Endless possibilities suck.

How constraints lead to better work and less anxiety

I don’t have much time so hear me out.

About 5 days ago I released a video about Peter Attia’s big appearance in the Epstein files and how he actually has a history of misleading us about various health and longevity concepts. Many people said it was the best video I’ve ever made.

The weird thing was that I made that video in 8 days - easily the fastest I’ve made a video in about 5 years.

My point isn’t (only) to gas myself up, but to highlight why this is a good example of how constraints actually make things better.

The other day I was doing an interview with Nir Eyal, author of Beyond Belief (he sent me an early copy - great book). With many many interesting pieces of research and stories, he highlights just how astonishingly powerful the placebo effect is. That is, the way we think about things dramatically changes our reality in tangible ways, and what we believe dramatically changes how reality affects us in tangible ways. This sounds like a rehashing of the cliche of “mind over matter,” but Nir really makes the concept come to life in an impactful way with all sorts of research into the widespread effects of the placebo effect.

In a Zoom call, I was telling him that I am 100% sold on the importance of belief, but I wanted to know how exactly do you get your mind to accept that so it actually translates into new, better actions. He had me do a little exercise where I thought about a problem I’m facing (procrastination) and what the limiting belief was that was leading to that crappy behavior pattern. I said that the belief limiting me is that I can’t do my best work when the conditions aren’t perfect or at least great. I need to be well-rested, focused, motivated, energetic, my room needs to be tidy et cetera et cetera- all these things had to be in place before I could really get started on my most important creative tasks.

Nir asked me to think of times when I was able to get good work done when things weren’t perfect. I could immediately think of several examples. In fact, my best ever performing video with 24 million views was made in a rush in less than a week. I quickly cobbled it together so fast simply because I felt the pressure to post something as it had been so long.

In 1975, pianist Keith Jarrett arrived at a concert hall in Cologne surprised to find that the piano prepared for him wasn’t the concert grand piano he had requested. Instead, it was a much smaller piano with several mechanical issues. The keys were sticking, the pedals weren’t working properly, the felt was worn away on the upper register so those notes sounded harsh and tinny. Various technical aspects that a famous jazz pianist would have expected to be in order when walking into a concert of over 1,000 people were not.

Jarrett was suddenly limited in where he could take his talent- he had to play around the problem areas of the piano. Imagine a kickboxer being told right before the fight that he couldn’t throw any knees, high kicks or right hooks.

Jarrett was given absolutely imperfect conditions, yet he delivered a near perfect performance. Many people hail the 1975 Köln Concert as Jarrett’s best piece of work.

We need constraints more than we realize.

If you’ve ever taken a very strong psychedelic, you may have found yourself in this weird plane of reality where boundaries have been completely dissolved. The fundamental borders and edges of reality have become really fuzzy and things feel quite limitless. Without getting in to too much detail (if you’re curious about how weird things can get, check out this post), this can feel amazing but it can very easily tip over into a terrifying, anxiety-ridden “bad” trip.

As I’ve discussed in this video the research (and logic) suggests that anxiety is essentially the same experience as uncertainty. So, when we are inundated with choices and possibilities and routes to take, our certainty of what the best thing to do is is diminished. Uncertainty is experienced as some level of anxiety.

In an old study by Jacob Hirsh, Raymond Mar and Jordan Peterson, they argue that the reason religious people have less anxiety and less activation in the part of the brain that can generate anxiety (the anterior cingulate cortex) is that their religious outlook constrains their world view.

If you have all these ideals and morals and prescriptions for behavior, then that limits the number of actions that can be “correct.” The number of actions and behaviors to choose from is limited, therefore we should expect less uncertainty and therefore less anxiety.

We are slowly learning more about the negative impacts of “gentle parenting.” That is, focusing too much on making sure the kids feel good and happy rather than sternly and strictly enforcing boundaries for their actions actually leads to less happy children. Kids need boundaries. Being overloaded with possibilities, overloaded with anxiety-inducing choices won’t make them happier.

This is one of the core tenets of Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. That increasing choices past a certain point paradoxically reduces happiness. You may eventually overcome “analysis paralysis” and make a choice but you walk away worried that maybe you made the wrong choice. How can you be sure you picked the best pair of jeans when there were 70 different styles and brands of jeans you could have picked from?

I constrained myself to getting that Peter Attia video out before Saturday because the details about his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein was news. If I waited much longer it would no longer be “news” and people would not be interested in an old story. Except, I thought it was the perfect segue to talking about Peter Attia’s overstepping with the science when it came to health and longevity and how arrogance impedes scientific progress.

I didn’t have time to hesitate and let my uncertainty lead to seconding guess my ideas and slowing down the process. So, I just went with my first instinct* of how to present the information. *Luckily I had been following and researching these topics for a very long time so it’s not like I just “winged” the research. Apparently that worked out for the best. Would giving myself more time to deliberate on it make it better? It’s possible, but probably not because I would have cut out certain aspects that made it a more engaging story rather than just an information dump.

Parkinson’s Law says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

I gave myself 45 minutes to write this all out and about 8 minutes (until my laptop reached 2% battery) to edit and check for errors. This article is certainly no Köln concert, but I have a feeling that if I released that time constraint and gave myself another 45 minutes to second guess myself the article would have taken several more days to get published because of course I would need to wait for the conditions to be perfect. It likely would have been worse and bloated with too much information anyhow.