the personality axis: are you a tweaker, a chiller, a bogger, or a pepper?
the chronicles of an under-achieving over-achiever
A friend of mine once told about a theory, a pop-culture psychoanalysis that they had heard.
There are four dimensions across which a person can exist:
A tweaker: one who freaks out about anything. One who is always stressed and in a rush.
A chiller: one who takes life as it comes. One who is down to do anything and can go with the flow.
A bogger: one who is a party-pooper, who never wants to do anything.
A pepper: one who is always bringing up the energy– super preppy, seems-like-they’re-on-5-cups-of-coffee-at-all-times.
These four dimensions exist on an axis:
Everyone can be placed somewhere along both axes. You might be a bogger-tweaker (always freaking out and mellowing-out the energy), or a chiller-pepper (always laid back and hyping up the function).
But people aren’t black and white, so everyone can also exhibit tendencies that move them across any of the axes. You might be a chiller with tweaker tendencies for things you care about, or a bogger that can be a pepper around the right people.
discovering my character arc
For so much of my life, I was a 100% organic, pasture-raised, non-GMO’d tweaker (I’d say I was quite a centrist on the bogger-pepper axis). And most of my friends would agree. This began with the chronicles of being “the smart one” in high school. It continued to university, where I realized that there are about 15,000 tweakers around me at all times. So what could I do to maintain my relative tweaker status? Tweak more.
EVERYTHING stressed me out. I always thought I was behind schedule or running out of time, (when I was maybe studying 4 times as much as I should’ve for each exam and I was about 2 weeks ahead in all my classes). I was that obnoxious friend complaining that I had too many job interviews and only got a 94% on an exam (it’s okay, I hated myself too).
The other day, one of my friends whom I got close with in just the last few months said that she thinks I’m a chiller (with a few tweaker tendencies, but I don’t think those are going anywhere, nor do I want them to.) She also placed me as pepper-leaning (I had never before been the one who “hypes up the party”).
Essentially, the Isabelle character arc looked as follows:
That, honestly, was the best compliment I had heard in a while.
Where are you all on the graph?
understanding why I was there
Through some really insightful people in my life, I have gotten a lot better at psychoanalyzing myself and my tendencies. I learned a few things about myself after coming to university that allowed me to not just categorize myself as a tweaker, but to understand why I felt stuck there.
My self-esteem and productivity were correlated with a coefficient that would break statistics. This manifested itself as an obsession with optimizing my life, and an outlook on life that I’m constantly under-achieving (while being a textbook over-achiever on the outside). This pulled tendencies out of me that were not only bad for my health, but brought down those around me. And even though I could recognize that my stress levels needed to be reduced, the thought that this change might make me even slightly less productive killed me.
To desperately maintain this productivity to protect my self-esteem, I was intensely and subconsciously (and consciously) self-handicapping. Self-handicapping is the act of deliberately setting obstacles for yourself to justify your potential failure. This means I wasn’t taking real risks in case I failed, so that I wouldn’t have to say I “wasted time” or “wasn’t capable”. The irony is that this was exactly the opposite of what would’ve improved my self-esteem. These risks are necessary to feel meaningfully productive, so I was just shooting myself in the foot. This was where the feeling that I was constantly “under-achieving” came from.
Psychological math works differently than regular math. Objectively, being 10% good at something is better than 0%. Taking one step towards a goal brings you closer to your goal than taking 0 steps. But the brain doesn’t think this way, or at least my tweaking brain didn’t. In my head, 0% of the way meant I had the potential to be at 100% if I took a step. But if I took a step and only reached 10%, I would’ve achieved less than what I thought I could, meaning I failed.
With the above realizations, I could conclude with reasonable confidence that I was a tweaker because I was constantly pressuring myself to accomplish a TON and yet stopping myself from accomplishing much so I wouldn’t feel like a failure. Yeah, no wonder I wouldn’t even let myself take a lunch break.
But this realization alone didn’t give me much. It became more of something I felt that I had to accept about myself and live with. I read the generic advice of books and the internet, of TikTok and my traditional, Arab parents. But nothing really worked, which made me think I just wasn’t built to enjoy life. Destined to a fate of tweaking if I ever wanted to accomplish anything.
understanding how I got here
Since then, there are so many people, moments, and experiences that I’m incredibly thankful for that are responsible for the canon events in my life that pulled me to the right on this axis. In retrospect, I can reflect on the realizations that let me * exhale * , calm the f*ck down, and live.
Being productive, as it turned out, wasn’t what my self-esteem was craving. It was being creative. In other words, I didn’t need to do a TON of stuff to feel good about myself. I just wanted to do some really cool stuff. Realizing that what I cared about was being creative rather than being productive allowed me to slow down and take my time, because my goals changed: I realized it was the originality and quality of the output that mattered to me, not how much output I created. I was chasing the feeling of creating something of my own.
To be completely honest, I needed to be dragged a lot farther in the opposite direction than I was comfortable with to realize this. I became tooo chiller in the aspects of life that mattered to me. But sometimes a vacation in the opposite extreme is what’s necessary to give us an objective understanding of the aspects of where we came from that we want to keep, and which we want to throw away. (this is where the * tweaker tendencies * portion I still retain come from– I looked back at how I used to be and cherry-picked the parts I still want).
if you’re still reading, thanks for sticking around. this is where it gets interesting.
In my first piece, I had two goals:
To tell you guys a bit about myself
I feel that who I am now is not an accurate representation of my character arc and my values, so I also wanted to explain how I got here.
To tell you all the value I hope to share with you through my Substack.
The tweaker-chiller, bogger-pepper psychoanalysis is a pretty pop-culture, completely-unbacked-by-science scale on which we can begin to understand how each of our brains work differently. And it turns out that psychoanalyzing yourself is quite powerful when you have good advice to turn to on how to work on these pieces of yourself. So my goal, with you all, is to explore how we can understand the uniqueness and differences of our brains to know what will really work for us to achieve what we each define as greatness. And to never be stuck with the feeling of forced complacency because this is “just the way I am”.
So, that’s me. Tweaker made chiller, bogger working towards pepper. This character arc made me realize how passionate I am about the world in which I can create. It got me interested in the startup world. It got me interested in writing. It got me interested in reading research papers about how the brain does creativity. And about understanding & counteracting the things we do that prevent creativity without realizing. Excited to share all that I’ve learned :)
Welcome to “A Spark of Creativity”. Let’s psychoanalyze ourselves to greatness 🫶🏻
hello from a fellow used-to-be tweaker!!! i'd say i have a similar character arc as you, probably for similar reasons. i'd love to hear more about the experiences that got you to where you are now :)