Most smart people, especially founders and builders, feel a constant pull between what they worry about and what they can actually do. Former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf calls these your “sphere of concern” and “sphere of influence.” For many, the concern sphere balloons while influence shrinks, leading to overwhelm and a feeling of lost agency.
Andrew Huberman, host of the Huberman Lab podcast, recently sat down with Stumpf to discuss practical tools for mental resilience. One, an exercise from Stumpf’s book Drown Proof, offers a sharp way to cut through the noise and reclaim focus. Huberman called it a “game changer” for him, one he wished he’d learned in “junior high school.”
Key Takeaways
- Your brain often confuses what you worry about with what you can act on. Andy Stumpf argues your “sphere of concern, which for most people, to include myself, is very large” often overshadows your “sphere of influence, which is very small.”
- The core insight: you have “no control over what happens to me in my life but I have absolute and complete and total control over how I respond to it.” This is the switch from passive worry to active agency.
- Andrew Huberman stated Stumpf’s method has been “immensely powerful” for him, helping manage time better and focus on actionable aspects of life.
- The exercise forces you to distinguish between problems you can act on and those that merely cause the “thumb scroll of death,” a cycle of endless distraction without progress.
- Use the Influence vs. Concern Exercise to quickly identify what deserves your mental energy and what needs to be released.
The Influence vs. Concern Exercise
This method comes from Andy Stumpf’s book, Drown Proof, designed to help individuals regain a sense of agency and combat overwhelm.
- Step 1: Set Up: Take a standard piece of paper, draw a line down the middle.
- Step 2: Label Columns: Concern on one side, influence on the other.
- Step 3: Brainstorm: Write down the things that are occupying your waking hours.
- Step 4: Realize Control: Realization that I have no control over what happens to me in my life but I have absolute and complete and total control over how I respond to it.
When This Works (and When It Doesn't)
This exercise helps you step back and identify a healthy or an unhealthy attachment to issues. Being worried or concerned about an issue on the 'Concern' side doesn't change the outcome. However, everything on the 'Influence' side directly impacts what you can achieve. It’s a tool for developing efficiency and agency, allowing you to target your time and be effective, rather than getting stuck.
Where does this break down? It’s less effective for big, ambiguous strategic thinking where the "influence" isn't immediately clear, or for philosophical questions that don't have direct, immediate actions. This isn't a tool for vision casting, but rather for bringing order to daily operational overwhelm and emotional drag.
What to Do With This
Imagine you're a founder and your lead investor just pulled out of the upcoming funding round, citing "market uncertainty." You feel a knot in your stomach, a mix of panic and frustration. This is the perfect moment to pull out Stumpf's Influence vs. Concern Exercise.
1. Set Up: Grab a plain sheet of paper. Draw a line down the middle.
2. Label Columns: On the left, write "Concern." On the right, write "Influence."
3. Brainstorm: Quickly jot down everything occupying your mind related to this news.
* Concern: The investor pulling out, losing face with your team, running out of runway, market sentiment, competitor fundraising successes, doubts about your own ability.
* Influence: Call other potential investors in your pipeline, update your financial model to extend runway, explore bridge loan options, openly communicate the situation to your core team, refine your pitch with new data, focus on exceeding current revenue targets, learn from investor feedback, take a run to clear your head.
4. Realize Control: Look at the lists. You can't magically make the investor come back. That's outside your sphere of influence. But you have complete control over how you respond: Do you spiral into worry, or do you pivot fast, communicate clearly, and attack the problems you can change?