Now I’m wondering if the part about “enjoyment” wasn’t mere psychoanalysis but something I either unusually lack, or which is unusually obscured from my sight.
Enjoyment isn’t the right word, I don’t think. My wife and I both described the “Bruce effect” sensation as being more like a sense of recognition or rightness—like confirmation of something that you expected, something that’s just the way the world works. That, upon successfully losing, it’s like, “yep, this is where I’m supposed to be”. Not enjoyment… more like satisfaction… though that’s still too strong. Closure, maybe? Relief? It’s a brief and subtle reward, not a conscious pleasure.
It was just a loser side with bad habits, probably formed mostly by hyperbolic discounting or poor impulse control.
Anosognosia. Don’t speculate, investigate—observe the automatic thoughts in action, rather than adding voluntary thoughts on top of them.
And it occurred to me that I should give this side a name and separate it out from my real me.
Be careful of how you do that… dispassionate separation is okay, rejection is not. When people actively reject parts of themselves (“that’s not me; I would never do that”), they make it more difficult to observe or change the actual motivation involved. (“After all, I would never do that… therefore it’s irrational/bad/whatever.”)
The way to remove something like this is to imagine what it’s like when that part of you gets its wish, so you can get a glimpse of what the reward is. Then you imagine having that reward, and find out what, if any, reward is behind that… and so on, all the way to the root reward emotion, fully experienced in your body, and chain backwards through the same path by which you came, re-experiencing as though you already have the root reward… noticing the difference in available choices, i.e., “If I already have this feeling, do I really need to do X? Is it easier to get X?”
Once you’ve fully worked back to the starting point, you’ll have changed the response options for the original behavior context—i.e., the original response will no longer be compulsive.
This is a very short sketch of the technique; my shortest training on it takes over an hour and assumes at least a little prior mindhacking experience. (The technique itself can be applied in about 10-20 minutes after some practice, or with the assistance of an instructor/guide.)
There are a few subtleties, not the least of which is that you need to be able to actually pay attention to your autonomous responses without injecting conscious interpretation, speculation, or critique (e.g., “that’s stupid, why would I want that?” etc.).
Enjoyment isn’t the right word, I don’t think. My wife and I both described the “Bruce effect” sensation as being more like a sense of recognition or rightness—like confirmation of something that you expected, something that’s just the way the world works.
Okay… I understand that, but only because of my struggles with my diet.
I recall you were trying paleo/primal at one point. What failed? Didn’t/couldn’t stick to it? Or even with eating completely paleo, you failed to lose weight and don’t know why? Did you keep a food log and/or track calories? Any intermittent fasting experimentation? Are you currently trying anything in particular?
Reminds me of Big Mind Technique a little bit. Acknowledging and integrating all your voices, including the self-destructive ones.
Techniques for working on brains are similar because brains are similar. ;-) Do you have anything you can point me to that’s a brief introduction, though? I’m always curious about new techniques. There are a lot of techniques that involve integration of multiple points of view, both in NLP and other branches of psychology, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find more of them that I haven’t heard of.
My wife (who is a life coach) has been to a couple of seminars and liked it. As wikipedia says, it evolved out of the “Voice Dialogue method created by Hal Stone and Sidra Stone”.
BTW, your work is very interesting and I look forward to your upcoming book.
Enjoyment isn’t the right word, I don’t think. My wife and I both described the “Bruce effect” sensation as being more like a sense of recognition or rightness—like confirmation of something that you expected, something that’s just the way the world works. That, upon successfully losing, it’s like, “yep, this is where I’m supposed to be”. Not enjoyment… more like satisfaction… though that’s still too strong. Closure, maybe? Relief? It’s a brief and subtle reward, not a conscious pleasure.
Anosognosia. Don’t speculate, investigate—observe the automatic thoughts in action, rather than adding voluntary thoughts on top of them.
Be careful of how you do that… dispassionate separation is okay, rejection is not. When people actively reject parts of themselves (“that’s not me; I would never do that”), they make it more difficult to observe or change the actual motivation involved. (“After all, I would never do that… therefore it’s irrational/bad/whatever.”)
The way to remove something like this is to imagine what it’s like when that part of you gets its wish, so you can get a glimpse of what the reward is. Then you imagine having that reward, and find out what, if any, reward is behind that… and so on, all the way to the root reward emotion, fully experienced in your body, and chain backwards through the same path by which you came, re-experiencing as though you already have the root reward… noticing the difference in available choices, i.e., “If I already have this feeling, do I really need to do X? Is it easier to get X?”
Once you’ve fully worked back to the starting point, you’ll have changed the response options for the original behavior context—i.e., the original response will no longer be compulsive.
This is a very short sketch of the technique; my shortest training on it takes over an hour and assumes at least a little prior mindhacking experience. (The technique itself can be applied in about 10-20 minutes after some practice, or with the assistance of an instructor/guide.)
There are a few subtleties, not the least of which is that you need to be able to actually pay attention to your autonomous responses without injecting conscious interpretation, speculation, or critique (e.g., “that’s stupid, why would I want that?” etc.).
Okay… I understand that, but only because of my struggles with my diet.
Now you’ve got me curious: where have you experienced that in relation to diet?
That when it fails, it feels like the thing that was supposed to happen has happened.
I recall you were trying paleo/primal at one point. What failed? Didn’t/couldn’t stick to it? Or even with eating completely paleo, you failed to lose weight and don’t know why? Did you keep a food log and/or track calories? Any intermittent fasting experimentation? Are you currently trying anything in particular?
Heh. Reminds me of Big Mind Technique a little bit. Acknowledging and integrating all your voices, including the self-destructive ones.
Techniques for working on brains are similar because brains are similar. ;-) Do you have anything you can point me to that’s a brief introduction, though? I’m always curious about new techniques. There are a lot of techniques that involve integration of multiple points of view, both in NLP and other branches of psychology, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find more of them that I haven’t heard of.
http://www.bigmind.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mind
My wife (who is a life coach) has been to a couple of seminars and liked it. As wikipedia says, it evolved out of the “Voice Dialogue method created by Hal Stone and Sidra Stone”.
BTW, your work is very interesting and I look forward to your upcoming book.