Graph of productivity vs anxiety

http://jimhines.livejournal.com/724969.html

This post describes a productivity vs anxiety graph as a bell curve: no anxiety and you don't work on something at all; too much and you're too terrified to start.

What I take away is that if someone isn't doing something you think they should, the right answer isn't always "come up with more and more and more reasons why they should". If their problem was "they couldn't be bothered", that will help. But if the problem is "they're paralysed by terror", making it MORE urgent will make it HARDER to start, not easier.

I feel, when I'm procrastinating, I'm often in the "paralysed" state. And I feel people should be entitled to say "get on and do it" to me, but that if they want to help, it would be more useful to start by asking "do you want more urgency or more reassurance" and provide whichever I ask for.

Contrariwise, if it's something I've promised to do, and someone's dependant on that, it's my responsibility to manage my internal emotional state, not theirs, and I can't expect someone at work etc to automatically accommodate me. But I've tried to get better at recognising the problem, and asking for what I need, rather than just assuming that what I need isn't obvious, I'm wrong for needing it.

Punching Up/Punching Down and Ring Theory

Punching Up/Punching Down

"Punching up" is verbally attacking someone oppressive of you. "Punching down" is verbally attacking someone more vulnerable than you. The former is a source of good comedy, the latter is bullying.

I recently read a good article on the topic, but I can't find it now. Does anyone remember? One thing it stressed is that it depends on the topic as well as the person: you can't divide people into "more marginalised than me" and "less marginalised than me" and say whatever you want to the latter group.

If someone is a high profile politician you strongly disagree with, it's still wrong to mock them for their race, or for looking ugly, or for being a woman, or for showing emotion when someone they love died (a) because it hurts OTHER PEOPLE who fit those characteristics and (b) because they still deserve SOME human courtesy, even if they're normally vile.

Circle theory

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407,0,6378839.story#axzz2uWlFqsEF

When someone has a personal disaster (eg. illness, lost job, family member died), think of concentric rings. The inner circle is the person most affected. The next are the people closest to them (eg. immediate family). The next are friends of *those* people. Etc.

And the general idea is to display a lot of tolerance to people in a smaller circle than you, and to seek support from people in the next circle out from you. Someone in an inner circle is likely to rant a lot of things it helps them to say, some right, some wrong. Correct them only if it helps *them*. And then go and bitch outward to *your* friends about how difficult it is and how conflicted you feel.

When put like that, it sounds obvious, but I found it wasn't clear until it was pointed out. It's not just a matter of "correct" and "incorrect", you expect people to need to vent when they don't have the emotional energy to be 100% precise all the time.

Putting them together

When I read them close together, I found the ring theory a good way of thinking about punching up and punching down. You don't necessarily have to agree that people more marginalised than you are 100% right about everything they say, in order to respect what they're saying even if you think it could be expressed a lot better.

That last sentence is something that should be obvious, but I've struggled a lot with, the difference between agreeing someone is justified in saying something, and automatically adopting it as a canonical truth about the universe.

And a lot of difficulty comes when people are in different circles on different topics. Sometimes someone's just wrong: some people feel personally offended that they can't continue to exploit someone else, but they're not actually suffering MORE than everyone else. But sometimes, two groups of people are in an inner circle on two different but overlapping topics, or both are marginalised by society, even if one more than the other. And both need to express their resentment, but accidentally catch the other in the cross-fire. And that's unavoidable at least some of the time, you can't always predict it, so you have to be ready to apologise for hurting the other group, without automatically saying "my group is 100% wrong about everything".