The Anxious-Boring Pendulum

career rest anxiety lifestyle sabbatical

The raw notebook draft that started this post — one open spread working through why rest keeps turning into anxiety.

I am reading a book called 停止内耗 — Stop Internal Friction. One concept in it has been stuck in my head: our lives are constantly oscillating between two states. Being anxious. And being boring.

That is it. That is the whole framework. And weirdly, it maps perfectly onto my current career break.

Rest, Then Anxiety

A few weeks ago, I made a deliberate decision to rest. Slow pace. Do as little as possible. Treat it like a real sabbatical, not a disguised job search. And for the first two days, it worked. I actually relaxed.

But by day three or four, the anxiety crept in. Not about money. Not about some looming deadline. Just this vague, itchy discomfort with doing nothing. My brain started hunting for productive things to latch onto.

So I started exploring:

Revamping my blog
Building a writing business (the idea of it, at least)
Job searching
Learning new programming trends

None of these were on my sabbatical plan. They were anxiety responses, dressed up as initiative. The book calls this the pendulum swing — you rest until rest feels wrong, then you overcorrect into busyness until busyness feels wrong. Repeat forever.

Which Side Do You Lean Toward?

The author suggests identifying which side you naturally lean toward, then building your life around that preference instead of fighting it.

For me, it is the boring side. I like time-blocking my days. I like keeping my lifestyle as constant as possible. I find stability energizing, not suffocating.

But here is the nuance I had to untangle: boring does not mean static. It means simple infrastructure with micro-autonomy.

For example, I basically eat at the same two restaurants every week. That sounds like a robotic routine. But within that constraint, I still choose what to order. The container is fixed; the content is free. That is the whole trick.

Same with my days right now. The schedule is boring. But within it, I decide:

What I want to write about
What topic I want to research
What feature I want to develop

The structure holds everything in place. The creativity just moves around inside it.

Boring Is Not Immune

But here is the part I did not expect. Choosing the boring lifestyle does not make the anxiety disappear. It just changes its shape.

Sometimes, in the middle of a very structured, very calm day, a different worry arrives. Am I being stagnant? Am I actually growing, or just repeating? Should I be doing more — learning more, building more, applying for more things?

This is not the restlessness of having too little to do. It is the restlessness of having exactly enough, and wondering if enough is actually too little by some standard I cannot see.

The difference now is that I know which side I lean toward. When that anxiety shows up, I do not immediately tear up my schedule and start a new project. I notice it. I let it sit for a while. And then I remember: this feeling is the pendulum trying to swing me toward the anxious side again. I do not have to follow it.

Knowing my preference does not stop the swing. But it gives me a direction to return to.

The Contradiction

The contradiction is not a bug. It is the operating system. You do not fix it. You just find a baseline that is boring, simple, and still has enough spice inside that you do not need to run away.