When beliefs, people, objects, behaviour, or anything particularly close to you is threatened, it's better to overreact and overcompensate WAY over what is needed to defend it than to underreact in such a manner that the threat still lingers and your cared about subject isn't completely safe.
I believe this with a fervent flame because a lot of my self-perception and worldview is constantly clashing, purposefully or not, with the majority of perceptions in my immediate environment, and if I didn't overcompensate when defending my deepest beliefs, I would pretty succinctly be streamrolled and amalgamated with the common mass of societal beliefs and cease to be a driven, if slightly odd, individual.
But you've got to be careful when doing this, because there are two critical chokepoints that can actually end up diminishing the utility you get from this: i) correctly identifying whether or not the threat is real, ii) whether you actually gain something from reacting to the threat.
Correctly Identifying The Threat
Analysis and understanding of the problem is the first step to solving it (George Polya, Solve It, 1945), and if done incorrectly, will be a case of terminal misdiagnosis. It is very easy to become trigger happy when it comes to defending the subjects closest to you (here, subject refers to beliefs, people, objects, behaviours or anything else that you might care about). But this trigger happiness can actually be to your own detriment, because there is a very good chance that it is going to break the feedback loop necessary for you to constantly improve.
If you take concern about your well-being or questions about your actions that are coming from a place of genuine observation or concern as a threat, you lose out on a lot of valuable signal. And even in the more benign case of misidentifying a threat that was never meant to beneficial and was instead innocuous, you have the opportunity cost of all the wasted effort put towards addressing this non-existent threat.
What's more, hair-trigger reactions to perceived threats from those close to you can irreparably damage interpersonal relations, which is actually the reason I started thinking about this overreaction in the first place. You do not want to lose the few people in your corner because you couldn't control a knee-jerk overreaction to something they did out of good will or didn't mean any harm by.
So, with all that said, you now understand the consequences of misidentifying a threat. How do you stop doing that?
1. Remove emotion from the equation as much as possible.
This applies to most decision making processes because emotion clouds judgement. Although emotion is what dictates what qualifies as a deeply valued subject, that is where its purview should stop. Any subsequent possible threats to that subject must be analyzed from as rational of a standpoint as possible.
2. Assume goodwill in the case of agents close to you and/or unknown agents.
You are a lot more likely to perceive an action as a threat if it comes from someone you view as a threat. When it comes to agents close to you that you know mostly have your best interests in mind (or what they think are your best interests, as long as there's not too wide of a divergence there, give them the benefit of the doubt. When it comes to unknown agents, take ambiguous actions whose second-order consequences even in the worst case scenario have bounded downsides, to be benign. However, if there is a possibility of a threat even in the worst case scenario, be wary and overreact at the first sign of a real threat (as given by thorough, rational analysis).
3. Delay judgement in the case of time-insensitive decisions.
While there will be times where you have to analyze a threat at the drop of a hat, most other times you have to analyze perceived threats are error-tolerant with respect to time horizons. If an event triggers a knee-jerk response to categorize it as a threat, step back. Meditate, go for a walk, whatever. Do not make decisions when emotionally aggravated. All of this is common decision making advice, just like point 1, but it is trite for a reason.
4. Understand the intended and possible effects of the perceived threat.
Deeply valued subjects have a tendency to warp the mind. This could be a good thing or bad thing depending on the subject, because this warping mostly takes the form of obsession, which is good with regards to your craft, but bad with regards to people. A consequence of this warping is a tendency to view all actions through the lens of this obsession. Not everything is about the things that you think about all the time, although it may seem like it. By understanding what the intended effect of a perceived threat is (if it came from an agent) you have a litmus test for whether the threat is intentional. But unintentional threats are still threats, so also give weight to an analysis of the possible effects, which is again, done objectively.
With all of that, you now hopefully have a framework and a set of heuristics to correctly gauge whether an action or event is actually a threat. But there will be times where responding to the threat just isn't worth it, because it might do more damage than it repairs.
What do you do then?
Gauging the necessity of a reaction
There are two main ways that a threat might not necessitate a reaction:
1. The threat itself is so miniscule that even the opportunity cost of putting in effort to react to it ends in a loss of a utility.
2. The threat is significant, but by overreacting or even reacting to it, you stand to damage something much more valuable to you.
So far in this essay I have been referring to "deeply valued subjects" as if they were a homogeneous group of entities that have no conflict with each other and are instead only threatened by external factors. This is, in fact, not true, and is a big reason as to why so many decisions in real life are messy. You're not only saving something - most times you're also sacrificing something else.
This is probably why "obsessed" people tend to do great work - since the subject that they're obsessed with is so valuable to them, it tends to drown out any and all noise when making decisions weighing the worth of their work against anything else. But for normal people, it's not as easy to decide between having time to spend with their family and having time to work on a startup or something similar.
But in most cases where such "sacrifice" is said to be needed, there seems to be one form of terminal misdiagnosis at work. The Pareto Frontier of Effort and Experience is much farther than you think. That is, you can do a lot of meaningful work before it starts to negatively impact other aspects of your life.
In situations where you have a threat to a certain part of your life that stems from another, equally important part, I think it's better to treat it as a problem of conflicting priorities rather than trying to fight against a threat, since that would make you significantly more willing to arrive at a compromise. This would entail that you understand how much you're willing to compromise on a deeply valued subject, which again depends on a thorough analysis of the problem and an understanding of whether you're even "compromising" on anything or just being flexible.
How to best set yourself up for success
A lot of threats you cannot control. A shitty PhD supervisor, a toxic friend group, VC interest drying out - there's a whole laundry list of these things. But it would make life a lot easier to eliminate all the threats you can control right off the bat, so you don't waste any time wrestling with yourself when there's a whole world's worth of problems at your doorstep.
The most salient, self-sabotaging threats are probably that of cognitive biases and a lack of discipline. Bad decision making mostly stems from flawed reasoning or incorrect conclusions, the root of which are cognitive biases. A lot more bad decisions are made due to incorrect decision making processes rather than incomplete information, especially in today's age - it is very rare that information that you're working with is so flawed or so incomplete that horribly bad decisions are made from them with sound logical reasoning.
A lack of discipline is the other aspect of self-sabotage. If cognitive biases mess with your planning, a lack of discipline messes with your execution. It's hard enough making decisions assuming you're a perfectly rational agent. But if you have to actively fight yourself when doing work, there is no way you're going to be able to manoeuvre and react fast enough to external threats.
So learn how to think well, and act well.
What now?
Now that you know when to not react to threats, what do you do when you have arrived at the conclusion that something is a real threat?
You fight. You put it all on the line, and you overreact to an extent that most people think is insane. You fight to protect that what is dear to you, and you ensure that you protect your deeply valued subjects till the last breath.
The problem with today's society is that quite a few people skip all the way to this step without going through the motions of considering the previous ones. If your default state is to rabidly defend all your beliefs without an analysis of the perceived threat, not only will you not learn, grow or expand your worldview, you will alienate the only people that are willing to try and have a conversation with you despite your opposing views.
And being stuck in echo chambers is not the most fun place to be if you value truth.
A possible solution to this is to just do genuinely hard things that you deeply care about. If your beliefs are all you have, you would tend to overestimate their importance in your own head. But if you're doing something genuinely hard and actually great, the amount of threats to your project and work are going to be so unbelievably high that low signal actions like the ones that typically tend to cause overreactions get drowned out.
Ergo, you should be grateful if you're in a position where you actually have to sit and think about how to analyze and deal with threats, because that means you're doing great work.
And while great work can be painful and stressful beyond belief, at least it isn't boring.