I really need a holiday.

I’m feeling stressed and trapped by my responsibilities, I get angry at people and at what they ask of me, I feel miserable at the end of most days.

Now, even just a year ago, I would have looked for a cause outside of myself: my job is unsatisfying, my boss is a dick, my colleagues are terrible, stuff like that… But as I got better and better at reflecting on how I feel, I started to notice again and again the old stoic wisdom that you hurt yourself by your own judgements.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

\- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.7

In almost all cases of my frustrations lately, I’m the one who causes the problem: I’m the one burdening myself with more responsibilities, I’m the one turning asks into shoulds, I’m the one taking badly small comments or decisions that in truth have nothing to do with me…

So there is a mechanism. Yet what is missing from that explanation, and from Stoicism in general, is a further explanation of why sometimes this psychological self-harm ramps up enormously. Many times, I’m fine handling massive workloads and worrying world events, but last sunday I got overwhelmed and almost had a panic attack while trying to bake foccacia… talk about giving way too many fucks when none are warranted.

My pet theory for explaining this effect is “emotional potential energy”.

In classical mechanics (and most of physics), potential energy is a trick we use to ensure conservation of energy: in a non-dissipative system (where there is no loss of energy, for example through friction), the potential energy is where the energy is stored when the system slows down (that is, when its kinetic energy decreases).

So if you throw a ball upward, its kinetic energy is getting converted into potential energy, until it reaches the highest point of its trajectory, where all the energy is potential (there is no movement and so no kinetic energy); and when it goes down, it starts converting its potential energy back into kinetic energy (accelerating).

I say potential energy is a trick, because the exact value doesn’t matter: what count is that the sum of potential and kinetic energy stays the same. This creates a really nice degree of freedom (what value to give to this sum), which is generally exploited to make the state of rest the one with 0 potential energy, thus simplifying computations tremendously.

Still, it’s a very useful trick.^[1] It transforms the unmanageable vector juggling of Newtonian Mechanics into the pure scalar manipulation of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics: all forces are converted into potential energy (fields technically), and thus they can be added easily and manipulated without remembering all the directions of the vectors. And more generally, the energy frame that potential energy enables has proven again and again its ability to expand our fundamental understanding of the principle of physics (for example with Quantum Electrodynamics).

That’s one of the intuition I want to leverage for “emotional potential energy”: the idea that a lot of varied small emotional annoyances and frustrations get converted to an undifferentiated form of energy.

Another key idea is that the more potential energy a system has, the less stable it is. So the more emotional potential energy you accumulate, the more emotionally unstable you become, self-inflicting more and more often the judgement that you have been harmed described by Marcus.

So my model is that as you go through your life, you accumulate more and more emotional potential energy from all kind of frustrations and pain and annoyance. And as it builds up, you become more and more unstable emotionally, and less and less able to calmly process the situation.

For me, high emotional potential energy leads to heaviness: I turn everything into a should, a burden, a responsibility. I lose the lightness and playfulness that is so essential to scientific and creative work. Everything becomes life or death, a test of my worth, and that kills all experimentation and learning instantly.

Now, how can we manage this emotional potential energy?

The first step is limiting its accumulation. The stoic sage or buddha might just not do it, never turning pain into suffering, but we are not enlightened yet. Instead, what I have personally found practical is to try to reflect quickly when feeling strong negative emotions, recontextualizing them, processing them, so they are not allowed to fester and poison me by building up too much emotional potential energy.

But since there is leakage, the build-up does happen. So we need to find ways to drain it. And I like to think of this release in terms of two main options: rest and sabbaticals

Rest is the obvious way to drain the emotional energy: just do things that are easy, relaxing, that make you feel better and release the tension. What lives here depends on personal taste, but classics include: reading, walking, meditating, exercising, sleeping, having sex, spending time with friends…

Yet I often find that rest hits diminishing returns quickly. I tend to get bored to death after a day or two fully dedicated to rest.

The other form of release I know of is sabbaticals. The word evokes months or years long changes of scenery, but even just a week works wonder. A sabbatical is much less about resting and recovering, and much more about following what makes sense and is exciting to you, what you want to be doing and exploring but have failed to find room for.

Personally, this is where curiosity and playfulness and exploration comes in: I have a lot of ideas and topics that excites me but which I can’t easily explore when I work, because they are never the priority, and I don’t have the room outside of work. So these are not about doing pure rest activities, but instead about doing something meaningful to you for its own sake, just because it is meaningful, not for deep optimization reasons.

Last but not least, how best to schedule this release of emotional potential energy?

It would be nice if you naturally noticed when it starts accumulating too much, and took steps then to drain it. But in practice, not only am I not well calibrated about how much release I need, it’s even worse: the more build up I have, the less able I am to notice the need for rest and sabbaticals. My anxiety takes over, making it even feel even more important to focus, to not miss a day, to not delay or slow down.

Which means that for people who tend to find themselves in this situation over and over again (I expect anxious people, but not only), I recommend what a friend of mine does: scheduling holidays in advance, and committing to actually take them when they arrive.^[2]

So that’s my plan for my next, close, deeply needed vacation: some rest, but a big dose of sabbatical, so I can release all that pent up emotional energy and find again the lightness that unlocks research insights.

1. ^{^}

   If you wonder why I keep calling it a trick and yet not disparaging it as “not real”, you can read my thoughts about the usefulness of “reality” as a concept.

2. ^{^}

   Modulo crunch time, but let’s be honest, it’s rarely actual crunch time.