All-for-Nothing Angst

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You cook a meal only to learn your family grabbed fast food on their way home. You study all week for an exam but accidentally skip a 20-point essay question. You work for days on an extensive application for a scholarship, an internship, or a job and get a rejection, or worse, no response.

These examples from my life led me to struggle with "all-for-nothing angst," which I will refer to as AFNA for short. Looking back, they were minor hassles, but they caused a major upset at the time because I responded to them with the same pernicious thought: “All that effort was for nothing.”

My clients have also struggled with AFNA.

Sometimes, AFNA is reactionary, such as when you put a lot of effort into a project and don’t reap the fruits of your work. Other times, it’s future-oriented, such as when you struggle to start assignments because you anticipate both drudgery and the uncertainty of the outcome.

AFNA is related to other psychological struggles I have explored in previous posts, such as obsessive needs to avoid wasting time or to seek recognition.

Extreme thinking and fear of failure can also make you more vulnerable to AFNA. Specifically, you can get stuck on just one “correct” outcome. Such extreme thinking is why AFNA keeps us from taking the first step in creating better habits. For example, people might give up on environmentally friendly behaviors if they think their efforts won’t make a difference.

Another behavior that makes people more likely to experience all-for-nothing angst is "precrastination," or the need to get things done as soon as possible. While precrastination can prevent the discomfort of having a longer to-do list, it can also lead to wasted effort when you make mistakes because you are trying to do too much at once. Precrastination can also limit the potential to develop ideas.

Alternatively, AFNA can prevent you from making future mistakes if accompanied by radically open dialectical behavior therapy (RO-DBT), which clinicians call healthy self-doubt. This entails questioning whether there is something to learn from a situation without harshly blaming yourself or others. For example, healthy self-doubt can help you reconsider whether you are trying to finish tasks even when you are tired and prone to making careless errors.

In contrast, unhealthy self-doubt can lead to denying mistakes and getting further entrenched in error. An example is driving halfway to your friend’s house, realizing you never called to make sure they were home, and yet refusing to pull over and call. Instead, you forge ahead at the risk of wasting even more effort.

Successful people take what others might see as a waste of effort in stride, and better yet, they can capitalize on them. For example, in his interview with psychologist Adam Grant, bestselling author John Green shared that he spent almost a year writing a novel about teenagers stranded on a desert island, only to realize he was dissatisfied with the project, which caused him to abandon it. However, he kept one sentence he liked: “It was kind of a beautiful day,” and put it in The Fault in Our Stars. What might have been an all-for-nothing moment was the kernel of a critically acclaimed work.

AFNA undermines the value of trusting that there is a process behind your endeavors. For example, American novelist Lauren Groff handwrites her first drafts and puts them in a box, never to look at them again. Her rationale is that she will remember only the best parts when writing subsequent drafts.

Although Groff’s process is intentional, it can be helpful to keep in mind in the face of AFNA moments. The trick is believing there might be something to learn or gain from an apparently wasted effort, even if you don’t know at the time what that benefit might be. By learning to accept loss, you open yourself up to the potential for personal growth. The idea here is that experience is never entirely wasted. It is part of the journey that makes life more interesting.

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You can begin the work of coping with AFNA by recognizing its destructive nature and committing to not allowing it to hijack your emotional well-being. Here are some suggestions to help you respond in a proactive way:

1. Accept that AFNA is part of life. Everyone has had all-for-nothing moments. If you believe you’ve had them more than others, it might be because obsessive efforts to avoid waste lead to self-sabotage. This is consistent with the downsides of "precrastination," as well as research showing that neurotic people tend to be more prone to experiencing negative events. Learning to let go will lead to wasting less of your mental energy.
2. Have hope in recovering mental energy. While you might not be able to avoid the pinch of AFNA, you can foster hope that your motivation will come again. In the meanwhile, be willing to file your efforts (mentally or by writing down the experience and saving it in an actual file) for potential later use.
3. Link your angst to a need. If wasted effort is causing you more angst than you think it should, it could signal that you have an unmet need, such as to rest, slow down, or seek encouragement from others.
4. Budget your mental energy like you manage time. Monitor your mental energy expenditure. Taking time to recharge and spreading out mentally taxing work will help prevent all-for-nothing moments and put them in perspective when they happen.

Placing a value on handling all-for-nothing angst with grace is consistent with the idea of the stoic challenge or re-framing unexpected disappointments as tests of emotional endurance. Believing in your inner strength can go a long way toward cultivating resilience.