Off the top of my head, I have the “happiness button”: it produces a short-term positive mood when I push it, generally lasting no more than 24 hours before I have to push it again. I’ve never been able to modify this in to a switch that just “stays on”, thus calling it a “button” instead. With about 5 seconds of meditation I can hit a rather euphoric state, and I can “flavor” it to match various “types” of happiness I’ve experienced before.
I don’t use it as much these days, because it becomes very difficult to detect problems in my life when I push it. Using it to produce euphoria generally renders me more or less useless for getting anything done (I can’t write this post with that emotional set still running—my brain is too occupied just enjoying itself. But I am smiling and feeling very physically relaxed and happy, like I just went for a jog and got some good news)
Earlier in my life, I’d use it often, since I was dealing with abuse that I didn’t know how to escape from—since I was stuck with the problem, I figured I might as well just push the button repeatedly and at least enjoy myself. Prolonged use tends to build up more and more problems that I’m oblivious to—using it even once will make it hard to see big, “inescapable” problems in my life. More frequent use makes more and more of my life feel “inescapable” because I’m not actually thinking about it. In moderation and combined with some rationality skills, I can use the state to cut apart problems from a somewhat more detached standpoint, but that’s a fairly complex skill, and not always the best approach.
It’s sort of like turning off “pain”—great until you realize your hand is sitting on a hot stove and you now need to head to the hospital for serious burns.
I can also switch which senses I’m focusing on fairly readily. Focusing on food when I’m eating it is a very distinct sensation from eating while reading a book, thinking about something, or socializing. I’m often ignoring most of my visual data. I have various synaesthetic perceptions which are also tied in to this—focusing on music gives me very strong kinaesthetic feedback, but it’s rare to feel that when just listening in the background.
To some degree, there’s also just switching between various modes of thought about the world. For instance, being able to switch in to “cataloging possibilities” or “rationally analyzing data” modes of problem solving, versus a step-by-step or intuitive approach that I’d normally take.
I can easily toggle whether or not I care about quite a lot—in particular, I seem to be able to toggle between a highly empathic state and the ability to not care at all what others think of me (I seem to rate as vastly less self-conscious about weird behavior in public, but I’m also very able to read how people are reacting to me). I can also do things like suspend my sense of hunger until a more opportune time (I’ll get “pinged” every so often, with pings being more frequent as my body reaches worse states). Very useful when I’m caught up in something, but I’ve recently developed the bad habit of just automatically suspending it and thus suffering performance degradation from not eating often enough >.>
I can switch how people react to me to a fair degree—invisible, threatening, and happy/trustworthy seem to be the most common states I project. I sometimes find it rather disconcerting how much I can project trustworthy (this seems to be more or less my default “no effort required” projection) - I’ve had security guards completely ignore me blatantly violating policies while other people got hassled for much more minor and subtle violations. I’m not sure why, but happiness and trustworthy also seem to go hand-in-hand.
There’s probably others in here—I’ve spent a lot of time exploring various switches and learning how to shift my brain like this, and I tend to pick up new ones easily from other people’s descriptions. Tapping in to your description, I notice my posture immediately improves (somewhat less slouched) when I tap in to my kinaesthetic perceptions. I think my posture is usually optimized to make vision easier (I tend to slouch so I’m closer to the monitor), and focusing on kinaesthetic data instead makes me realize that it’s not comfortable.
Off the top of my head, I have the “happiness button”: it produces a short-term positive mood when I push it, generally lasting no more than 24 hours before I have to push it again. I’ve never been able to modify this in to a switch that just “stays on”, thus calling it a “button” instead.
That’s probably a good thing. Most interventions in that direction recommend a trip to the emergency room after several hours.
Off the top of my head, I have the “happiness button”: it produces a short-term positive mood when I push it, generally lasting no more than 24 hours before I have to push it again. I’ve never been able to modify this in to a switch that just “stays on”, thus calling it a “button” instead. With about 5 seconds of meditation I can hit a rather euphoric state, and I can “flavor” it to match various “types” of happiness I’ve experienced before.
I don’t use it as much these days, because it becomes very difficult to detect problems in my life when I push it. Using it to produce euphoria generally renders me more or less useless for getting anything done (I can’t write this post with that emotional set still running—my brain is too occupied just enjoying itself. But I am smiling and feeling very physically relaxed and happy, like I just went for a jog and got some good news)
Earlier in my life, I’d use it often, since I was dealing with abuse that I didn’t know how to escape from—since I was stuck with the problem, I figured I might as well just push the button repeatedly and at least enjoy myself. Prolonged use tends to build up more and more problems that I’m oblivious to—using it even once will make it hard to see big, “inescapable” problems in my life. More frequent use makes more and more of my life feel “inescapable” because I’m not actually thinking about it. In moderation and combined with some rationality skills, I can use the state to cut apart problems from a somewhat more detached standpoint, but that’s a fairly complex skill, and not always the best approach.
It’s sort of like turning off “pain”—great until you realize your hand is sitting on a hot stove and you now need to head to the hospital for serious burns.
I can also switch which senses I’m focusing on fairly readily. Focusing on food when I’m eating it is a very distinct sensation from eating while reading a book, thinking about something, or socializing. I’m often ignoring most of my visual data. I have various synaesthetic perceptions which are also tied in to this—focusing on music gives me very strong kinaesthetic feedback, but it’s rare to feel that when just listening in the background.
To some degree, there’s also just switching between various modes of thought about the world. For instance, being able to switch in to “cataloging possibilities” or “rationally analyzing data” modes of problem solving, versus a step-by-step or intuitive approach that I’d normally take.
I can easily toggle whether or not I care about quite a lot—in particular, I seem to be able to toggle between a highly empathic state and the ability to not care at all what others think of me (I seem to rate as vastly less self-conscious about weird behavior in public, but I’m also very able to read how people are reacting to me). I can also do things like suspend my sense of hunger until a more opportune time (I’ll get “pinged” every so often, with pings being more frequent as my body reaches worse states). Very useful when I’m caught up in something, but I’ve recently developed the bad habit of just automatically suspending it and thus suffering performance degradation from not eating often enough >.>
I can switch how people react to me to a fair degree—invisible, threatening, and happy/trustworthy seem to be the most common states I project. I sometimes find it rather disconcerting how much I can project trustworthy (this seems to be more or less my default “no effort required” projection) - I’ve had security guards completely ignore me blatantly violating policies while other people got hassled for much more minor and subtle violations. I’m not sure why, but happiness and trustworthy also seem to go hand-in-hand.
There’s probably others in here—I’ve spent a lot of time exploring various switches and learning how to shift my brain like this, and I tend to pick up new ones easily from other people’s descriptions. Tapping in to your description, I notice my posture immediately improves (somewhat less slouched) when I tap in to my kinaesthetic perceptions. I think my posture is usually optimized to make vision easier (I tend to slouch so I’m closer to the monitor), and focusing on kinaesthetic data instead makes me realize that it’s not comfortable.
That’s probably a good thing. Most interventions in that direction recommend a trip to the emergency room after several hours.