Stress. What a bitch.

It's simultaneously fundamental to how we evolved to exist, and horribly calibrated to today's existence.

It's necessary for effective planning, anticipating problems, and organizing almost anything. However, a rather large "but": our biological systems were designed for lions, tigers, and bears, and not, oh...my constant rumination on a never-dwindling todo list, or whether the cute girl at the gym also thinks I'm cute oh god I'm staring, or if the strange noises my cat is making are because he's possessed of a nefarious medical ailment, or if it's just 2 am and the zoomies are on every channel.

It's a classic old hardware, new software problem: society and culture et al are the software, and our largely unchanged physical selves (evolutionarily-speaking) are the old hardware.

Chess is a surprisingly good analog for leveraging this concept, and offers further insight into what to do about it.

For starters, the more you suck at chess, the more you experience real-time feedback. This is a straightforward mechanic. You don't see the impending doom coming; it just happens. When we suck at something, we're not good enough to anticipate our downfall.

This is similar to the acute, calibrated stress response our bodies instinctively have:

• Encounter a predator (or some equally-as-overused example of "caveman stuff").
• Get stressed.
• Stress injects superpower chemicals.
• Superpower chemicals help us handle the danger.
• Chemicals normalize, and stress response fades.

The as-not-yet-mentioned linchpin here is that our bodies don't have a stress meter (similar to this weightlifting framework). When we dump adrenaline to get ready for excrement hitting the fan, our endocrine system has no way of knowing if we're reacting to a rabid, rampaging 1200 pound grizzly bear or anxiety about the client pitch this afternoon.

(Rabid grizzlies are decidedly less common than the ilk of the latter variety.)

This is why this metaphor isn't a reach. While we're sitting cozy at home, Monday morning quarterbacking Grug's mammoth audible 50,000 years ago, where it obviously seems that a freaking mammoth must be more stressful than whatever we're ruminating on, our bodies largely don't know the difference between an actual mammoth, and a mammoth parking ticket. It's all in our perception of the stress.

Back to chess.

Let's say you're an intermediate player. You know some basic openings sequences, some tactical patterns, and make the noobie mistakes that toss a game out the window less frequently.

All good things.

However, in the spirit of this little stress test we're concocting, while you're aware of a whole lot more possibilities, your skill at navigating the full gamut of said possibilities is limited. And, the timeframe for making a mistake, and then feeling the effects of that mistake are stretched out. Fog of war stuff.

The intermediate player is the parallel for struggling with an untethered modern-day stress response: lots of anxiety^[1] for many tiny, evolutionarily-speaking, concerns.

One final, curious wrinkle:

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."^[2]

The best players in the world, the titled players (e.g., grandmasters and international masters), fall in this bucket.
It's indisputable that they have the most analytical and "computing power" of any skill-level^[3], which will stimulate the largest total "anxiety volume." And, the stakes for their games are much higher; sometimes their entire livelihood is chess.

However, masters 'filters' are nigh-infinitely more sophisticated: they can effortlessly eliminate possibilities and branches of moves the intermediate dwells on, and will equally-as-effortlessly, lose over.

Okay, let's take this to the endgame. I see a few possible takeaways, beyond the utility of the framework itself:

• Sometimes it's better to be a beginner. Purposely creating contexts where "being good" isn't a requisite can be powerful: hobbies, caring if your closet is Instagram-organized, etc.
• However, sometimes the takeaway really is just, "git gud." For endeavors we care about to the sacrifice of others, this is the clear answer.
• A corollary to the above point: managing stress is a skill that can and should be cultivated.
• Knowing more isn't always helpful. And further, a confluence of "intermediate perspectives" converging all at once, can be perilous to navigate.
• Implement "master level" filters wherever you can, and improve them as you go. In general thinking parlance, this is a version of what Jim Wendler, a well-known powerlifter and coach, calls "open mind (with filter)."^[4]