I like the general rehearsing TAPs part of this, but I had to opt out of doing a general-purpose sapience spell.
It took me a while to figure out a thing that might work at all here, because in real life I tend to spend too much time on the meta level in an anxiety kind of way, and it was hard for me to figure out something I could do that wouldn’t just map to the anxiety thoughts and have either no effect or a negative one. It was sort of unclear whether anything in this category would even be beneficial; there are specific times in my life when I need more sapience, but those are I think mostly pretty well-defined (Internet rabbit holes that I need to snap out of, and also times when I feel generically shitty in unclear ways and benefit from remembering to try and locate the shittiness in specific parts of my body and/or thoughts (which sometimes lets me remove some stressors)), and in other contexts I actively do not want to go on the meta level (e.g. when I have finally managed to focus on a work task and want to stay focused and not snap out of it).
I decided to try this: “when I look at my watch, notice something in my environment, appreciate it, notice its spatial relationship to me”. Point being to take me out of my head instead of into it, to notice that things exist outside my brain and I am a person in the world.
But then I tried to rehearse this and I found it really stressful. I would notice my watch and then be like “oh no I have to notice a thing now” and it felt like a new obligation and this was really unpleasant. I would start reading an interesting thing and then have to snap out of it and notice a thing instead—being immersed in something is sometimes bad and snapping out of it can be necessary, but often being immersed in something is in fact good and in general I want to do it more, not less!
(This may be related to the thing Kaj cited in their post on TAPs finding that a certain kind of perfectionist can be harmed by TAPs because it activates the “oh no this is an obligation and I have to perform” thing. I’m not convinced that that’s always a real effect—I certainly find lots of TAPs useful to me and not that stressful—but in this case it very much triggered the “oh no an obligation” thing.)
So I’m going to instead work on situation-specific sapience TAPs, which are likely to have more false negatives (i.e. not trigger when it would be better for them to trigger) but also fewer false positives along the lines of interrupting my focus:
1. [when I switch between apps on my phone] AND [when I notice myself scrolling social media for a long time], look up from my screen for five seconds and try to notice whether I want to currently be doing this thing.
2. when I notice myself feeling generically shitty, try to enumerate sources of physical discomfort.
I like the general rehearsing TAPs part of this, but I had to opt out of doing a general-purpose sapience spell.
It took me a while to figure out a thing that might work at all here, because in real life I tend to spend too much time on the meta level in an anxiety kind of way, and it was hard for me to figure out something I could do that wouldn’t just map to the anxiety thoughts and have either no effect or a negative one. It was sort of unclear whether anything in this category would even be beneficial; there are specific times in my life when I need more sapience, but those are I think mostly pretty well-defined (Internet rabbit holes that I need to snap out of, and also times when I feel generically shitty in unclear ways and benefit from remembering to try and locate the shittiness in specific parts of my body and/or thoughts (which sometimes lets me remove some stressors)), and in other contexts I actively do not want to go on the meta level (e.g. when I have finally managed to focus on a work task and want to stay focused and not snap out of it).
I decided to try this: “when I look at my watch, notice something in my environment, appreciate it, notice its spatial relationship to me”. Point being to take me out of my head instead of into it, to notice that things exist outside my brain and I am a person in the world.
But then I tried to rehearse this and I found it really stressful. I would notice my watch and then be like “oh no I have to notice a thing now” and it felt like a new obligation and this was really unpleasant. I would start reading an interesting thing and then have to snap out of it and notice a thing instead—being immersed in something is sometimes bad and snapping out of it can be necessary, but often being immersed in something is in fact good and in general I want to do it more, not less!
(This may be related to the thing Kaj cited in their post on TAPs finding that a certain kind of perfectionist can be harmed by TAPs because it activates the “oh no this is an obligation and I have to perform” thing. I’m not convinced that that’s always a real effect—I certainly find lots of TAPs useful to me and not that stressful—but in this case it very much triggered the “oh no an obligation” thing.)
So I’m going to instead work on situation-specific sapience TAPs, which are likely to have more false negatives (i.e. not trigger when it would be better for them to trigger) but also fewer false positives along the lines of interrupting my focus:
1. [when I switch between apps on my phone] AND [when I notice myself scrolling social media for a long time], look up from my screen for five seconds and try to notice whether I want to currently be doing this thing.
2. when I notice myself feeling generically shitty, try to enumerate sources of physical discomfort.