Tag: introspection

Modes, not traits, and decoupling cognitive energy from intentionality

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[Epistemic status: speculation from single n of 1 experiences that I’m excited about]

I had a really effective second half of my day today, and right now I’m going to speculate about some of the mechanics of that.

Modes, not traits

Some relevant background to this is a thought that I had two weeks ago:

“I shouldn’t think of terms in terms of ways that I should be or things that I should do, but rather __modes__ that I could get into that are useful sometimes. Even if I want to be in those modes most days, I should still think of them as separate modes and not as default states.”

This is important because a lot of ways that I want to be consume some resource, so I can’t actually maintain them perpetually. I might want to be habitually hyper-productive, but since I probably can’t be hyper-productive for literally all of my waking hours (I need rest and stuff), if I try to always be hyper productive, I’ll fail, and never really build the habit. Instead, I should have a hyper-productive mode and build the habit of  getting into that mode regularly.

This is maybe obvious to a lot of you, but it seems like a useful insight to me. (I wonder if I’m on the verge of reinventng “work/life balance” in the same way that I reinvented “its good to have a room.”)

I think this goes pretty deep, and there are a number of different not-necessarily mutually exclusive modes at various levels of subtlety. (For one thing, I have a mode for syncing with Anna: our natures tend to clash by default, but these days she either meets me in something like my way of being, or I meet her at something like her way of being.)

But here are three high level, high granularity modes / ways of being / high-level intentions that it seems like I would want to operate from on a regular basis.

  • Rest
  • Executing intentions mindset / committed engagement [manager time]
  • Slow thinking / deep work / mono-focus [maker time]

The rest of this post will be about holding the Executing intentions mindset.

Maintaining taughtness

My current sense of how to do the Executing Intentions mode well, involves maintaining “taughtness” / “tension” across the whole period that you’re in that mode. That’s a phenomenological description: it feels like there’s a sort of tension that I can let go slack. It has something to do with remembering the executing intentions meta-intention? Or having the context of the tasks that I’m doing loaded up and available?

One reason why this worked well today, I think, was that I decided that I was going to stop listening to audio-books for the time being. I might usually listen to an audiobook as I walk somewhere, but this tends to take me out of the EI mindset, what was taught becomes slack.

Other ways that I can fall out of it:

  • Looking at my phone in the bathroom.
  • Making food and eating, and especially listening to audio while making food.

Each of these have a character of “I’m doing this mundane thing right now, I might as well occupy my mind with something entertaining or informative.” It might be that that engagement with that material kicks out the EI meta-intention, because my mind is filled with other content. But it feels more like all of those behaviors have a kind of lackadaisical attitude, like “its fine to slow down and spend time here”, instead of the momentum of one thing after another.

I did take breaks today, but they had a different character than most breaks I take. They were more intentional: more circumscribed, less distracted. I intentionally decided how long each one was going to be, and set a timer, but more importantly than the timer, there was a part of me that didn’t turn off during the break, I was still geared up to take the next thing coming at me. I’m confident this is less restful than other kinds of breaks, and thus it is crucial that this is only a mode and that one also have a rest mode, when you release all the tension and taughtness.

Decoupling energy levels from intentionality

Another thing that happened today is that at the end of my session, I was feeling cognitively drained. I think that usually, that would cause me to disengage from the EI mindset and release my conscious hold on my intentionality. But this time, I was more like “I notice that I am cognitively drained. My job in this time-slice is to recover cognitive energy.” and I went to go strength train.

I think there’s something important here: I was decoupling how tried I felt from how intentional I was going to be.

This seems important on a number of counts

  • For one thing it caused me to strength train during my work day, which sometimes gets skipped.
  • Additionally, this sort of rolling with the punches enabled me to maintain the taughtness, instead of abandoning the attitude whenever I loose cognitive resources.

Remember, this really depends on having high quality rest.

Emotional misattribution? Mental structures you can access from states

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

In my recent post on possible interventions on physiological arousal, there’s something interesting about two of the approaches that felt most promising to me.

Both singing and exercising involve going with the flow, or moving in the same “direction” as the arousal. In both cases, you lean into the activation, but you apply a new meaning to it, or reinterpret it, or repurpose it, or something.

In the case of singing: I feel agitated about something and my physiology is activated. I sing some folk songs, really feeling into the emotions and the meaning they embody. After doing that for a bit the arousal exhausts itself, and I’m calmer or more settled.

It similar in the case of exercising: I’m agitated, I pour that excess energy into working out, and I expend that energy.

In fact, while we’re at it, in the past, I’ve noted before that masturbation / ejaculation seems to have a similar impact.

The last two are less confusing / surprising, because they seem like they involve hormonal shifts / the literal expending of chemical energy. But what’s happening in the case of singing? There’s some, goal structure / meaning, some reason why I’m aroused / agitated / activated, I take that activation and “apply” it to a totally separate goal structure / meaning, I “resolve” this new goal structure, and my system calms down as if it just forgets what caused it to be agitated in the first place.

That seems kind of weird. You’d think that if my body thought that there was some reason to be energized, and I added a second reason to be energized, but then resolve that second reason, I should still be energized, because nothing has changed about reason #1.

But I guess it doesn’t work that way.

It seems more like there’s a two way information flow between mental content and physiological state, and each one informs the other. (I think “informs” is exactly the right word. Each one is updating on the outputs of the other, my body responding to my thoughts, and my thoughts responding to my body.) So if I’m agitated, and I try to shift my thoughts to something non-agitating, this force-against-force, my mind is resisting, on the basis of my bodily activation. But I can easily swap out a different agitating / activating thought structure, without any resistance at all. And apparently, the whole system doesn’t have enough “working memory” to track two meanings at once, and so the original gets dropped.

I suspect that this phenomenon might be pretty general, that it applies to a bunch of different emotional/physiological states, not just arousal. I was in a circle once, when I was really sad about one thing, and then I found myself crying about (and feeling some catharsis around) some other sad thing.

In fact, I think in general, when I’m feeling sad, I tend to associate it with my romantic loneliness, out of something like habit, even if my romantic situation didn’t have much to do with why I was feeling down.

I postulate that when you’re in a given physiological state, you have ready access to all (?) of the meaning-structures (whatever that means), that are “attuned to” (whatever that means), that state. So when you’re sad, you can access all of the reasons / narratives to be sad (although maybe only one at a time?), and when you’re excited you can access all of the reasons / narratives to be happy.

[I wonder if this has anything to do with why depression is resilient. Maybe people slip into a depressed state, and they access / slide into a meaning structure that they’re used to remunerating on, which unfortunately, is very robust, and so they get stuck in their depressed state.  That is, when a person is depressed they are accidentally doing the opposite of the trick I described above, instead of switching to a meaning that they can resolve, thereby exiting the state, they switch to a meaning that is particularly hard to resolve.]

This is in some sense just a restatement of the concept of “emotional misattribution”, but it seem importantly different in framing somehow.

 

 

 

Your visual imagery gives insight into your motivation for action and emotion

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

If you’re like me, you have subtle mental imagery flashing through your mind all the time, as you’re thinking, or writing, or doing tasks, or making a decision, or otherwise being a human. But by default, it is to quick (or something?) and you don’t notice it.

I claim that learning to notice these flashes can be super useful.

Two examples:

One

A few months ago, I was triggered and frustrated at CFAR about something, and I was writing from my trigger.

(Side note: when I am triggered about something, I will often write from the triggeredness, and get it all out on paper, just trying to articulate the force of my frustration, without trying to be charitable or whatever. And then, having gotten it out, from a more  I’ll go through in a more composed frame of mind, and assess which parts of what I’m saying seem true, and further, what plans to make regarding the situation. This allows me to get more clarity about what the triggered part of me is trying to protect, but allows me to adopt more strategic strategies than “be triggered about it.”)

I was writing from my trigger about how CFAR is bad in this particular way, and I noticed that I kept having mental flashes of [redacted CFAR staff member]. I realized the things I was frustrated with were basically just [redacted], but I had been painting all of CFAR with that brush. This is helpful to notice.

Two

Or more recently, I was making tentative plans to run a weekend workshop on some advanced content. I had gotten as far as drawing up an invite list and starting to compose an invite / interest-checking email when I noticed that my mental imagery of the event was all centering on one person.

I realized that I was mostly interested in impressing that person, and the way I was going to do it was spend 3 days, and involve 20 other people. This was cause for me to stop and goal-factor.

[Yes. It might still be cool for me to run that workshop. But if my goal was to impress [different redacted] this was a very inefficient way to do it.]

How to learn this?

I don’t think that I have this down super-reliably, so I’m probably not the best person to tell you how to train it. But to the extent that I have this skill, I learned it from doing Physical-Auditory-Visual meditation, where you spend x-minutes just paying attention to the sensations in your body, then x-minutes paying attention to your verbal thoughts, and then x-minutes paying attention to your mental imagery.

This meditation is described in more detail in a bunch of meditation resources, but I believe I first encountered it via Shinzen Young’s The Science of Enlightenment.