Progress isn't gradual

I used to believe that progress with feeling more secure was roughly gradual:

It was very frustrating.

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I had terrible neck pain for years. Eventually, one day, I made some updates and experienced sudden relief. I didn’t experience pain for months, so I began to think my neck pain was history.

This is not what happened.

Soon, I began to notice moments where my neck was in great pain.

I got worried: Relapse!? Was all of my progress a lie??

To get a better sense of the problem, I started journaling every moment my neck felt tense. I knew my neck used to trigger in situations where I felt I wasn’t fully expressing myself socially and a few others — had this come back?

No—my neck wasn’t triggering in those situations, it was actually fine then. But: It was triggering in other situations I’d never noticed were triggers—such as when I felt like I wasn’t “being productive enough”.

I’d never noticed this feeling was a trigger—but, well, I also worry about my productivity very rarely.

As it turned out, my neck pain had multiple triggers. Some related to social interaction, others related to productivity, and yet others remained to be noticed:

I had unlearned many of the social triggers that preempted my neck pain, and yet other triggers remained.

(In retrospect this should’ve been more obvious: Just because you cure a cold or asthma doesn’t mean you never cough again.)

I also noticed that my triggers appeared to follow like a power law: a few were very common; the rest formed a longer tail.

Something that surprised me was that any trigger could preempt debilitating neck pain. I’d expected progress with my chronic pain to look like the pain gradually disappearing over a long time period, but it was more like the debilitating suffering started happening less and less often.

This mattered because it meant the way to track progress wasn’t “Do I feel good or bad today?”, but “How frequently do I experience good versus bad days?”

Now that I have a better model of progress, new moments of neck pain have gone from annoying (Uh oh is this relapse?) to exciting (I’ll be able to feel even more secure soon).

—@chrislakin | Writing | Now

V3. 2025 May 5 – 2025 Nov 8.