A while ago, a struggling student emailed me to ask about his prospect of passing. He included the phrase,
“Lately, I have been putting forth what seems to me to be an incredible effort to improve my grade.”
While his grade was quite bad, the student had previously shown flashes of focus. I was intrigued. Maybe the brief chat I’d had with him about his work ethic had gotten through? Maybe he’d turned over a new leaf? With hope for this young man in my heart, I logged into our online homework system to see… that he had completed 2 of the last 100 homework problems. A total of 11 minutes of effort.
Not so incredible.
With my hopes of a brighter semester for this student dashed, I wondered why he had written that line in his email. Did he think that I would be fooled, not even look at the assignments, and go ahead and give him that “A” that only comes with such an obviously incredible effort? Maybe he wanted to advertise himself as hard-working, planting a seed in my mind for a future recommendation.
Perhaps the most likely truth is that the student really believed that he was putting forth great effort. Maybe he thinks a lot about math homework, even stresses about it. That can be tiring, so it feels like work, even when no actual progress was made.
What’s sad is that if the student put as much effort into doing math as he put into pained rumination, he probably would have passed the class.
But I can empathize. This is a common human struggle. We think about someone’s birthday gift so much that it feels like we’ve put a lot of effort into it, even if the end result was going back and getting the first gift we saw. We often worry about how to appropriately respond to a text, but the end result is just sending an emoji. Or maybe we spend a whole weekend considering whether we might put some hours into a work project, but we never do.
We’d like the amount of stress we put in, to somehow be equal to the quality of our output. But it typically doesn’t work this way. Our brains like to crank away, even when there’s no cream in the churn.
This happens quite a bit with climbing too. I often see folks sitting at the base of a crag for 45 minutes after they’ve arrived, doing a lot of hemming and hawing about what route they want to try and who’s going to climb first. “Maybe I’ll just take it easy today and climb well below my limit,” we often say. This is almost always a product of stress. That first route, or maybe that first challenging route — the one with the unknown hold quality and uncertain clipping positions — can be a tough thing to embark on… especially with people watching your performance.
Some climbers circumnavigate this stress by picking a project (along with the same two warm-ups) to work every climbing day for months or years. Another possible stress avoidance strategy is only climbing at a level that we can comfortably onsight. These are fine options if it’s what you truly want out of the sport, but I think most of us strive to be stronger, more competent, and more comfortable in a variety of situations.
In a similar attempt to avoid immediate stress, some math students don’t show up to class at all, or try very little when they do. And some people don’t attempt gift giving, thoughtful texting, work projects, or anything that might have a rewarding payoff.
Maybe it’s not the lack of optimal action that is so troubling with each of these scenarios. It’s that stress took joy away from our lives regardless.
So how can we reduce this unnecessary perceived effort while still feeling a sense of satisfaction with our lives? Or, in other words, how do we improve our productivity to stress ratio?
I may have fallen (I only ask that you allow me to make falling puns for… the rest of my life) into one answer to this question after my accident. A lot of people ask me how I dealt with the emotional toll of not being able to leave my room for 3 months, or the lack of consistency in my subsequent recovery. And while I’ve done a handful of things to maintain sanity, the truest answer seems to be, “complete resignation.”
I haven’t had much of a choice in the matter.
Climbing, walking, standing, or even sitting up quickly were just not going to happen for me. And if I still need a cane, almost 5 months later, then there’s not much I can do about that. Accepting my position, however undesirable, allowed me to move forward.
So maybe if we can make decisions, and accept them as if we have no further choice in the matter, then we’ve cracked it.
Don’t know which route to climb? Pick the one that is first alphabetically. Blame the Gods and bail if it doesn’t work out.
Can’t decide which of the 60 peanut butter options to go with? Choose randomly and call your next PB&J the “sandwich of fate”.
Don’t know what gift to choose? Go with your gut — it usually works out for gifts. Or give the gift of the peanut butter that you hated.
Accept that you’re a math student and give it your best. Schedule times to work, and work. Schedule times to not work, and don’t work. Choose the nearest poop emoji for the text (or essay images) you’re not sure about, or just write, “I don’t know how to respond”. Decision made. In most situations, any decision will do just fine. And if you’re unhappy with one, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to redeem yourself.
Just don’t let stress take the joy out of… everything. Living shouldn’t take an incredible effort.