Coaching practices for This One Problem Has Swelled Up to Fill My Entire Field of Vision Like It's the Only Thing in the World and I've Lost All Sense of How Small it Actually is Against Everything Else and How Little It'll Matter a Year From Now
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For This One Problem Has Swelled Up to Fill My Entire Field of Vision Like It's the Only Thing in the World and I've Lost All Sense of How Small it Actually is Against Everything Else and How Little It'll Matter a Year From Now, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- This one problem has swallowed my whole field of vision
- This one problem has swelled up to fill my entire field of vision, like it’s the only thing in the world
- This one thing has swallowed my whole field of view
- This thing has swallowed my whole field of view
- This one thing has swallowed my whole field of view
Practices that may help
- The view from above
Zoom out — picture your situation from high above, in the scale of the city, the world, and time.
Stoicism, as a Set of Practices - Place it in the scale of the whole
Set your problem against the size of the universe and the brevity of all human time.
Meditations, as Marcus Practiced It - The view from outside your life
Mentally zoom out until your current problem shrinks to its actual scale.
Zhuangzi and the Practice of Perspective Shift - Ask: how will this look in one year, five years?
Project forward to check whether the catastrophe still looks catastrophic from a temporal distance.
Decatastrophizing, Made Practical - The spatial zoom-out
Mentally lift yourself out of the room and rise until you see the whole world spread below you.
The View from Above - Deliberately invoke the small-self shift
Seek an encounter with something genuinely vast to let your personal concerns be re-proportioned.
Awe and the Small Self - Zoom out in time
Ask how much this will matter in ten years to shrink a present crisis to size.
Self-Distancing: Thinking Clearly About Your Own Problems - Identify the other things that will also be true of your future life
Focalism makes future events seem bigger than they are by ignoring all the other things that will still be present.
Affect Forecasting: Why You Mispredicted How You’d Feel - Zoom out from the single loss to the aggregate
A loss looks catastrophic in isolation and trivial across the whole portfolio of your life.
Loss Aversion, Made Practical - The temporal zoom-out
Set today’s problem against a year, a decade, a century — and ask whether it still ranks.
The View from Above
Related concerns
- When Decatastrophizing Time Perspective Shift
Project forward to check whether the catastrophe still looks catastrophic from a temporal distance.
Ask: how will this look in one year, five years?
- When Reappraisal Vs Suppression Distance Reappraisal
Step back from the situation and think about it as if you were an observer, or as if it were happening to someone else.
Distancing reappraisal
- When The View From Above Spatial Zoom Out
Mentally lift yourself out of the room and rise until you see the whole world spread below you.
The spatial zoom-out
- When Zhuangzi Perspective Shift View From Outside Life
Mentally zoom out until your current problem shrinks to its actual scale.
The view from outside your life
- When Loss Aversion Zoom Out To Aggregate
A loss looks catastrophic in isolation and trivial across the whole portfolio of your life.
Zoom out from the single loss to the aggregate
- When Stoicism View From Above
Zoom out — picture your situation from high above, in the scale of the city, the world, and time.
The view from above
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.