How Depression Helped Me Conquer the Loss Aversion Bias

Every day I make more decisions about what I’m not going to do than what I am going to do.

The next time you’re meeting up with a group of people pay attention to how long it takes the conversation to turn to how busy they are. Extra points if at least one person complains about being overly busy. The hectic lifestyle is our cultural norm. Try to not talk about being busy. I dare you.

Unfortunately, I can’t do busy. It will send me straight down a dark depression spiral. In order to stay healthy, I have to make sure there is a lot of open space in my days. This means I’m almost never too busy. And most of the time I’m not what you would even call busy. I do a lot of stuff every day, but I don’t do even more. I used to be as crazy busy as the next person, but then a bout of really bad depression made it impossible to maintain. I was forced to deal with my loss aversion bias in the most dramatic ways: I had to stop doing basically everything.

The loss aversion bias is people’s preference for gains over losses. We have a preference for solving problems by adding something rather than subtracting. Loss aversion is one of the major reasons people become exhausted and burned out. When I hear someone talk about how overly busy and stressed out they are, I know the next thing they’ll say is probably going to be about how they’re adding even more to their plate.

No one ever says they’re jettisoning things. They may talk about carving out time to be mindful, resting more. But that’s adding something, right? That’s one more thing to put on the to-do list. Or they may talk about how they’ve “failed” at accomplishing something. But almost never do they ever say they’re letting things go on purpose, joyfully. People prefer to figure out how to do everything more efficiently, using productivity hacks. Better time management, better sleep, better diet—we can do it all if we find the right ingredients to add to our life.

When you have mental health challenges you learn over time how to prioritize tasks, whittle life down to the essentials. When you are forced to jettison everything, you begin to understand what really matters. You become inured to and even accepting of the loss of productivity because you’ve learned to recognize extraneous stuff that you don’t really have to do, were doing only because you thought you had to, or were giving in to external pressures. Over time you figure out how to divide your goals into those that really do enhance your quality of life, and those that decrease it. And you jettison the latter,because you have one overarching goal: feeling good enough that you want to be alive in this world. Everything else follows from that.

I honestly think that on my better days my quality of life and happiness may be on par with or even greater than what I see in people who don’t struggle with mental health issues. Sure, I have some bad times, but they’ve taught me to slow down, open up space for myself, let go of all the pressures. I’ve been forced to learn the important lesson that if you want to get the most out of life, you have to give up more than you add.

This goes against instinct. Why? Because when you lose things, you feel bad. Adding things gives you that nice dopamine hit. Adding things is condoned, busyness makes you seem accomplished and important. Doing less? On purpose? I can tell you that in conversations about busyness I am always the only person who talks about not getting stuff done in a positive way, as something I intentionally practice. Maybe people think I just must not have ambition or the responsibilities they do; possibly they think I’m lazy. True, not true? Who knows. Comparing two people’s lives is that whole apples and oranges thing. What I do know is that every day I make more decisions about what I’m not going to do than what I am going to do. This is the way I choose to live. And I believe that most people have the capacity to make empowering choices for themselves regardless of life circumstances.

Does this way of life mean I lose out on things? Absolutely. Does it mean I sometimes disappoint people? Yep. And that is hard, but it gets easier over time. Because what I gain is so much better than anything I ever got from adding to my burdens in a misguided attempt to solve them. Every time I “lose out” on something because I’ve made a decision to pursue quality of life over productivity, busyness, and giving in to external pressures, I feel better. It becomes a bit like ripping off a Band-Aid. There’s always a sting, but you kind of start to look forward to it, because that fresh air hitting new skin is the feeling of freedom.