Knowing yourself

Knowing yourself too much can sometimes mean you pay too much attention to low-probability low-impact events, which can result in overall poor decision-making

From the point of mental health, I’m not sure if “knowing yourself” is actually a good thing. Rather, I think there is a sweet spot of an “optimal amount of self-knowledge” that lets you lead life well without anxiety.

On the one hand, if you don’t know yourself well enough, you run the risk that you make wrong choices. For example, until my first ADHD diagnosis in 2012, I wasn’t aware of this aspect of myself, and how it affects the way I think. With full benfit of hindsight, I made a few poor career decisions before that, taking on jobs where too much attention to detail was required, and where my bursts of hyperfocus were actually a bug rather than a feature.

On the other hand, now that I’ve invested the last decade or more in getting to know myself better, I sometimes wonder if I know too much about myself, and if that makes me too conservative. Years of thought and mental pattern recognition have meant that I now know that there are certain tasks or situations that possibly trigger me, and through the process of backward induction, I start worrying prematurely. In fact, a therapist I saw a few years back put down a lot of my anxiety as “anticipatory anxiety”, that I get anxious in anticipation that something might go wrong.

A few years ago, Ravikiran Rao wrote this stellar post about the “Khumrah treadmill”, which he repeated here on Substack:

Beating the dead Khumrah horse

As you get to know yourself better, you might get anxious about newer and newer things thanks to the Khumrah treadmill.

Let’s take one example. From time to time, there are certain news items that trigger me. For example, going back about 4 years, there was the news about increasing Covid-19 cases and the lockdown going on forever and forever (for non-Indian readers- in India, during the lockdown, schools were closed, which made it incredibly hard for families).

Now, because you know that there is news that might trigger you, you start fearing sources that might deliver you the news. During that time (Covid lockdowns), I remember, I started getting a mild fear of newspapers, in the off chance that there might be something in there that might trigger me. So the fear of possibly getting news about lockdowns meant that I started fearing newspapers!

And then the backward induction / Khumrah treadmill continues - you know the newspaper might trigger you so you hesitate to pick it up from outside your door every morning. And so on and so forth.

This is just one example, and up to about two levels of Khumrah that I mentioned here. Because you’ve invested in knowing yourself on several different axes, and what you like and dislike, and what you might feel anxious about, it will start affecting your decision-making more than it should. For example, you might find that some people might potentially trigger you because of their thoughts or words or actions, and you start avoiding them. As a next step, you start avoiding people who hang out with them. You are the loser.

The problem is this - once you add one or two layers (“X triggers me. Y might cause X, so I’ll avoid Y. Z might cause Y, so I’ll avoid Z”) you’re playing with minuscule probabilities here. Your decision-making is now driven by your desire to eliminate very low probability events with a small downside. From an expected value perspective, it is next to nothing. Even if you adjust for risk or utility, it is next to nothing. Your decision-making gets warped.

Having written all of this, I wonder if it has so much to do with knowing yourself, or if the problem is to let your self-knowledge affect you far more than it needs to - where you look at the world in a binary manner rather than in terms of probabilities, and that leads to poor decision-making.

What does ADHD have to do with this?

When you get a diagnosis of neurodiversity, or mental illness, it is likely to play an outsized impact in your life. This is especially the case if, like in my case, the diagnosis explains so much of your decisions / actions / behaviours in your life thus far, Because it has explained so much of your life so far, you expect it to guide your decisions in your life going forward as well.

So every decision thereafter, you approach it from the point of view of your ADHD (or whatever other neurodiversity / mental illness). Soon you start using your ADHD (let’s stick to this) to build Khumrah treadmills around everything that is bothering you or might bother you - probabilities and potential impacts be damned. And that affects your decision making.

This takes me back to where we started from - some knowledge about yourself is good. That you know you have ADHD means you broadly make better choices (in the big decisions at least) and stop beating yourself up for what seemed like mistakes or inappropriate behaviours, and that can have a huge (positive) impact on your mental health.

However, letting your ADHD-driven “derivative triggers” guide your life (where you pay too much importance to low-probability low-impact events), you end up making a lot of bad decisions, and being unnecessarily conservative. In fact, dwelling too much on your ADHD when you make small decisions can actually lead to much worse anxiety.

Think (but not too much!) about this!

PS: For neurotypicals reading this, one difficulty that people with ADHD (I THINK - I’ve been told I’m possibly on the autism spectrum, though my psychiatrist has said there is no way to diagnose that now) have is “sizing”. Every decision is a decision, and the importance (and impact) doesn’t matter. You spend as much time deciding which school to put your child in, as you do in deciding what clothes she should wear to school today.

It is similar with how you react to things - an unexpected guest coming home affects you as much as (let’s say) moving to another house. So your incentives are vastly different to that of neurotypicals. Actually this is a topic for a full essay on another day.

PPS: I had a LOT of difficulty getting OpenAI to generate an image for this post. Anyway, here it is: