I do the same thing, I think. A baseline of “do nothing” is an emotionally neutral thing to compare your actions to, and accurately describes what you’re probably getting done when you instead try to think of the best way to do something. But it took me a long time to get that.
If I’m reading this right, your hesitation is nearly the shape of an anxiety attack—it’s a “meta-analysis lockdown”, though not quite a “recursive meta-analysis meltdown”. When you don’t get that obvious physiological feedback flaring up, it’s harder to recognize the similarity, unless it gets extreme. I hope it doesn’t feel like too personal a question, but would you characterize yourself as having had an anxiety disorder? You mention the lockdown in social situations, where this is most common. But I think that the problem is the same however mild, and the solutions too.
When I’m relaxed enough to think in sentences and this happens, I stop and ask myself why I’m actually worried. For tasks, I usually notice then that my real worry isn’t that I’ll do “just ok”, but that I won’t even complete the given task! My brain remembers failing to finish things all too well, and the reason that happens not well enough. How strange, that the anticipation of a problem can cause the problem! I don’t know if the same conditioned fear of total failure was your challenge as well, or what other things cause perfectionism.
I couldn’t think clearly about this mental fog until I had an essential insight. Once I acknowledged that not completing the thing was my real fear, I considered this “worst case” as a real choice, possibly a good choice! Or perhaps, no choice at all. I retrained myself to really take it seriously by doing nothing on purpose.
This is an extreme example, and probably sounds crazy, because it was. One of the many things that triggered anxiety attacks for me was the realization that I was going to be late to work, unless I skipped breakfast. Another trigger was skipping breakfast. Working late to catch up caused me to get home late, often missing dinner, and getting poor, insufficient sleep. And my brain demanded a perfect solution to all parts of the problem, which was the real problem. When I realized that, the rest became clear. I had a leisurely breakfast, strolled to work late, and had a talk with my boss, explaining the whole thing. We made a deal that I could arrive between 9 and 10 with no questions asked. I loaded up on frozen dinners. After a few months, that trigger dissolved.
In an alternate universe, I might have gone to office hours when I was a student. Or slept and socialized instead of trying to catch up on homework every waking moment. In an alternate universe, a socially challenged perfectionist might intentionally say something unimpressive to some people they wish to impress, just to feel that the world won’t then come to an end.
My actual feat was not changing my belief that I must accomplish perfection to avoid failure, not quite. On the surface, that’s what a character in MoR would call “learning to lose”. But really, learning to lose is accomplished by tabooing the words “lose” and “fail”, and seeing what outcome you really fear.
TLDR: Thinking in abstract terms about outcomes can be helpful, and having a default outcome that corresponds well to over-analyzing is great. But you may have trouble doing this at all, or at least getting “correctly weighted outcomes” if you don’t figure out what in your beliefs or values is really causing the heavy analysis. And that belief or value might be worth changing!
I do the same thing, I think. A baseline of “do nothing” is an emotionally neutral thing to compare your actions to, and accurately describes what you’re probably getting done when you instead try to think of the best way to do something. But it took me a long time to get that.
If I’m reading this right, your hesitation is nearly the shape of an anxiety attack—it’s a “meta-analysis lockdown”, though not quite a “recursive meta-analysis meltdown”. When you don’t get that obvious physiological feedback flaring up, it’s harder to recognize the similarity, unless it gets extreme. I hope it doesn’t feel like too personal a question, but would you characterize yourself as having had an anxiety disorder? You mention the lockdown in social situations, where this is most common. But I think that the problem is the same however mild, and the solutions too.
When I’m relaxed enough to think in sentences and this happens, I stop and ask myself why I’m actually worried. For tasks, I usually notice then that my real worry isn’t that I’ll do “just ok”, but that I won’t even complete the given task! My brain remembers failing to finish things all too well, and the reason that happens not well enough. How strange, that the anticipation of a problem can cause the problem! I don’t know if the same conditioned fear of total failure was your challenge as well, or what other things cause perfectionism.
I couldn’t think clearly about this mental fog until I had an essential insight. Once I acknowledged that not completing the thing was my real fear, I considered this “worst case” as a real choice, possibly a good choice! Or perhaps, no choice at all. I retrained myself to really take it seriously by doing nothing on purpose.
This is an extreme example, and probably sounds crazy, because it was. One of the many things that triggered anxiety attacks for me was the realization that I was going to be late to work, unless I skipped breakfast. Another trigger was skipping breakfast. Working late to catch up caused me to get home late, often missing dinner, and getting poor, insufficient sleep. And my brain demanded a perfect solution to all parts of the problem, which was the real problem. When I realized that, the rest became clear. I had a leisurely breakfast, strolled to work late, and had a talk with my boss, explaining the whole thing. We made a deal that I could arrive between 9 and 10 with no questions asked. I loaded up on frozen dinners. After a few months, that trigger dissolved.
In an alternate universe, I might have gone to office hours when I was a student. Or slept and socialized instead of trying to catch up on homework every waking moment. In an alternate universe, a socially challenged perfectionist might intentionally say something unimpressive to some people they wish to impress, just to feel that the world won’t then come to an end.
My actual feat was not changing my belief that I must accomplish perfection to avoid failure, not quite. On the surface, that’s what a character in MoR would call “learning to lose”. But really, learning to lose is accomplished by tabooing the words “lose” and “fail”, and seeing what outcome you really fear.
TLDR: Thinking in abstract terms about outcomes can be helpful, and having a default outcome that corresponds well to over-analyzing is great. But you may have trouble doing this at all, or at least getting “correctly weighted outcomes” if you don’t figure out what in your beliefs or values is really causing the heavy analysis. And that belief or value might be worth changing!