Employing one’s rational skills in extremely stressful or emotional situations, specifically extreme infatuation:
Today at the market, while waiting on the queue, I recognized an ex-lover of mine. One I had never gotten over. I dared not speak her name. I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would have absolutely no control over what I would said to her, if I didn’t shut down entirely, standing there with my mouth open, my breath held, and a cacophony of conflicting thoughts and emotions on my mind.
I knew that, if, against all probability, she decided thereafter to renew contact with me, all of my priorities, all of my wants, all of my existence, would become subordinate to hers. I’d be looking forward to her texts like a drowning man looks forward to air. Her approval would bless me, her anger would damn me.
This is obviously wrong. No human being should lose judgement and freedom so absolutely to another. It’s not right that all one’s system of ethics, ambitions, values, priorities, wants, needs, principles and morals… it’s not right that it shifts and solidifies around two supreme tenets:
Making the other (I hesitate to call them “beloved”) happy.
Being with that other, as closely as possible.
What does the research say? What is the common wisdom in this community? How does one deal with this kind of extreme emotion?
I can empathize to an extent—my fiance left me about two months ago (two months ago yesterday actually, now that I check). I still love her, and I’m not even close to getting over her. I don’t think I’m even close to wanting to get over her. And when I have talked to her since it happened, I’ve said things that I wish I hadn’t said, upon reflection. I know exactly what you mean about having no control of what you say around her.
But, with that being said...
Well, I certainly can’t speak for the common wisdom of the community, but speaking for myself, I think it’s important to remember that emotion and rationality aren’t necessarily opposed—in fact, I think that’s one of the most important things I’ve learned from LW: emotion is orthogonal to rationality. I think of the love I have for my ex-fiance, and, well...I approve of it. It can’t be really be justified in any way (and it’s hard to even imagine what it would mean for an emotion to be justified, except by other emotions), but it’s there, and I’m happy that it is. As Eliezer put it, there’s no truth that destroys my love.
Of course, emotions can be irrational—certainly one has to strive for reflective equilibrium, searching for emotions that conflict with one another and deciding which ones to endorse. And it seems like you don’t particularly endorse the emotions that you feel around this person (I’ll just add that for myself, being in love has never felt like another persons values were superseding my own—rather it felt like they were being elevated to being on par with my own. Suddenly this other person’s happiness was just as important to me as my own—usually not more important, though). But I guess my point is that there’s nothing inherently irrational about valuing someone else over yourself, even if it might be irrational for you.
In short them, yes. I long term, some people would benefit from awareness-increasing techniques, such as meditation or therapy, while other people would benefit from changing their behavior.
The question “is heartbreak the way humans experience it right now a good thing” is one of the more complex questions about the human condition,yes. My mental modell of all that is kinda like the following:
On an neurochemical level, the way “love” stimulates the reward-centers has been likened to “cocaine”.Its an extremely strong conditioning, addiction even. So of course your brain wants to satisfy that condition by all means possible. If we have a look at popular culture, its kinda expected to have extreme reactions to heartbreak: people fall into depression, start rationalizing all kinds of really crazy behaviour (stalking, death threats, lifechanging roadtrips) etc etc.
To avoid all that you have to thoroughly impress on your emotional side that its over: thats why some people do the whole “burn everything that connects me with her”, others just overwrite that old emotion with new (irrational)emotions like anger, hold a symbolic funeral, repeat it to youself everyday in a mirror etc.
Unfortunately I am not aware of studies about optimal treatment of heartbreak, but common wisdom is: NO contact at all in the beginning, allow yourself to grieve, find solace with friends/familiy, and somehow redefine your sense of selfesteem- take up painting/coding/comething you have always wanted to do.
If one wanted to go the rational route: research neurochemistry, find out wether its really like cocaine-addiction, do whatever helps with cocaine-withdrawal. (or the other most closely related drug-withdrawal).
If one wanted to go the rational route: research neurochemistry, find out wether its really like cocaine-addiction, do whatever helps with cocaine-withdrawal.
Why do you label that process of researching neurochemistry rational?
Well OPs stated goal is to end the strange behaviour they have around their ex, which takes away their agency. While a common problem within humans, it appears to be solved mostly with time- eg it is unsolved. We have some (bad) data available that this is actually very similar to some kinds of addiction. And while certainly addiction is nowhere near 100% curable, (or we would have heard of that by now) my prior for “having found some better than placebo treatments for one of the major drug addiction (cocaine)” is 70-80 percent. So I do give “investigate this line of thinking, speak with experts” at least a high enough investeded-time/chance of success- ratio to be worth considering. That was my thought process for using rational, is the explanation satisfying?
Bad data. I have not read the original research study whose findings were later likened to those of cocain, and am a bit suspicious how similar they actually are. “study the neurology” instead of “neurochemistry” would be more accurate, I guess.
I still see no valid argument for that claim, that you can get significant knowledge about the issue to judge whether or not trying one of the addition treatment exercises is likely to be helpful.
The main problem, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t heartbreak itself, but the way I enter an altered state around her. To put it simply, I can’t think straight. It’s like being intoxicated, or in terrible pain. Getting over an ex is tough. But right now I’m more interested in getting over my feelings when around a loved one, rather than becoming paralyzed and my mind becoming blank.
Sorry I failed to make myself clear. To put it simply back: it feels as if you are in pain or intoxicated, because thats exactly what it is, http://www.pnas.org/content/108/15/6270.short for example. Your system 1 is in desperate need to get its fix OR stop the hurting, even if system 2 is fine. The obvious way to combat it and your accompanied loss of agency is to precommit in some way to stop being around them, but also to ignore their wishes in the future. The way this happens for a lot of people is rationalizing undesired qualities to their expartners, having strong peer pressure etc. Because system 1 is so strong on this front, depending on your own stability, it can actually be dangerous to fight it too much with system 2. For the whole system 1 against system 2, mindfulness meditation is useful.
You can write down your own goals to make them clearer to you. If you are clear about what you want to do it’s harder for someone else to give you other goals then when you are empty.
There are various kind of things you can do to learn emotional control. I remember times in the past where strong emotions could cloud my mind but after doing a lot of meditation that’s not true for me anymore.
In the absence of ugh-fields or a lot of unknowns strong emotions make me think clearly and I can still follow rules based heuristics.
The most charged emotional situation I can think of that likely would have freaked a lot of people out was when it was past midnight and I was walking alone and a guy grabbed me and told me: “Give me 5 Euros or I’ll kill you”
To get to something more speculative, I have the idea that love is a lot of conditioning. If everytime you think about X, you feel good, the next time you think about X you will feel even more good. A bit unpredictability thrown in generally increases the effect.
If you repeat that a thousand times you get a pretty strong stimulus. Almost wireheading ;)
Of course there are additional effects that comes with physical intimacy. Speaking about them would be even more speculative.
I don’t think doing interventions in highly charged emotional issue like this in a practically-oriented way is well done via text.
Text is much better for discussing the topic on a more abstract level. Having abstract concepts to orient yourself in a situation can help.
I gave one practical suggestion, meditation. To be more practical: Find a local meditation group with an experienced teacher and attend it regularly.
One of the exercises that CFAR does is comfort zone extension. That can also help. If you often do that kind of exercises you train yourself to be still operational under strong emotions.
What is the common wisdom in this community? How does one deal with this kind of extreme emotion?
It’s not great data, but I recall an analogous discussion on Less Wrong several months ago.
I participated in the discussion of a post covering subject matter similar to what you’re thinking about: is love a good idea?. It seems to me the original poster was trying to make something like a hypothetical apostasy of falling in love, with mixed results. I had a lot of sympathy for him, as trying to become a rational apostate of ‘falling in love’ seems a challenge fraught with pitfalls, and yet one somebody might find tempting to pursue such a path after having love rend one’s emotions so. The original poster admitted he hadn’t been in a relationship as significant as, for example, yours, so there might be limited value in that perspective. Still, I feel like the rest of us were able to clarify his somewhat muddled thinking in the comments, so you might find solace there. Additionally, you might feel like sending some participant in that discussion a private message if what they wrote reaches out to you.
Employing one’s rational skills in extremely stressful or emotional situations, specifically extreme infatuation:
Today at the market, while waiting on the queue, I recognized an ex-lover of mine. One I had never gotten over. I dared not speak her name. I knew, with absolute certainty, that I would have absolutely no control over what I would said to her, if I didn’t shut down entirely, standing there with my mouth open, my breath held, and a cacophony of conflicting thoughts and emotions on my mind.
I knew that, if, against all probability, she decided thereafter to renew contact with me, all of my priorities, all of my wants, all of my existence, would become subordinate to hers. I’d be looking forward to her texts like a drowning man looks forward to air. Her approval would bless me, her anger would damn me.
This is obviously wrong. No human being should lose judgement and freedom so absolutely to another. It’s not right that all one’s system of ethics, ambitions, values, priorities, wants, needs, principles and morals… it’s not right that it shifts and solidifies around two supreme tenets:
Making the other (I hesitate to call them “beloved”) happy.
Being with that other, as closely as possible.
What does the research say? What is the common wisdom in this community? How does one deal with this kind of extreme emotion?
I can empathize to an extent—my fiance left me about two months ago (two months ago yesterday actually, now that I check). I still love her, and I’m not even close to getting over her. I don’t think I’m even close to wanting to get over her. And when I have talked to her since it happened, I’ve said things that I wish I hadn’t said, upon reflection. I know exactly what you mean about having no control of what you say around her.
But, with that being said...
Well, I certainly can’t speak for the common wisdom of the community, but speaking for myself, I think it’s important to remember that emotion and rationality aren’t necessarily opposed—in fact, I think that’s one of the most important things I’ve learned from LW: emotion is orthogonal to rationality. I think of the love I have for my ex-fiance, and, well...I approve of it. It can’t be really be justified in any way (and it’s hard to even imagine what it would mean for an emotion to be justified, except by other emotions), but it’s there, and I’m happy that it is. As Eliezer put it, there’s no truth that destroys my love.
Of course, emotions can be irrational—certainly one has to strive for reflective equilibrium, searching for emotions that conflict with one another and deciding which ones to endorse. And it seems like you don’t particularly endorse the emotions that you feel around this person (I’ll just add that for myself, being in love has never felt like another persons values were superseding my own—rather it felt like they were being elevated to being on par with my own. Suddenly this other person’s happiness was just as important to me as my own—usually not more important, though). But I guess my point is that there’s nothing inherently irrational about valuing someone else over yourself, even if it might be irrational for you.
Mostly I resent the fact that my mind becomes completely clouded, like I’m on some drug.
You are.
I don’t think naturally producing a hormone counts as being on drugs. If it did, that would mean that everyone is on tons of drugs all of the time.
Some people seem to get higher dose of internally produced drugs than others.
I suppose that’s what they call “being more emotional”?
Probably one of those words that could mean many things:
a) a higher dose of hormones;
b) greater awareness of your internal state; or
c) an exaggerated reaction to the same dose of hormones.
Measuring the difference between those three is hardly trivial, though. Can’t they be considered the same for all practical purposes?
In short them, yes. I long term, some people would benefit from awareness-increasing techniques, such as meditation or therapy, while other people would benefit from changing their behavior.
The question “is heartbreak the way humans experience it right now a good thing” is one of the more complex questions about the human condition,yes. My mental modell of all that is kinda like the following:
On an neurochemical level, the way “love” stimulates the reward-centers has been likened to “cocaine”.Its an extremely strong conditioning, addiction even. So of course your brain wants to satisfy that condition by all means possible. If we have a look at popular culture, its kinda expected to have extreme reactions to heartbreak: people fall into depression, start rationalizing all kinds of really crazy behaviour (stalking, death threats, lifechanging roadtrips) etc etc.
To avoid all that you have to thoroughly impress on your emotional side that its over: thats why some people do the whole “burn everything that connects me with her”, others just overwrite that old emotion with new (irrational)emotions like anger, hold a symbolic funeral, repeat it to youself everyday in a mirror etc.
Unfortunately I am not aware of studies about optimal treatment of heartbreak, but common wisdom is: NO contact at all in the beginning, allow yourself to grieve, find solace with friends/familiy, and somehow redefine your sense of selfesteem- take up painting/coding/comething you have always wanted to do. If one wanted to go the rational route: research neurochemistry, find out wether its really like cocaine-addiction, do whatever helps with cocaine-withdrawal. (or the other most closely related drug-withdrawal).
Why do you label that process of researching neurochemistry rational?
Well OPs stated goal is to end the strange behaviour they have around their ex, which takes away their agency. While a common problem within humans, it appears to be solved mostly with time- eg it is unsolved. We have some (bad) data available that this is actually very similar to some kinds of addiction. And while certainly addiction is nowhere near 100% curable, (or we would have heard of that by now) my prior for “having found some better than placebo treatments for one of the major drug addiction (cocaine)” is 70-80 percent. So I do give “investigate this line of thinking, speak with experts” at least a high enough investeded-time/chance of success- ratio to be worth considering. That was my thought process for using rational, is the explanation satisfying?
I asked for researching neurochemistry not about researching cocaine treatment.
Bad data. I have not read the original research study whose findings were later likened to those of cocain, and am a bit suspicious how similar they actually are. “study the neurology” instead of “neurochemistry” would be more accurate, I guess.
I still see no valid argument for that claim, that you can get significant knowledge about the issue to judge whether or not trying one of the addition treatment exercises is likely to be helpful.
The main problem, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t heartbreak itself, but the way I enter an altered state around her. To put it simply, I can’t think straight. It’s like being intoxicated, or in terrible pain. Getting over an ex is tough. But right now I’m more interested in getting over my feelings when around a loved one, rather than becoming paralyzed and my mind becoming blank.
Sorry I failed to make myself clear. To put it simply back: it feels as if you are in pain or intoxicated, because thats exactly what it is, http://www.pnas.org/content/108/15/6270.short for example. Your system 1 is in desperate need to get its fix OR stop the hurting, even if system 2 is fine. The obvious way to combat it and your accompanied loss of agency is to precommit in some way to stop being around them, but also to ignore their wishes in the future. The way this happens for a lot of people is rationalizing undesired qualities to their expartners, having strong peer pressure etc. Because system 1 is so strong on this front, depending on your own stability, it can actually be dangerous to fight it too much with system 2. For the whole system 1 against system 2, mindfulness meditation is useful.
You can write down your own goals to make them clearer to you. If you are clear about what you want to do it’s harder for someone else to give you other goals then when you are empty.
There are various kind of things you can do to learn emotional control. I remember times in the past where strong emotions could cloud my mind but after doing a lot of meditation that’s not true for me anymore. In the absence of ugh-fields or a lot of unknowns strong emotions make me think clearly and I can still follow rules based heuristics.
The most charged emotional situation I can think of that likely would have freaked a lot of people out was when it was past midnight and I was walking alone and a guy grabbed me and told me: “Give me 5 Euros or I’ll kill you”
To get to something more speculative, I have the idea that love is a lot of conditioning. If everytime you think about X, you feel good, the next time you think about X you will feel even more good. A bit unpredictability thrown in generally increases the effect.
If you repeat that a thousand times you get a pretty strong stimulus. Almost wireheading ;)
Of course there are additional effects that comes with physical intimacy. Speaking about them would be even more speculative.
I have trouble parsing this… could you rephrase it in a more practically-oriented way?
I don’t think doing interventions in highly charged emotional issue like this in a practically-oriented way is well done via text.
Text is much better for discussing the topic on a more abstract level. Having abstract concepts to orient yourself in a situation can help.
I gave one practical suggestion, meditation. To be more practical: Find a local meditation group with an experienced teacher and attend it regularly.
One of the exercises that CFAR does is comfort zone extension. That can also help. If you often do that kind of exercises you train yourself to be still operational under strong emotions.
It’s not great data, but I recall an analogous discussion on Less Wrong several months ago.
I participated in the discussion of a post covering subject matter similar to what you’re thinking about: is love a good idea?. It seems to me the original poster was trying to make something like a hypothetical apostasy of falling in love, with mixed results. I had a lot of sympathy for him, as trying to become a rational apostate of ‘falling in love’ seems a challenge fraught with pitfalls, and yet one somebody might find tempting to pursue such a path after having love rend one’s emotions so. The original poster admitted he hadn’t been in a relationship as significant as, for example, yours, so there might be limited value in that perspective. Still, I feel like the rest of us were able to clarify his somewhat muddled thinking in the comments, so you might find solace there. Additionally, you might feel like sending some participant in that discussion a private message if what they wrote reaches out to you.