Tag: meditation

Physiological arousal / activation / agitation

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

Separately from aversions, there is excess physiological arousal. [1]

Sometimes, even when I’ve pretty successfully processed some felt sense, and am riding it out, there’s still stress involved. For instance, when I’m drafting an important email, to a potential employer or potential romantic partner.

This kind of arousal isn’t always bad. Often the energy of this kind of heightened state is positively useful. But high arousal usually correlates with less stable attention. And, often, this high level of arousal causes me to bounce off my work.

Oftentimes this happens just after I finish something stressful. In this case, it will often feel hard to transition to the next thing, instead opting to go for a walk around the neighborhood (for 40 minutes to an hour, usually). The high levels of activation is “left over” after sending the email, and it accordingly feels effortful to put direct my attention toward something else.

This doesn’t seem bad, calming down and returning to a baseline (and maybe doing psychological processing at the same time?) seems like a natural thing to do. But also, that bouncing off is one of the main ways that I loose time in my day, and it seems like there ought to be way to do drop that arousal much more efficiently.

Some thoughts:

  • I could maybe just take this as my trigger to go exercise for the day, and turn the excess energy to a productive purpose, while also stabilizing my physiological arousal level.
    • Having a quick, intense exercise routine seems helpful for this. I was jumping rope for a while, but that apparently didn’t stick.
  • I could just set a ten minute timer and slow down my heart rate, by breathing slowly?
  • Remember my feet?
  • I could do a physical relaxation routine. [This feels wrong in that it’s like setting up a counterforce against the agitation, and having them conflict. It seems like a better thing would not feel like that.]
  • I could try removing the felt sense from my chest. [That feels bad and clugy.]
  • I have some idea that regular meditation is supposed to improve this stability of this variable. So that if I was meditating more regularly, I would return to baseline more rapidly and easily? I don’t know if that’s true.
  • Meditators do a thing sometime, where they break a thing down into its component sensations. Do that?
  • Maybe I should do Focusing to this as well? That seems hard. “This” is slippery.
  • Ok. Well another theory is that this is just the same thing exactly as the felt sense / unhandled concern situation, and not “left over” at all. Like I’m feeling agitated because I don’t know what the response will be, and its important, even if it is out of my hands. This suggests that I should dialogue with the thing about whether it is actually out of my hands?
  • Singing

 

[1] Just to note, you can have high arousal due to some aversion or concern that has not been processed. In fact, that is probably even more common. But in this section, I’m only discussing high-levels of activation that are not associated with an aversion or unprocessed yank.

 

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.

Metacognitive space

~ elityre ~ 2 Comments

[Part of my Psychological Principles of Personal Productivity, which I am writing mostly in my Roam, now.]

Metacognitive space is a term of art that refers to a particular first person state / experience. In particular it refers to my propensity to be reflective about my urges and deliberate about the use of my resources.

I think it might literally be having the broader context of my life, including my goals and values, and my personal resource constraints loaded up in peripheral awareness.

Metacognitive space allows me to notice aversions and flinches, and take them as object, so that I can respond to them with Focusing or dialogue, instead of being swept around by them. Similarly, it seems to, in practice, to reduce my propensity to act on immediate urges and temptations.

[Having MCS is the opposite of being [[{Urge-y-ness | reactivity | compulsiveness}]]?]

It allows me to “absorb” and respond to happenings in my environment, including problems and opportunities, taking considered instead of semi-automatic, first response that occurred to me, action. [That sentence there feels a little fake, or maybe about something else, or maybe is just playing into a stereotype?]

When I “run out” of meta cognitive space, I will tend to become ensnared in immediate urges or short term goals. Often this will entail spinning off into distractions, or becoming obsessed with some task (of high or low importance), for up to 10 hours at a time.

Some activities that (I think) contribute to metacogntive awareness:

  • Rest days
  • Having a few free hours between the end of work for the day and going to bed
  • Weekly [[Scheduling]]. (In particular, weekly scheduling clarifies for me the resource constraints on my life.)
  • Daily [[Scheduling]]
  • [[meditation]], including short meditation.
    • Notably, I’m not sure if meditation is much more efficient than just taking the same time to go for a walk. I think it might be or might not be.
  • [[Exercise]]?
  • Waking up early?
  • Starting work as soon as I wake up?
    • [I’m not sure that the thing that this is contributing to is metacogntive space per se.]

[I would like to do a causal analysis on which factors contribute to metacogntive space. Could I identify it in my toggl data with good enough reliability that I can use my toggl data? I guess that’s one of the things I should test? Maybe with a servery asking me to rate my level of metacognitive space for the day every evening?]

Erosion

Usually, I find that I can maintain metacogntive space for about 3 days [test this?] without my upkeep pillars.

Often, this happens with a sense of pressure: I have a number of days of would-be-overwhelm which is translated into pressure for action. This is often good, it adds force and velocity to activity. But it also runs down the resource of my metacognitive space (and probably other resources). If I loose that higher level awareness, that pressure-as-a-forewind, tends to decay into either 1) a harried, scattered, rushed-feeling, 2) a myopic focus on one particular thing that I’m obsessively trying to do (it feels like an itch that I compulsively need to scratch), 3) or flinching way from it all into distraction.

[Metacognitive space is the attribute that makes the difference between absorbing, and then acting gracefully and sensibly to deal with the problems, and harried, flinching, fearful, non-productive overwhelm, in general?]

I make a point, when I am overwhelmed, or would be overwhelmed to make sure to allocate time to maintain my metacognitive space. It is especially important when I feel so busy that I don’t have time for it.

When metacognition is opposed to satisfying your needs, your needs will be opposed to metacognition

One dynamic that I think is in play, is that I have a number of needs, like the need for rest, and maybe the need for sexual release or entertainment/ stimulation. If those needs aren’t being met, there’s a sort of build up of pressure. If choosing consciously and deliberately prohibits those needs getting met, eventually they will sabotage the choosing consciously and deliberately.

From the inside, this feels like “knowing that you ‘shouldn’t’ do something (and sometimes even knowing that you’ll regret it later), but doing it anyway” or “throwing yourself away with abandon”. Often, there’s a sense of doing the dis-endorsed thing quickly, or while carefully not thinking much about it or deliberating about it: you need to do the thing before you convince yourself that you shouldn’t.

[[Research Questions]]

What is the relationship between [[metacognitive space]] and [[Rest]]?

What is the relationship between [[metacognitive space]] and [[Mental Energy]]?

Some musings about exercise and time discount rates

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[Epistemic status: a half-thought, which I started on earlier today, and which might or might not be a full thought by the time I finish writing this post.]

I’ve long counted exercise as an important component of my overall productivity and functionality. But over the past months my exercise habit has slipped some, without apparent detriment to my focus or productivity. But this week, after coming back from a workshop, my focus and productivity haven’t really booted up.

Here’s a possible story:

Exercise (and maybe mediation) expands the effective time-horizon of my motivation system. By default, I will fall towards attractors of immediate gratification and impulsive action, but after I exercise, I tend to be tracking, and to be motivated by, progress on my longer term goals. [1]

When I am already in the midst of work: my goals are loaded up and the goal threads are primed in short term memory, this sort of short term compulsiveness causes me to fall towards task completion: I feel slightly obsessed about finishing what I’m working on.

But if I’m not already in the stream of work, seeking immediate gratification instead drives me to youtube and web comics and whatever. (Although it is important to note that I did switch my non self tracking web usage to Firefox this week, and I don’t have my usual blockers for youtube and for SMBC set up yet. That might totally account for the effect that I’m describing here.)

In short, when I’m not exercising enough, I have less meta cognitive space for directing my attention and choosing what is best do do. But if I’m in the stream of work already, I need that meta cognitive space less: because I’ll default to doing more of what I’m working on. (Though, I think that I do end up getting obsessed with overall less important things, compared to when I am maintaining metacognitive space). Exercise is most important for booting up and setting myself up to direct my energies.

[1] This might be due to a number of mechanisms:

  • Maybe the physical endorphin effect of exercise has me feeling good, and so my desire for immediate pleasure is sated, freeing up resources for longer term goals.
  • Or maybe exercise involves engaging in intimidate discomfort for the sake of future payoff, and this shifts my “time horizon set point” or something. (Or maybe it’s that exercise is downstream of that change in set point.)
    • If meditation also has this time-horizon shifting effect, that would be evidence for this hypothesis.
    • Also if fasting has this effect.
  • Or maybe, it’s the combination of both of the above: engaging in delayed gratification, with a viscerally experienced payoff, temporarily retrains my motivation system for that kind of thing.)
  • Or something else.

 

How do I jumpstart into productivity momentum?

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Initial ideas:

  • Start working as soon as I wake up
  • Start working at some pre-selected time, or at some pre-selected trigger.
  • Do my serenity protocol.
  • Process one of my inboxes (push through the crud, the small effort-aversions, and get into the rhythm of completing tasks)
  • Meditate
  • Mastrubate
  • Pick a task, then do 90 seconds of cardio.

My intervention, just learn to notice when my productivity momentum is low.

Looking at my listed hypotheses, from last year:

Hypothesis 1: My mind is mostly driven by short-term gratification. I can get short term gratification in one of two ways: via immediate stimulation, or by making progress towards goals. Making progress towards goals is more satisfying, but it also has some delay. Switching from immediate stimulation to satisfaction by making progress on goals  entails a period of time when you’re not receiving immediate stimulation, and also not being satisfied by goal-progress, because you’re still revving up and getting oriented. It takes a while to get into the flow of working, when it starts being enjoyable.

But once you’re experiencing satisfaction from goal-progress, it feels good and you’re motivated to continue doing that.

  • This suggests that I should do something that makes progress towards goals, but also gives me immediate gratification (like touch typing practice)?
    • Other options:
      • Processing email or reminders

Hypothesis 1.5: Same as above, but it isn’t about gratification from immediate stimulation vs. gratification from goal-progress. It’s about gratification from immediate stimulation vs. gratification from self actualization or self exertion, the pleasure of pushing yourself and exhausting yourself.

  • This suggests the same kind of actions as 1. + things like just setting an timer for an hour and switching to deep work (which I predict I will be resistant to, which is evidence for 1.

Hypothesis 2: There’s an activation energy or start up cost to the more effortful mode of being productive, but once that cost is paid, it’s easy.

[I notice that the sort of phenomenon described in Hyp. 1, 1.5, and  2, is not unique to “productivity”. It also seems to occur in other domains. I often feel a disinclination to go exercise, but once I start, it feels good and I want to push myself. (Though, notably, this “broke” for me in the past few months. Perhaps investigating why it broke would reveal something about how this sort of momentum works in general?)]

  • Intervention: make it as easy as possible to pay that activation energy (which sounds kind of like “productive task with immediate gratification”).

Hypothesis 3: It’s about efficacy. Once I’ve made some progress, spent an hour in deep work, or whatever, I the relevant part of my mind alieves that I am capable of making progress on my goals, and so is more motivated do that.

In other words, being productive is evidence that something good will happen if I try, which makes it worth while to try.

(This would sugest that other boosts to one’s self-confidence or belief in ability to do things would also jump start momentum chains, which seems correct.)

  • I could do autosuggestion, or affirmations?
  • I just need to do something hard?
    • But I don’t feel motivated to do something hard. That’s the point.

Hypothesis 4: It’s about a larger time budget inducing parts-coordination. I have a productive first hour and get stuff done. A naive extrapolation says that if all of the following hours have a similar density of doing and completing, then I will be able to get many things done. Given this all my parts that are advocating for different things that are important to them settle down, confident that their thing will be gotten to.

In contrast if I have a bad morning, each part is afraid that it’s goal will be left by the wayside, and so they all scramble to drag my mind to their thing, and I can’t focus on any one thing.

[This doesn’t seem right. The primary contrasting state is more like lazy and lackadaisical, rather than frazzled.]

Yeah. This seems not right.

Hypothesis 5: It is related to failing with abandon. It’s much more motivating to be aiming to have an excellent day than it is to be aiming to recover from a bad morning to have a decent day. There’s an inclination to say “f*** it”, and not try as hard, because the payoffs are naturally divided into chunks of a day.

Or another way to say this: my motivation increases after a good morning because I alieve that I can get to all the things done, and getting all the things done is much more motivating than getting 95% of the things done because of completion heuristics (which I’ve already noted, but not written about anywhere).

Note: I think that I have learned about not failing with abandon, and this hypothesis dose not seem on point anymore.

Hypothesis 6: It’s about attention. There’s something that correlates with productivity which is something like “crispness of attention” and “snappiness of attentional shifts.” Completing a task and then moving on to the next one has this snappiness.

Having a “good morning” means engaging deeply with some task or project and really getting immersed in it. This sort of settledness is crucial to productivity and it is much easier to get into if I was there recently. (Because of fractionation?!)

This snappiness of attention seems like “cognitive effort/cognitive readiness“.

Hypothesis 7: It’s about setting a precedent or a set point for executive function, or something? There’s a thing that happens throughout the day, which is that an activity is suggested, by my mind or by my systems, and some relevant part of me decides “Yes, I’ll do that now”, or “No, I don’t feel like it.”

I think those choices are correlated for some reason? The earlier ones set the standard for the later ones? Because of consistency effects? (I doubt that that is the reason. I would more expect a displacement effect (“ah. I worked hard this morning, I don’t need to do this now”) than a consistency effect (“I choose to work earlier today, so I’m a choose-to-work person”). In any case, this effect is way subverbal, and doesn’t involve the social mind at all, I think.)

This one feels pretty right. But why would it be? Maybe one of hypotheses 1-5?

And here I mention cognitive effort/ readiness, pretty exactly.

Are there other ways to adjust the setpoint?

It matters if this is a positive effect, that causes actions (as this framing implies), or a negative effect, that prevents actions (as the framing of hyp. 7.5 implies). Is is about increasing my cognitive effort, or about not giving in to fleeding temptations?

  • practice noting my urges, instead of acting on them.

Hypothesis 8: Working has two components: the effort of starting and reward making progress / completing.

If you’re starting cold, you have to force yourself through the effort, and it’s easier to procrastinate, putting the task off for a minute or an hour.

But if you’ve just been working on or just completed something else and are feeling the reward high from that, then the reward component of tasks in general, is much more salient, is pulled into near-mode immediacy. Which makes the next task more compelling.

I think this captures a lot of my phenomenological experience regarding productivity momentum and it also explains the related phenomena with exercise and similar.

(Also, there’s something like an irrational fear of effort, which builds up higher and higher as long as you’re avoiding is, but which dissipates once you exert some effort?)

(M/T on Hyp. 8:) If this were the case, it seems like it would predict that momentum would decay if one took a long break in the middle of the day. I think in practice this isn’t quite right, because the “productivity high” of a good morning can last for a long time, into the afternoon or evening.

  •  Again, this seems to imply some kind of bootstrapping activity, that is both easy and/or engaging, and effectively productive.

Hypothesis 7.5: [related to 1, 1.5, and 3. More or less a better reformulation of 7.] There’s a global threshold of distraction or of acting on (or reacting to) thoughts and urges flashing through one’s mind. Lowering this threshold on the scale of weeks and months, but it also varies day by day. Momentum entails lowering that threshold, so that one’s focus on any given task can be deep, instead of shallow.

This predicts that meditation and meditative-like practices would lower the threshold and potentially start up cycle of productivity momentum. Indeed, the only mechanism that I’ve found that has reliably helped me recover from unproductive mornings and afternoons is a kind of gently-enforced serenity process.

I think this one is pretty close to correct.

 

Hypothesis 10: [related to 2, and 8] It’s just about ambiguity resolution. Once I start working, I have a clear and sense of what that’s like which bounds the possible hedonic downside. (I should write more about ambiguity avoidance.)

Bah. Seems wrong.

 

Notes:

  • Why is it that getting up and working first thing in the morning jumpstarts momentum?
  • Why is it that starting at a particular time, jumpstarts productivity momentum.

 

Impact of mindfulness meditation on wellbeing and productivity: preliminary results

~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

[epistemic status: semi-formal lab report.

This is all about me. Probably of interest only to the people that want to observe some of my process. This is also not all that well organized. It’s partly stream of conciseness.]

Intro:

Over that past few months (and the past 2 years, before that), I’ve been conflicted about the importance of having a regular meditation practice. There are good arguments for the high importance of concentration and metacognition, and meditation supposedly boosts those skills. Furthermore, I’ve directly observed some effects on my cognition that seems to be the result of having meditated that morning: being more apt to notice my thoughts as they’re happening, feeling more settled, being less reactive [I still need to write about “reactivity”], etc.

However, there’s clear and plausible confound. My life is often hectic, and maybe I only get around to meditating on days and weeks when I’m generally on top of everything. That is maybe the causality is reversed: instead of meditation making my life better, it that when my life is already going pretty well, I sit down to meditate.

So, I’m doing a randomized trial.

Two Mondays ago I flipped a (digital) coin. If it came up “1” then I would make a diligent effort to meditate every day for 20 minutes each day for the next 14 days, regardless of what else happening in my life. If it came up “0” I would meditate only when I felt like it.

It came up “1”, and for the past week and a half I’ve been meditating every day. (On one of the days, I meditated for only 18 minutes instead fo 20, but I don’t think that invalidates the experiment.)

I haven’t even finished my two weeks of meditation yet, but these are my preliminary results.

(Note that this experiment is just for observing the effects on my overall wellbeing and productivity. I may do other experiments with more explicit measurements for the psychological axes that I expect meditation to improve, but this isn’t that.)

Results:

This is going to be kind of informal. I don’t have rigorous proof for any of these conclusions. I’m partially sharing my “this is what it seems like to me”. Obviously, I’ll do further followup on all of these.

Briefly, meditation is definitely less important for my overall wellbeing than 1) Good sleep 2) getting regular intense exercise 3) being oriented on my goals and having my tasks “loaded up” and maybe 4) regularly taking a rest day.

Last week, the first part of my week was especially (95th percentile) good and productive, and then the later part of my my week (Wednesday on) was kind draggy and low-motivation (Being gentle on myself, I fell back to doing only one major task each day).

I’m chocking this up to 1) having a good rest day on Sunday, and 2) outlining my day in detail the night before for each of the days of the week (something I sometimes do). My subjective impression is that doing that self-organization in a deep (vs. a cursory or superficial way) makes a big difference for my productivity.

(My current hypotheses are that this is due to “loading up” my goals in my peripheral attention (or something) / making me (peripherally) aware of the full context of my goals and therefore the real tradeoffs and costs, and/or future-pacing providing some sort of sub-verbal nudge at decision point junctures throughout the day. [I should theorize about this].)

In the later part of the week, I had some major shoulder tension (a first for me), that persisted for days. After about 5 days, I spend an hour doing Focusing, and hanging with it, and “going inside of it”. It dissolved.

I think there was also an issue of not exercising (I was going on long walks, but I didn’t do anything intense, like strength training) making it harder for me to get to sleep. At least, I wasn’t strength training and I was getting less than 8 hours of sleep. (Around 7. Always more than 5.)

All of these seem like bigger factors than my meditation practice. Though I’ll also note that my meditation sessions weren’t particularly good. I sometimes am on-point, returning to my breath with high frequency, and getting into a sort aggressive flow with meditation. That didn’t happen this week. When the other factors are taken care of, I might meditate better, and meditation might then provide a boost over and above.