Escaping the Doom Loop

I brought my wife home from the hospital yesterday.

She was injured, and it was my fault.

The doctors weren’t quite sure how serious her injuries were, and as I watched her asleep from the cocktail of medications they had given her, I mentally screamed to myself:

“How the fuck did I get here?”

The Doom Loop

The doom loop is a reinforcing process where progressively linked negative situations lead to further deterioration and potentially catastrophic outcomes.

Throughout my life, I have witnessed the doom loop play out in many different kinds of situations, both in personal and professional life. I’m sure you have, too, but maybe you didn’t know what to call it. It can also take many forms.

Going on Tilt

I first realized and understood the concept of a doom loop when I started playing poker with friends years ago. I noticed all players had good and bad days, but for some, there seemed to be an emotional and mental breakdown when things didn’t go their way. They would make a mistake or miss a draw, then double down by making an emotional, bad decision, leading to more bad decisions. Their mood soured, and their mental state turned almost desperate as they began the inevitable outcome of making progressively worse, bad emotional decisions until they lost all of their chips.

I then noticed it in myself when playing poker early on.

“You’re on tilt,” my friend told me back then.

He meant that I had entered into a bad emotional state of not thinking clearly and beginning that same downward spiral of bad decisions.

This is an example of a doom loop.

The doom loop can have major and potentially catastrophic consequences. And even if it doesn’t have significant, “one-way door” types of outcomes, it can be at least painful and costly.

Over the years, I saw this same pattern occur occasionally in the personal and professional lives of various people I knew and observed.

Some people lost their jobs or even had their careers go completely off-track. Some lost their fiances, wives, or families, others life-long friends; some folks lost their health, and in lucky cases, some people would just go through a relatively bad period in their lives.

The doom loop can often be identified by a chain of bad decisions, lack of preparation, persistent bad attitude, poor mental or physical health, desperation, or just plain bad luck.

Organizational Behavior

In organizational contexts, the doom loop often manifests in a cycle of negative feedback, poor performance, and demotivation among employees. Poor results lead to lower morale and engagement, resulting in even worse performance, creating a downward spiral that can be challenging for an organization or employee to break out of.

There’s always a reason poor performance or bad culture exists in a company. Hopefully, those problems have solutions that are being meaningfully worked on. However, in some cases, performance or culture could be getting worse and not better and can result from some form of doom loop.

I believe doom loops have been, and are currently, affecting my company and my life. Ultimately, this can jeopardize my mission and the success of the company we are trying to build.

Warning Signs

It’s not like I didn’t have warnings.

“Stop, sit down right now,” my yoga instructor Harish told me three months ago as he ended our yoga lesson just 10 minutes in.

“If you continue like this, your body or mind will break. It’s only a matter of time. You already know what’s wrong with you.”

I had asked Harish if there was anything he could advise me from yoga that would help me sleep better. I was having trouble sleeping and experiencing a lot of stiffness and pain in my lower back.

Harish had asked me several questions about my work and work hours. He had also been working with me on some issues with flexibility and stiffness I’d been suffering from. After a short discussion, Harish stopped our lesson

“If you lose your health, how can you fulfill your mission?” he asked.

Three weeks ago, I couldn’t walk. After returning from India, I still had too many problems to address at our company.

Things worsened when I returned from India as progress slowed, and several key issues, problems, and bad culture became clear.

I had lower back pain from lack of exercise and from sitting in front of my computer, working all of the time and every day. My back worsened to a point where, for 2-3 days, I had to crawl and could not sit for extended periods.

While I fixed my back issue with more exercise and breaks throughout the day, I knew I wasn’t resolving all of my health issues well enough.

And then there was the continued problem of lack of sleep. It’s all bad when you only sleep 3-4 hours a night. Maybe I’d get over 5 hours on a good night, but those days were increasingly rare.

My Doom Loop

We have a lot of major problems at my company.

While we are fixing many problems, fixing these problems takes Herculean effort, especially given the army we have.

Problems at work cause massive stress; those problems require lots of work; lots of work causes a lack of time to exercise, which causes a lack of sleep, which in turn causes poor focus throughout the day, which potentially causes… doom.

The accident

I agreed to go rock climbing at the gym with my wife. I had recently trained to belay (holding a safety rope for a climbing partner) but was still new to belaying and climbing. Because I wasn’t sleeping much, I knew I needed more exercise to help me sleep more, and I thought going climbing would be a good way to spend time with my wife and exercise at the same time.

For the past few weeks, I had only been sleeping 3-4 hours a night, and although all the caffeine I was consuming in the morning made me feel fine, I wasn’t fine.

While my wife was climbing, I was distracted and tired. I didn’t pull the rope as I was belaying her. She fell 10-12 feet from her climb, but I didn’t pull in the rope, which should have broken her fall. She fell to the floor and hit her head and neck.

This was my fault.

Escaping the doom loop

Many times, I think we know. We know we are trapped in some kind of doom loop.

But in other cases, it needs to be made clear. There needs to be a yoga teacher or someone in your company or personal life to point out that you are in a doom loop. And when you identify a doom loop in others or at your company, you should make it clear, especially to someone you care about.

Root Cause

Escaping the doom loop requires not only identification but a move to action; this requires understanding the root cause of a doom loop.

The doom loop can affect a person, team, or entire organization. We often know the cause of the problem, but sometimes, we may only think we do.

It’s important to truly identify not only that there is a problem but what the root cause of the problem is.

In this case, sometimes getting external help can make a world of difference. Often, we can get so close to a problem and get so in the weeds that an external observer, even one without great training or expertise, can help us identify root causes we have lost perspective on.

Further, it’s always helpful to run typical exercises of 5 Whys or logic trees to help us think about root causes in a structured way.

Get out of tilt

When I used to play poker early on, I easily tilted and played terribly. However, over time, I rarely ever tilted again. And I got to a point where I won a lot; seriously, like a lot! And I got to the point where I could call out other people’s hands and cause them to tilt.

I believe a big part of the doom loop is a state of mind. It’s a state of emotional entrapment and hopelessness that can be overcome with practice and motivation. For those trapped in a doom loop, however, it can be a continuous state of victimhood, reactiveness, and desperation.

In my own experience, my doom loop had pushed me into a state of anger, resentment, and hopelessness.

“Daddy, why are you yelling so much at night? Are you ok?” my daughter Kaela asked me last week.

It’s time for a change.

How do we escape?

To be clear, I’m speaking as a victim of a doom loop who hasn’t figured it out yet. However, I at least know there has to be a strong motivation to change. I hadn’t been brought to the point where enough is enough.

Well, folks, I don’t think you can find any bigger motivation than what just happened to me.

I also believe that it will require a shift in mindset. A shift from defense to offense.

My patience is gone

Ultimately, it’s all my fault.

My doom loop is my fault. I could blame and have blamed, people at my company, India, my co-founders, or anyone else. But ultimately, I haven’t been making the hard decisions to end this doom loop.

I needed to have done the hard thing.

I also needed to stop always defaulting to sacrificing my health and my family, especially for uninvested people who don’t care.

Finally, I needed to force more accountability and bigger change, even if it’s just for the sake of change.

A fundamental duality is “character” vs. “cruelty.” In every duality, benefits accrue from a balance. However, I’ve operated with a dramatic orientation toward character at the expense of being taken advantage of repeatedly, lied to, and lied about, and have not responded with enough cruelty.

That time is over.

My patience is gone.

A virtuous cycle

The opposite of a doom loop is what is known as a “virtuous cycle.”

A virtuous cycle is a self-reinforcing process that results in successful outcomes. Each step in a virtuous cycle leads to positive results that further enhance the conditions for success, creating a cycle of continuous and reinforcing improvement.

This year, I hope for my company to establish all the foundational building blocks we need to start our virtuous cycle for organizational success.

Sometimes, these building blocks take a while to develop. Further, enough conviction and overwhelming force (Yang vs. Yin) are required to cause a change.

The first major building block for our virtuous cycle started with our product team. We brought in the right people with the right attitude towards learning who all fit our culture. While that team lacks key experience and knowledge in some areas, in other areas, they are better than some of the most successful product teams I have worked with in my career.

We’re getting there.

What about you?

How the fuck did you get where you are?

Are you, like me, trying to escape a doom loop?

Do yourself a favor; don’t wait.

Identify the problem and the root cause. Then, move towards action with overwhelming force.

Getting lucky

Well, folks, my wife woke up after sleeping for over 14 hours since yesterday. While she’s still numb on the left side of her body, she feels dramatically better and believes she’ll be ok.

I may have escaped a potentially catastrophic outcome from my doom loop.

You’ll have to excuse me now as I wrap up this post. I have a doom loop and consequences from my doom loop I need to attend to.

My doom loop could have proven catastrophic for me and my family. I think I got lucky this time. But I may not be so lucky the next time.

What about you?