Why shouldn’t you aim for the minimum?

For me, classifying this kind of thinking as dangerous is more powerful than thinking of it as bad or ineffective. I don’t just want to argue from anecdotes, especially since I had read some of these stories before my own breakdown. So, why is aiming for the minimum dangerous?

The minimum is a moving target

Let’s say you’re tired of lying unconscious in your bed for 8 hours every night. Fair enough! You want more hours in the day and decide to try sleeping less. Let’s say you do this pretty systematically: you track your reaction times and productive hours each day, and compare two weeks of your normal routine against two weeks of sleeping 7 hours a night. If your data looks good, and you feel okay, then you’ve just gained an hour a day! Nice.

Unless… if you are trying to minimize your hours of sleep, not just reduce them, your work is not done. You have established that the minimum amount of sleep you need is less than or equal to 7 hours of sleep per night. Time to sleep even less.

Minimization is greedy. You don’t get to celebrate that you’ve gained an hour a day, or done something impactful this week, because that minimizing urge is still looking at all your unclaimed time, and wondering why you aren’t using it better, too.

I had heard lots of clichés around this (“it’s a marathon, not a sprint!”) but the one that really got through to me was a therapist accusing me of thinking about my time in the same disordered way that some people think about their weight. She’d seen anorexic patients who knew that you shouldn’t get too thin, so they’d set a target weight. But after reaching the target, it was hard not to think… “Hey, I got here, and it wasn’t even that hard! Plus, I’m still not that skinny. What’s another five pounds?”

It’s not easy to build a Schelling fence in your mind. The minimum amount of self-care is a moving target, and if you fall below that minimum, bad things can happen.

By definition, less than the minimum is bad

If you get less than the minimum amount of sleep you need, you’re going to experience a few unpleasant days, but unless you fall asleep at the wheel of a car you’re likely to recover. In fact, your body can force recovery upon you via unplanned naps and sleeping through your morning alarms.

When you are aiming to minimize non-altruistic use of your time, money, and/or energy, things get a bit riskier. The signals of needing more self-care are more subtle than unplanned naps. By definition, though, less than the minimum necessary is not something you can sustain.

Some people seem to naturally have guardrails around this sort of thinking; they notice when they’re putting too much pressure on themselves and ease off. It’s not surprising that the effective altruism community, which selects for a willingness to make unusually large ethical commitments, attracts people who lack these guardrails.

Personally, it’s sort of astonishing that I was simultaneously working full-time, doing several impact-oriented side projects, suicidally depressed, and confident that I was spending way too much time selfishly looking after myself. I think being that suicidally depressed should have been a pretty strong signal that I was below the minimum, but at the time it felt easy to dismiss. I wish I had eased off before getting to the point of a breakdown.

Being at the minimum means having no slack

Obviously, my mental health problems were caused by more than a single disordered thought pattern. But because I was aiming for the minimum, I didn’t have any buffer to absorb disruptions like a (psychiatrist-advised) medication change. I was, sort of by intention, dangerously close to a breakdown.

Your ability to impact the world is directly dependent on your ability to function. The world is chaotic and lots of bad things happen, so sometimes events beyond your control will make your life suddenly harder. A supportive friend moves away. Your favourite café work space closes. A family member dies. A global pandemic happens. You might not even notice a load-bearing thing until it’s gone and everything gets mysteriously more difficult. You don’t need to be able to shrug off this kind of disruption, but you need to be able to survive it.

You don’t know exactly where the minimum is, and if you’re constantly skirting it, then you won’t have enough slack. You’ll end up collapsing because of some chaos beyond your control.

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