How I Limit Anxiety, Stress, and Regret

A few weeks ago I wrote a post for WSO that received a lot of traffic and comments: Why I Quit My Job (a.k.a. "Regrets of the Working").

I talked about how the story of a palliative care nurse and the top 5 regrets of her dying patients led me to quit my consulting job and start my own business.  More than a few strangers and friends reached out to say that they felt the same way about their lives and their jobs.

This post is a follow-up and addresses the same issue, but from a much more tactical standpoint.

Instead of talking philosophically about how you might feel about life in 50+ years, I'm going to focus on addressing the gnawing feelings of stress and anxiety that most of us are feeling right now, in the present moment.  I'm talking about that dull, underlying, constant stress caused by the things we sacrifice because of work.  Things like growing apart from your old best-friends, failing to reach your potential outside of work, or becoming aged and unhealthy while still in your 20s.

I'll give my perspective on a complicated question that I've asked myself many times: 'How do I limit anxiety, stress, and regret in my life while working a demanding career?'

Quitting is not the answer

Let me start with an important statement: quitting your job is not the solution.

Quitting is certainly a solution to eliminate feelings of regret, anxiety, and stress, but I don't think it is the best solution or even a good solution.

Quitting didn't solve my problems.  I decided to quit my management consulting job after 4-years when I realized I was heading down a path that I didn't want to be on, which I was only following because of momentum and social pressure.  I was stressed, anxious, burnt out, and starting to regret the choices I'd made since graduating university.  I quit with the hope that these feelings would disappear and I'd transform into the 'happy-go-lucky' guy I was during school, but unfortunately, it didn't work out like that.

Don't get me wrong, the feeling of handing in my computer on my last day and stepping out into the sunshine while giving zero fucks about the projects/emails/meetings/office politics was euphoric, but it was still just a transient sensation that passed within a few days.  It didn't take long for the lingering stress and gnawing anxiety to start creeping back into my life, prompting me to investigate a little further the real causes of my perpetual unrest.

The real cause of my anxiety, stress, and regret

As I mentioned in my previous post, most regrets are the result of tiny day-to-day decisions that accumulate over the extended timeline of your life.  I used to blame my demanding job for these sacrifices and regrets, but my recent unemployment has changed my perspective.

Regardless of how many hours I work each week, I am forced to make countless decisions about how I allocate my time and energy.  For example, no matter how busy I am each day, I'll spend at least some amount of time eating food, sleeping, and surfing the internet.  With each example I am free to choose from multiple options that require about the same amount of time and effort — I can order a salad or nachos, I can read a relaxing book before bed or watch G.O.T. episodes on full volume, I can read Farnam Street or Buzzfeed.

Choose the poor option and you'll experience that familiar gnawing stress knowing you are heading down a path of regret, but choose the better option and you'll feel that familiar self-satisfaction from doing what you know you should be doing.  Each option requires about the same time and effort, but will result in very different outcomes.

If so much about the quality of life is dictated by the sum of these moment-to-moment choices, then why we we knowingly make the wrong choice so often?

Systems: the secret sauce of high-performance

Whether you're powering through a 100-hour week or you're an unemployed coffee-shop aficionado (like me), you are free to make daily choices that will change the quality of your life now and in the future.  The obvious challenge is that spending 90% of your time and energy on work makes it infinitely harder to make the correct choice (see decision fatigue and willpower for additional explanation), but that's why building systems is so critical.

I love this excerpt from a recent Lifehacker article called Stop Relying on Motivation and Make Change by Creating Systems.  The quote is from Ramit Sethi, who runs a personal finance blog called iwillteachyoutoberich.com.

"One of my mentors, BJ Fogg, who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, says we should assume that our “future self” is going to be lazy with no motivation. We need to set up systems to make achieving our goals as easy as possible — even when our motivation is low. In other words: Motivation DOESN'T work. Systems do."

I can't even count how many times I've tried to build a new habit only to completely fall off the wagon a few weeks later.  Systems help me overcome my self-defeating, procrastinating, lazy, and inferior alter ego by automating my actions regardless of how shitty my attitude and mindset is in the present moment.

A simple system for taking control of your work, life, and fitness

In the 6-months before I quit and the 6-months after I quit, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to balance demanding work with everything else in my life.  My goal with this system is to make better day-to-day decisions so that I limit my current state stress and anxiety, and future state regret.  It's easy to let a demanding job take over your life, but this system gives you a bit of a buffer and helps you make room for the other important things in your life.

The approach I'm going to describe has worked well for me and a number of my clients, but that doesn't mean it's perfect.  It has constantly evolved and changed over the last few years and I hope it continues to do so.  It's a work in progress, and a selfish reason for writing this on WSO is that I want the opinion of smart people to improve it.

Over the past 5ish years I've tried 10 – 15 different "systems" targeted at remedying my lack of willpower and consistency: Outlook scheduling, day-planners, checklists, post-it reminders on my laptop, endless to-do lists, etc.  Some worked, some didn't, and most required too much effort to be sustainable.  In the end I created my own version that included the best of a few methods, and nails the golden trifecta of effectiveness, efficiency, and adherence that is critical to the success of any change plan.

For lack of a better term, I've started calling this my 'Life Checklist'.

I'm going to explain the system I use in this post, and you can also click here to download the template I use.

The 'Life Checklist'

The 'Life Checklist' is a one-page, one-month to-do list that tracks daily habits in three categories: Work, Life, and Fitness.  For each category I figure out a long-term goal that's important to me and will protect against future regret and current stress and anxiety.  For example, maybe it's becoming a confident public speaker for 'Work', staying close with my old friends for 'Life', or fixing my hunched posture for 'Fitness'.  I then transform each long-term goal into 1 to 3 actionable daily habits which I write down on the 'Life Checklist'.

At the end of each day I take 1-minute and mark which habits I completed and which habits I didn't, including a comment on why. At the end of each month I'll assess my % adherence, decide on new habits (or the same ones), and write them down on a new sheet. In total it requires less than 1-hour a month to track (and maybe a little extra to execute, depending on the habits), but the payoff is massive:

#1) I'm protecting myself against future regret and limiting my present moment stress and anxiety by taking control of my life and schedule.

#2) By including the 'Life' and 'Fitness' categories, my day-to-day focus extends beyond the usual 'Work' monotony and helps remind me that there is more to life than just work.

#3) I can achieve massive results in a few weeks or months just by staying consistent ~80% of the time.

Three principles of the Life Checklist

The design of the 'Life Checklist' was loosely based on three principles that resonate with me: 'The ONE Thing', 'Don't break the chain', and 'What gets measured, gets managed'.

1) 'The ONE Thing'
'The ONE Thing' is actually a book written by Gary Keller, although the concept he writes about is not new; I just find he vocalizes it best.  In essence, it's taking a long-term distal goal and turning it into 'what's the one thing I can do right now'.  When I think about regrets I want to avoid or goals I want to achieve, it's always in terms of some fuzzy vision of my future self: 'I want to be fit and healthy', 'I want a fulfilling and happy life', or 'I want to be stress-free and enjoy my work'.  I have no idea how to jump from my current state to this ideal end-state.  So instead of trying to do everything at once I just identify one simple action I can realistically do each day that takes me closer to my goal.  For example, 'Don't eat sugar', 'Write a to-do list before opening laptop', 'Text one friend each day',  or 'Meditate for 5 minutes' are all simple habits I've used.

2) 'Don't break the chain'
This concept is usually attributed to Jerry Seinfeld (but apparently incorrectly!).  The story goes that Jerry gave some sage advice to a young comic about how to get better: write everyday, and stay consistent by marking a X on a big wall calendar.  Each day you write adds to the 'chain' of X's, and your focus becomes 'don't break the chain' (link to article). Regardless of whether or not the story is b.s., the tactic works.  There have been plenty of days where I've dragged myself off the couch to do mobility drills for 5-minutes just to keep the chain going for one more day.

3) 'What gets measured, gets managed'
This is another concept that may be incorrectly attributed (source), but it's most often referred to as a Peter Drucker quote.  As I mentioned above and in my previous post, regrets in life are often the result of little decisions you make by default without even realizing you are making them.  For most of us the first step to fixing a problem is realizing that it exists. By creating a monthly checklist I address both parts of Drucker's quote — I 'measure' each habit daily, and I 'manage' by changing my actions to achieve 80% adherence. Very often I'll start tracking a new habit without actively trying to change it (e.g. how many nights do I sleep 8+ hours) just to get an objective measure so I can figure out if I need to manage it further.

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Working insanely hard, long hours in banking, consulting, trading, etc. can suck sometimes, but life has little purpose or meaning if you aren't working hard and pursuing excellence at something.  Many of you reading this probably have awesome jobs that you've worked hard to get, and you shouldn't throw that away because of some present moment stress, anxiety, and regret.

Life is still a grind when you work 80+ hours a week, but it's surprising how much better it can get because of something as simple as a checklist.  For me, the checklist gives me the feeling of control of my destiny and the knowledge that I'm progressing towards my life goals, even if it's just one small step each day.

I quit and I love my life right now, but that's more a result of strategies I use like the 'Life Checklist' than it is the act of quitting.

Maybe in the end you'll decide to quit anyways.  Or maybe you won't.  I think that's a decision each of us has to make on our own, but make sure you don't do it because of feelings that can be fixed by something as simple as a checklist.

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Alistair Clark is a former management consultant that runs worklifefitness.co. He consults top-performing business professionals (consultants, bankers, entrepreneurs, etc.) on how to balance career success with the rest of their life so that they can maximize their performance in the office, in the gym, and in their homes.  Get started with a free eBook: Get in Shape and Save 11 Hours a Week.