🔻 The Power of Doing Less, Not More

How hidden biases in our to-do lists may be hindering mental well-being

When we try to solve problems or improve our mental well-being, we tend to gravitate toward adding tasks to our lives: start meditating, try journaling, take up exercise, etc.

The problem with these helpful suggestions is that they all point in one direction by constantly telling people to do more. Even if we put aside the fact that constantly adding tasks to our lives is unsustainable, we’re left with a landscape of suggestions that completely ignore the possibility of improving our lives by removing certain actions or habits.

It’s highly unlikely that all of the best mental health strategies involve adding something to our lives. Sometimes, we need to avoid particular actions or give up old habits rather than commit to new actions, but we don’t fairly weigh these more passive options.

A new study explores how widespread this bias is in our daily decision-making. The results confirm that people consistently give more additive than subtractive suggestions when trying to improve mental health. This may be contributing to a growing sense of overwhelm in our personal lives.

📈 The pervasive do-more bias in mental health advice

In a new set of experiments published in August 2025, researchers examined how people give and perceive mental health advice. Their goal was to understand whether we naturally encourage additive (e.g. start yoga) over subtractive (e.g. stop doomscrolling) well-being strategies and whether this bias persists across different platforms, relationships, and situations.

In the first couple of experiments, participants were presented with short vignettes describing people experiencing depression or anxiety. Some vignettes included characters who were already engaged in many supportive health behaviors (e.g. volunteering, exercising), while others described people engaging in harmful behaviors (e.g. smoking, gambling).

Participants were asked to offer advice that might “improve the current mental state” of the character. The researchers then recruited coders who were blind to the study hypotheses and asked them to code the participant responses for additive vs subtractive suggestions.

Overall, responses showed that people were significantly more likely to offer additive rather than subtractive advice.

In another more naturalistic study, the researchers analyzed Reddit comments offering advice in depression and anxiety subreddits. Similar to the previous studies, blind coders labeled advice given on Reddit as either additive or subtractive. And once again, people were significantly more likely to give additive over subtractive advice, regardless of how many activities the original advice requester said they already engaged in.

A fourth study introduced a twist. Instead of generating their own mental well-being advice, participants were asked to rate the effectiveness and feasibility of advice given by other people. In addition to the previous biases in producing advice, this study revealed a strong bias in how people perceived additive vs subtractive advice. People rated additive advice as more effective and more feasible than subtractive advice, and they said they’d be more likely to adopt the additive advice themselves.

Even when the researchers explicitly taught people about additive vs subtractive mental well-being strategies and asked for a list of each type of advice separately, participants still gave more additive than subtractive advice. Clear prompting and emphasizing didn’t do much to remedy the bias.

In a final study, the researchers gave up on humans and tested ChatGPT instead, asking it to recommend changes a person could make to manage their mental health. Just like humans, the large language model preferred to give additive rather than subtractive advice.

So the additive advice bias seems quite comprehensive, affecting man and machine in a range of different scenarios and contexts. However, there was one interesting variable that did seem to boost people’s willingness to give subtractive advice. When people were asked to imagine giving advice to a close friend instead of a stranger or themselves, they suddenly gave significantly more subtractive advice and rated that advice as more likely to be beneficial than the additive advice.

When we think of what we should do to improve our own mental well-being or what the average person should do, we tend to lean toward greater action and extra life activities. But when we imagine the people we love most, we have a more balanced outlook and we’re more sympathetic toward the idea that removing activities from our lives may be just as beneficial for our mental health.

For ourselves and strangers, we seem to operate under an implicit assumption that we can only improve our mental health with less laziness and more commitment: “go to the gym”, “work harder”, “keep a journal”, “DO MORE!”. Our closest friends pull more nuanced thinking out of us, opening up subtractive options such as “quit smoking”, “drink less”, “stop multitasking”, “reduce your screen-time”, etc.

It’s possible that we’re just less willing to give up our own pleasurable vices so we lean toward new actions instead. For example, if we want to lose weight, we may choose to exercise more instead of cutting out tempting junk food. Or maybe we’re just more sensitive to seeing when a friend is over-exerting themselves—we’re frequently more forgiving and generous toward our friends than we are to ourselves across many areas of life. Indeed, when you’re struggling with a stressful event, it’s often a good idea to imagine what you would say to a friend if they were in your situation, because it helps to distance yourself from your self-focused biases when coming up with good advice.

If we can learn to be as forgiving and pragmatic about our own lives as those of our friends, we may be better able to follow the right advice at the right time and improve our mental well-being.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

#1. Ask yourself: what can I remove, not just add?

• Whether helping yourself or someone else, remember that mental health can often be improved by doing less. Instead of defaulting to the next habit, intervention, or fashionable life-hack (ice bath?), consider what might be draining energy or creating stress in your life that could be reduced or eliminated.

#2. Let go of the myth that effort equals value

• We often assume actions requiring effort will be better than actions requiring less effort, but that isn’t always true. When considering the best course of action, try to assess next steps in terms of expected outcomes, not just effort required. For example, if someone wants to lose weight, a sensible concern about taking weight loss drugs might be that they won’t enhance strength or fitness as much as physical exercise will, but an irrelevant concern would be that the drugs are “just the lazy way out”.

#3. Beware of overwhelm

• Sometimes, it’s hard to foresee how new plans of action can quickly become unmanageable. Additive advice can unintentionally create pressure on different areas of our lives by taking away free time or energy from other important activities. Be mindful that a long list of new tasks—even if they’re “good for you”—might not be helpful if you’re feeling run-down or if there’s a risk of overload. In some circumstances, the best advice is simply to pause, rest, or let go.

“Change based on principle is progress. Constant change without principle becomes chaos.”

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

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