Managing Emotional Potential Energy

[adamShimi]

Link post

I really need a holiday.

I’m feeling stressed and trapped by my responsibilities, I get angry at people and at what they ask of me, I feel miserable at the end of most days.

Now, even just a year ago, I would have looked for a cause outside of myself: my job is unsatisfying, my boss is a dick, my colleagues are terrible, stuff like that… But as I got better and better at reflecting on how I feel, I started to notice again and again the old stoic wisdom that you hurt yourself by your own judgements.

Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.

\- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.7

In almost all cases of my frustrations lately, I’m the one who causes the problem: I’m the one burdening myself with more responsibilities, I’m the one turning asks into shoulds, I’m the one taking badly small comments or decisions that in truth have nothing to do with me…

So there is a mechanism. Yet what is missing from that explanation, and from Stoicism in general, is a further explanation of why sometimes this psychological self-harm ramps up enormously. Many times, I’m fine handling massive workloads and worrying world events, but last sunday I got overwhelmed and almost had a panic attack while trying to bake foccacia… talk about giving way too many fucks when none are warranted.

My pet theory for explaining this effect is “emotional potential energy”.

In classical mechanics (and most of physics), potential energy is a trick we use to ensure conservation of energy: in a non-dissipative system (where there is no loss of energy, for example through friction), the potential energy is where the energy is stored when the system slows down (that is, when its kinetic energy decreases).

So if you throw a ball upward, its kinetic energy is getting converted into potential energy, until it reaches the highest point of its trajectory, where all the energy is potential (there is no movement and so no kinetic energy); and when it goes down, it starts converting its potential energy back into kinetic energy (accelerating).

I say potential energy is a trick, because the exact value doesn’t matter: what count is that the sum of potential and kinetic energy stays the same. This creates a really nice degree of freedom (what value to give to this sum), which is generally exploited to make the state of rest the one with 0 potential energy, thus simplifying computations tremendously.

Still, it’s a very useful trick.^[1] It transforms the unmanageable vector juggling of Newtonian Mechanics into the pure scalar manipulation of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics: all forces are converted into potential energy (fields technically), and thus they can be added easily and manipulated without remembering all the directions of the vectors. And more generally, the energy frame that potential energy enables has proven again and again its ability to expand our fundamental understanding of the principle of physics (for example with Quantum Electrodynamics).

That’s one of the intuition I want to leverage for “emotional potential energy”: the idea that a lot of varied small emotional annoyances and frustrations get converted to an undifferentiated form of energy.

Another key idea is that the more potential energy a system has, the less stable it is. So the more emotional potential energy you accumulate, the more emotionally unstable you become, self-inflicting more and more often the judgement that you have been harmed described by Marcus.

So my model is that as you go through your life, you accumulate more and more emotional potential energy from all kind of frustrations and pain and annoyance. And as it builds up, you become more and more unstable emotionally, and less and less able to calmly process the situation.

For me, high emotional potential energy leads to heaviness: I turn everything into a should, a burden, a responsibility. I lose the lightness and playfulness that is so essential to scientific and creative work. Everything becomes life or death, a test of my worth, and that kills all experimentation and learning instantly.

Now, how can we manage this emotional potential energy?

The first step is limiting its accumulation. The stoic sage or buddha might just not do it, never turning pain into suffering, but we are not enlightened yet. Instead, what I have personally found practical is to try to reflect quickly when feeling strong negative emotions, recontextualizing them, processing them, so they are not allowed to fester and poison me by building up too much emotional potential energy.

But since there is leakage, the build-up does happen. So we need to find ways to drain it. And I like to think of this release in terms of two main options: rest and sabbaticals

Rest is the obvious way to drain the emotional energy: just do things that are easy, relaxing, that make you feel better and release the tension. What lives here depends on personal taste, but classics include: reading, walking, meditating, exercising, sleeping, having sex, spending time with friends…

Yet I often find that rest hits diminishing returns quickly. I tend to get bored to death after a day or two fully dedicated to rest.

The other form of release I know of is sabbaticals. The word evokes months or years long changes of scenery, but even just a week works wonder. A sabbatical is much less about resting and recovering, and much more about following what makes sense and is exciting to you, what you want to be doing and exploring but have failed to find room for.

Personally, this is where curiosity and playfulness and exploration comes in: I have a lot of ideas and topics that excites me but which I can’t easily explore when I work, because they are never the priority, and I don’t have the room outside of work. So these are not about doing pure rest activities, but instead about doing something meaningful to you for its own sake, just because it is meaningful, not for deep optimization reasons.

Last but not least, how best to schedule this release of emotional potential energy?

It would be nice if you naturally noticed when it starts accumulating too much, and took steps then to drain it. But in practice, not only am I not well calibrated about how much release I need, it’s even worse: the more build up I have, the less able I am to notice the need for rest and sabbaticals. My anxiety takes over, making it even feel even more important to focus, to not miss a day, to not delay or slow down.

Which means that for people who tend to find themselves in this situation over and over again (I expect anxious people, but not only), I recommend what a friend of mine does: scheduling holidays in advance, and committing to actually take them when they arrive.^[2]

So that’s my plan for my next, close, deeply needed vacation: some rest, but a big dose of sabbatical, so I can release all that pent up emotional energy and find again the lightness that unlocks research insights.

1. ^

   If you wonder why I keep calling it a trick and yet not disparaging it as “not real”, you can read my thoughts about the usefulness of “reality” as a concept.

2. ^

   Modulo crunch time, but let’s be honest, it’s rarely actual crunch time.

[plex]

Nice post! Another rich metaphor for something which I suspect is pretty tightly related to this is Neural Annealing, a “unified theory of music, meditation, psychedelics, depression, trauma, and emotional processing”. I’ll quote the section which I think captures the core of the idea:

First, energy (neural excitation, e.g. Free Energy from prediction errors) builds up in the brain, either gradually or suddenly, collecting disproportionately in the brain’s natural eigenmodes;

• This build-up of energy (rate of neural firing) crosses a metastability threshold and the brain enters a high-energy state, causing entropic disintegration (weakening previously ‘sticky’ attractors);

• The brain’s neurons self-organize into new multi-scale equilibria (attractors), aka implicit assumptions about reality’s structure and value weightings, which given present information should generate lower levels of prediction error than previous models (this is implicitly both a resynchronization of internal predictive models with the environment, and a minimization of dissonance in connectome-specific harmonic waves);

• The brain ‘cools’ (neural activity levels slowly return to normal), and parts of the new self-organized patterns remain and become part of the brain’s normal activity landscape;

• The cycle repeats, as the brain’s models become outdated and prediction errors start to build up again.

Any ‘emotionally intense’ experience that you need time to process most likely involves this entropic disintegration->search->annealing mechanism— this is what emotional processing is.

And I’d suggest that this is the core dynamic of how the brain updates its structure, the mechanism the brain uses to pay down its ‘technical debt’. In other words, entering high-energy states (i.e., intense emotional states which take some time to ‘process’) is how the brain releases structural stress and adapts to new developments. This process needs to happen on a regular basis to support healthy function, and if it doesn’t, psychological health degrades— In particular, mental flexibility & emotional vibrancy go down — analogous to a drop in a metal’s ‘ductility’. People seem to have a strong subconscious drive toward entering these states and if they haven’t experienced a high-energy brain state in some time, they actively seek one out, even sometimes in destructive ways.

However, the brain spends most of its time in low-energy states, because they’re safer: systems in noisy environments need to limit their rate of updating. There are often spikes of energy in the brain, but these don’t tend to snowball into full high-energy states because the brain has many ‘energy sinks’ (inhibitory top-down predictive models) which soak up excess energy before entropic disintegration can occur.

Hope you take some time to anneal away some of that potential energy soon. People consistently underestimate the negative ripples on the social web from being overstretched, as opposed to the obvious and tangible “but this thing right in front of me needs doing”.

[adamShimi]

Oh, I like the neural annealing connection, I have read the post but didn’t relate it to emotional potential energy, but it makes sense!

Hope you take some time to anneal away some of that potential energy soon. People consistently underestimate the negative ripples on the social web from being overstretched, as opposed to the obvious and tangible “but this thing right in front of me needs doing”.

Thanks. That’s the plan. ;)

[Lucy Farnik]

Great post! I’ve also experienced this build-up at many points in my life, this framework seems really useful.

One thing I’ve found particularly helpful for addressing this is freewriting. Just sit down every morning with your laptop and commit to writing 750 words. Don’t constrain what you write about, just let it be a stream of consciousness. You can write about your favorite type of pizza or whatever, but in practice you’ll probably get bored of shallow things like this pretty quickly and start diving into more meaningful things. You’ll then start noticing small annoyances that you weren’t consciously aware of before and you’ll gradually process them. And there will probably be a lot of them, so the cumulative effect of doing this consistently is really large.

Typical mind fallacy obviously applies here, freewriting has been life-changing for me but it might be less effective for you. But I’m guessing a large enough subset of LW readers is sufficiently similar to me that this is high-EV to try. Note that it can take a few days to start getting value out of this, I’d recommend committing to doing this everyday for 2 weeks. If after 2 weeks you don’t notice your emotional potential energy decreasing, it’s probably not a good fit for you.

Another thing that works somewhat well for me is just having some time without much external stimulation, e.g. going for regular walks without my phone and with earplugs. Again, it just lets your mind wander and eventually discover small things that have been bothering you and need to be processed.

[adamShimi]

I do find thinking on paper (a bit more intentional than freewriting, but the same vibe) to be particularly helpful, I agree. Just like walks.

The reasons I don’t find them enough is that:

1. They generally happen after the fact, which means that some build up happened

2. Personally, I’m rarely able to release all the build up just through thinking on paper (happens, just rare)

Still, I find it’s a good way to build emotional potential energy much slower, and to notice when you really need to have a full break/​sabbaticl.