Irony of Planning: The Paradox of Relieving Anxiety by Creating More Anxiety

February 8th, 2023

Planning is a fundamental aspect of our lives. It provides us with a sense of control and predictability, enabling us to navigate the complexities of the world around us. We create plans to achieve our goals, whether they are personal, professional or even societal. However, despite our best efforts to use planning to alleviate anxiety, it often has the opposite effect. In an ironic twist, the very act of planning can create new anxieties, as we become increasingly worried about things not going according to plan.

This paradox is rooted in the nature of planning itself. When we make a plan, we have a vision in our minds of how things should unfold. We imagine the steps we will take, the obstacles we will face, and the outcomes we will achieve. This mental model provides us with a sense of comfort, as we believe that we have a roadmap for success. However, this comfort is often short-lived. As soon as we start to put our plan into action, we realize that the real world is much more complex and unpredictable than our imagination. Life is unforeseeable, and we are forced to confront unexpected challenges and setbacks.

This is when the anxiety sets in. We become worried that our plan is not working out as we had hoped. We worry that we will fail to achieve our goals, or that we will experience negative consequences. These worries are compounded by the fact that we have invested so much time, energy, and emotion into our plan. We feel that we have put so much at risk, and that there is now a great deal at stake. This creates a sense of pressure, as we feel that we must perform perfectly in order to succeed.

The irony of planning is that, in trying to relieve our anxiety about the plans going wrong, we end up creating even more plans to temporarily alleviate our stress. This is because we often set an impossibly high bar for ourselves and do not want to settle for less. We have imagined a perfect scenario, and we now believe that this scenario is the only way things can be. We have convinced ourselves that anything less than perfection is failure, and this creates a constant source of stress and anxiety.

A related concept to the irony is Hofstadter’s law, which states that “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law.” This law highlights the tendency for projects and tasks to take longer than we initially anticipate, due to unforeseen difficulties, unexpected challenges, and a range of other factors. When we make plans, we are already assuming that things will not go exactly according to plan, but we are still overly optimistic about the timeline of our projects and tasks. As a result, when we encounter the inevitable delays and setbacks, we become even more anxious and stressed, as we are now facing the prospect of falling behind schedule. This creates a vicious cycle of anxiety and stress, as we try to make up for lost time, and push ourselves to complete our tasks as soon as possible.

This is not to say that planning is not useful. It remains an indispensable tool for helping us achieve our goals and manage our lives. However, it is important to recognize the limitations of planning, and to avoid setting unrealistic expectations for ourselves. We need to acknowledge that the world is complex and unpredictable, and that our plans will always be subject to change. We need to be flexible, adaptable, and resilient, and we need to be able to accept that things will not always go according to plan. Only by doing so, we can truly reduce our anxiety, and find a more fulfilling and meaningful life.