Tag: psychology

Some ways to “clear space”

~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

[Epistemic status: pursuing ideas, no clear conclusion]

Part of the thinking of my Psychology and Phenomenology of Productivity

Followup to: What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

So there’s a problem.  When I’m agitated, the thing that most helps is doing Focusing on the agitation, to dialogue with it and get clarity about which goals are threatened. But when I’m most agitated, my mind tends to glance off of my agitation. I can’t stabilize my intention on the agitation enough to start doing Focusing.

So I have a circular dependency. I want to do Focusing, to help the agitation. I can’t do Focusing, because I’m agitated.

I think resolving this is what is meant by the “clearing a space” step in Gendlin’s 6 steps, and may be isomorphic to “unblending”.

Personally, I really want to have a systematic solution to this problem.

These are somethings that I know help boost me out of the circular dependency.

  • Grab another person to be my focusing companion. This one helps hugely, for reasons that are unknown to me. (Extra working memory? I don’t think that’s it. Maybe, having another person looking at me creates a slight pressure towards coherent trains of thought, instead of my mind/attention jumping around from stimulus to stimulus? That seems closer.
  • Start writing. This seems like it also anchors my attention, so that it’s easier to be in contact with the anxiety/agitation, without slipping off.

These are some things that might help, but I haven’t tried in depth yet.

  • Some explicit practice with the unblending step of Focusing? (It’s my understanding that some Focusing teachers train this explicitly
  • Top down regulating my SNS activity using something like Val’s old Againstness, or my suggestion serenity routine from 2014?

 

Note that I need my solution that itself avoids the problem of the circular dependency. Whatever the technique I use to to make space to do Focusing on the agitation has to be easy to do when agitated, or what’s the point?

But ideally, I could have a TAP sequence that looked like…

[Notice the agitation] -> [Snap my fingers (or something, to reify and time-condence the noticing] -> [Clear space somehow] -> [Do Focusing on the root of my agitation]

What to do with should/flinches: TDT-stable internal incentives

~ elityre ~ 5 Comments

[epistemic status: current hypothesis, backed by some simple theory, and virtually no empirical evidence yet]

{Part of the thinking going into my Psychology and Phenomenology of Productivity sequence}

The situation

I’ve been having an anxious and unproductive week. There’s a project that I intend to be working on, but I’ve been watching myself procrastinate (fairly rare for me these days), and work inefficiently.

More specifically this situation occurs:

I’m sitting down to start working. Or I am working, and I encounter a point of ambiguity, and my attention flinches away. Or I’m taking a break and am intended to start working again.

At that moment, I feel the pressure of the “should”, the knowing that I’m supposed to/I reflectively want to be making progress, and also feel the inclination to flinch away, to distract myself with something, to flick to LessWrong (it used to be youtube, or SMBC, but I blocked those) or to get something to eat. This comes along with a clench in my belly.

The Opportunity and Obligation

This is a moment of awareness. At that moment, I am conscious of my state, I’m conscious of my desire to make progress on the project. If I do flick to LessWrong, or otherwise distract myself, I will loose that conscious awareness. I’ll still feel bad, still have the clench in my belly, but I won’t be consciously aware of the thing I’m avoiding (at least until the next moment like this one). At that moment, I’m at choice about what to do (or at least more at choice). In the next moment, if the default trajectory is followed, I won’t be.

Realizing this put’s a different flavor on procrastination. Typically, if I’m procrastinating, I have a vague “just one more” justification. It’s ok to watch just one more youtube clip, I can quit after that one. I can stay in bed for another five minutes, and then get up. But if my level of consciousness of my situation fluctuates, that justification is flatly not true.

I have the opportunity right now, to choose something different. I, in actual fact, will not have that opportunity in five minutes.

That me, right then, in that timeslice, has a specific obligation to the world. [I should maybe write a post about how my morality cashes out to different timeslices having different highly-specific obligations to serve the Good.] In that moment, I, the me that is conscious of the should, have the obligation to seize the opportunity of that increased consciousness and use it to put myself on a trajectory such that the next timeslice can effectively pursue a project that will be a tick of the world iterating to a good, safe, future.

The problem

The naive way to seize on that opportunity is to force myself do the task.

There’s a problem with that solution, aside even from the fact that it doesn’t seem like it will work (it’s typically a red flag when one’s plan is “I’ll just use will power”). Even if I could reliably seize on my moment of awareness to force myself to overcome the aversion of my flinch response, doing so would disincentivize me from noticing in the first place.

Doing that would be to install a TAP: whenever I notice myself with a should/flinch, I’ll immediately grit my teeth and preform an effortful and painful mental action. This is conditioning my brain to NOT notice such experiences.

Which is to say, the “just do it” policy is not stable. If I successfully implemented it, I would end up strictly worse off, because I’d still be procrastinating, but I would be much less likely to notice my procrastination.

A guess at a solution

After having noticed this dynamic this week, this is the approach that I’m trying: when I notice the experience of an entangled “should” and the flinch away from it, I orient to hold both of them. More specifically, I move into facilitation mode, where my goal is to make sure that the concerns of both parts are heard and taken into account. Not to force any action, but to mediate between the two conflicting threads.

(Taking advantage of fleeting moments of increased consciousness to hold the concerns of two inchoate and conflicting things at once, is a bit tricky, but I bet I’ll aquire skill with practice.)

If I were to generalize this goal it is something like: when I have a moment of unusual awareness of a conflict, I move to in the direction of increased awareness.

I’ve only been doing this for a few days, so my n is super small, and full of confounds, but this seems to have lead to more time spent dialoguing parts, and days this week have been increasingly focused and productive.

 

Goal-factoring as a tool for noticing narrative-reality disconnect

~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

[The idea of this post, as well as the opening example, were relayed to me by Ben Hoffman, who mentioned it as a thing that Michael Vassar understands well. This was written with Ben’s blessing.]

Suppose you give someone an option of one of three fruits: a radish, a carrot, and and apple. The person chooses the carrot. When you ask them why, they reply “because it’s sweet.”

Clearly, there’s something funny going on here. While the carrot is sweeter than the radish, the apple is sweeter than the carrot. So sweetness must not be the only criterion your fruit-picker is using to make his decision. He/she might be choosing partially on that basis, but there must also be some other, unmentioned factor, that is guiding his/her choice.

Now imagine someone is describing the project that they’re working on (project X). They explain their reasoning for undertaking this project, the good outcomes that will result from it: reasons a, b, and c.

When someone is presenting their reasoning like this, it can be useful to take a, be and c as premises, and try and project what seems to you like the best course of action that optimizes for those goals. That is, do a quick goal-factoring, to see if you can discover a y, that seems to fulfill goals a, b, and c, better than X does.

If you can come up with such a Y, this is suggestive of some unmentioned factor in your interlocutor’s reasoning, just as there was in the choice of your fruit-picker.

Of course this could be innocuous. Maybe Y has some drawback you’re unaware of, and so actually X is the better plan. Maybe the person you’re speaking with just hadn’t thought of Y.

But but it also might be he/she’s lying outright about why he/she’s doing X. Or maybe he/she has some motive that he/she’s not even admitting to him/herself.

Whatever the case, the procedure of taking someone else’s stated reasons as axioms and then trying to build out the best plan that satisfies them is a useful procedure for drawing out dynamics that are driving situations under the surface.

I’ve long used this technique effectively on myself, but I sugest that it might be an important lens for viewing the actions of institutions and other people. It’s often useful to tease out exactly how their declared stories about themselves deviate from their revealed agency, and this is one way of doing that.