But presumably it’s possible to be too relaxed, calm, and/or happy, and one should instead be anxious, angry, and/or sad. How can I tell when this is the case, and what should I do to increase my neuroticism in-the-moment?
This stuff is mutually reinforcing with ego’s ‘forever’ identity based narratives. ‘If I relax then I become the sort of person who is just relaxed all the time and never does anything AHHHH!’ Whereas what actually happens is that given the ability to choose which stresses to take on, rather than it being an involuntary process, we choose a lot better in apportioning our efforts to the things we care about. One of the noticeable changes is that people take on fewer projects, but put more effort into those they do take on. Most of us, if we were taking a rigorous accounting, would be forced to admit that our project start:project finish ratio is quite bad by default. Core Transformation puts us directly in touch with these and potentially lots of other objections. The point isn’t to sweep them under the rug but to identify the true content of these objections and figure out how we want to engage with that while letting the non-true parts drop away once all objecting parts are actually satisfied.
cf. https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/07/core-transformation.html
Specifically:
h/t @romeostevensit