let into your life.

Don’t feel bad about being cautious about or even rejecting feedback. Protecting yourself is necessary, particularly if you are an HSP and very sensitive to feedback, critical or otherwise. Your creative practice is sacrosanct, and anything that interferes with the joy you feel in creative process needs strong boundaries around it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to get feedback, or that you have to listen to it. You don’t. Feedback does not necessarily make work better. Listening to the wrong kind of feedback can make your work worse. Pay attention to your feelings in these matters. Feedback only helps if you are open to it, and it’s the right kind. Trust yourself. What matters is how you feel about your work, not what other people think about it.

On Belonging

If you want to feel you belong with others, first you must feel you belong to yourself.

I’ve recently joined Andy Mort as one of the facilitators of The Haven, his gentle community for deep thinkers and sensitive creatives, where I run a forum called “From Burnout to Book.” Writers of all kinds and at all stages of their own writing journey can find kind and compassionate encouragement there, and I invite you to join us. If you sign up to the Haven using my special link, you will get a free 45-minute consultation with me about your writing, so I can learn how to better support you in the forum. The Haven is a wonderful community and a true home for us gentle souls, and we’d love to have you there!

The Haven is built around a year-long contemplation of themes that change with the seasons, and in October we are reflecting on belonging (we just recorded a podcast episode about it that will be coming out soon, available here). Let me ask you a question: Do you feel like you belong, truly belong, anywhere?

I’m one of those people who’s never felt they belong. I have always had this deep-seated feeling that I don’t belong here, in the world. It mostly manifests as a sense that other people all know what they’re doing, they belong in their own lives, but I somehow don’t. It’s like an existential version of imposter syndrome. I can’t say where it comes from, though I have my suspicions it has its roots in being a shy, highly sensitive kid who often experienced rejection and was deeply hurt by it. Its origins don’t really matter to me, though – what interests me is how belonging, and not belonging, have resonated through my life, and how I see these things now, as an adult looking backward and forward from the middle stage of my life.

Being a misfit is a part of my sense of self (I’m an Enneagram 4, after all!). It’s something I value, but also something that has always been painful. I left the US at age 16 to go live abroad, because I did not feel I belonged in my home culture. I spent the majority of the next decade living in other countries, because not fitting into a culture where I was a foreigner was easier than not fitting into my own (and I genuinely love learning about other cultures and studying languages).

What I realized after a while, though, was that living overseas was in part an attempt to escape myself. For a time in a new place I was able to pretend I was a different person, exploring different ways of being in a new culture, but my self always caught up with me eventually. Usually around the one-year mark, if you want to get specific. Wherever I went, there I was.

It’s telling that I didn’t start to feel like I belonged somewhere until I started to feel like I belonged in myself. The sense of being rooted in myself, living the life I’m meant to live (whatever that means), is what brought me home, finally. I don’t mean physically: I’ve been back in my home culture for many years now. I’m referring to the feeling of having found my thing, and my people. And what brought me to this place, my home, as I see it, is accepting who and what I am. I’m a writer, a creative, a person who must live and be in that realm of creative energy and inspiration for the main of my time. Even if it means my life isn’t successful in a conventional sense. Even if it means I never make much money.

What does it feel like to belong? It feels safe, and unbounded by conditions. It feels like not having to change myself, or perform thoughts, feelings, or actions. You know you belong when you enter a space that was already holding you before you walked through the door. That’s how I feel in the Haven, and it’s how I feel in my own life. I have made space for myself, I am holding myself compassionately and with deep and unconditional support.    

So often we go about things in an inside-out way. If I belong with others, I’ll feel like I belong (to/in myself). If this equation isn’t working for you, try flipping it. If I feel like I belong (to/in myself), I’ll belong with others. I found my people when I became my own people. Focus on yourself, know who you are, do what pleases you. You may find that this is what turns the world toward you, and brings you to a place of greater belonging that has always already been holding space for you.

Do You Seek Success, Mastery, Enjoyment, or Impact?

Or do you perhaps want a little of everything? (That’s okay!)

I was listening to an episode of Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast, and for the first time ever I had a…hmm…shall I call it a quibble, with the great Brené. I want to be clear that I’m an admirer of hers, because she does good work and I am in awe of her public speaking skills. (Plus, she’s a fellow academic who uses grounded theory, an inductive research methodology that was my own preference when I was a practicing social scientist and that I now use in an adapted form for my fiction writing.) But this particular episode got me thinking.

She and her guest were discussing the difference between two goals of work: success and mastery. And I totally agreed with their assessment. Success is an outward evaluation of the value of your work. It is the rewards you receive when people like what you do. And these are fleeting, often ultimately a let-down, and can serve as a distraction from continuing to do your work. Success isn’t a continuous state; rather, it comprises moments that are soon over, and that are matched by inevitable failures along the way. Mastery is a motivator that can keep you on track through the vagaries of the success/failure binary. It’s an intrinsic goal, based on your own evaluation of the value of your work and your capacity for improvement and excellence. All that sounds good. Except.

Except, I don’t see myself in either of those choices. I’m certainly not a success-seeker, as should be obvious for anyone who has read anything on this blog. But I’m not that interested in mastery, either. I see that quest in my sister, who is a competitive cyclist. But as a writer, what would mastery even look like? I’m sure there are numerous legitimate answers to that question, but I’ve just never connected with the idea of developing mastery. Sure, I want to improve my writing, but that’s not why I do it.

Are there other choices here? Brené wasn’t saying that success and mastery are it. But in this particular conversation, they were presented in that either/or framework. I think she would agree, as an intellectually curious person, that there are perhaps other options that deserve to be included. So I thought about my own goals. The first I came up with is enjoyment. My main goal in everything I do is to enjoy myself, because I spent so many years of my life not. I don’t mean enjoyment here in the sense of fun, although I think fun matters, too. What I mean is that feeling of fulfillment in work, that combination of excitement and absorption you get when you’re doing something that feels deeply meaningful. Enjoyment, however, is about more than just personal fulfillment. It is tied to the quality of your work. When you enjoy the process of doing your work, it adds something ineffable to it: people can sense your work is personal and authentic. The honest truth is, I was never cut out for mastery, in academics or any other field. My specialty is that personal, authentic message.

And that leads me to my final addition to the work goals list: impact. Much like success is the outward manifestation of mastery, impact is the outward expression of enjoyment. When you seek meaning through work, the natural extension is a desire for it to be meaningful to others, just as it is a natural extension of mastery to want it to be recognized by others. But impact, unlike success, is lasting. While success is a benefit conferred on you, impact is a benefit you offer to others. And there’s another important difference between them. While success by its very nature is something you are generally aware of in your own life, you often don’t know the extent of your impact in others’. When I write a blog post or put out a podcast episode, I mostly don’t know its impact. Something I write or say could change someone’s life – I don’t know, and likely never will in most cases. Impact is by nature humble.

You can want all of these things, success, mastery, enjoyment, impact. But most people have one that takes precedence. Understanding which can help you learn what motivates and drives you, and it can also help you find balance. While there’s nothing wrong with desiring success, you can balance its emotional ups and downs with mastery. And while wanting to make a difference in people’s lives is great, you won’t be able to do that unless you first learn how to find meaning and enjoyment in your process.