I've come to the conclusion that I've been doing something wrong in my writing, and I'm going to stop doing it.
The annoying thing is that fixing it requires making my writing slightly clunkier.
Conversation
The thing I've been doing wrong is this: I (as many others) like to make idiosyncratic use of single-word terminology with precise meaning. e.g. I've talked about anxiety vs worry, difficult vs hard, emotions vs feelings, labour vs work.
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All of these represented useful distinctions that it's important to make, but also all of these represent a more precise use of a single word than the colloquial use supports, and which in many cases people would make the opposite or different distinctions.
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The work vs labour one is particularly telling in that I've been observing recently that multiple authors make very similar distinctions, often using the words in the opposite way!
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The solution is, I think, to start using compound terms for these distinctions.
e.g. I already mostly did this in difficult problems and hard work. It's not a difficult/hard distinction, it's a difficult problem/hard work distinction.
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The work/labour distinction I used could probably be better expressed as something like wage-equivalent labour vs life work (this is a distinction I have from Thomas Green who had it from Hannah Arendt. I don't think these terms are perfect for her meaning but are close)
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Worry vs anxiety is something like "worrying about outcomes" vs "anxiety over uncertainty".
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Using the longer, clunkier, terms, makes the distinction more memorable, clearer, and lowers the cognitive load of keeping track of the point being made. It also makes the point more reusable outside of the context. It has many advantages.
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But also it makes the job of writing it harder (because you have to come up with good terms) and the writing clunkier (because you have these long terms you keep reusing), so I'm sulking a bit. It's the right call though.
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Replying to
This is brilliant. I tend towards compound words naturally, but never really thought about why. Nor did I realise that I was having trouble remembering your distinctions (hard/difficult being the most salient — since I reach for it the most often and you introduced it to me).