I used to have really strong emotions that could be triggered by trivial things, which caused both me and the people I was around a lot of suffering.
I managed to permanently stop this, reducing my emotional suffering by about 90%! I did this by resolving to completely own and deal with my emotions myself, and told relevant people about this commitment. Then I was just pretty miserable and lonely feeling for about 3 months, and then these emotional reactions just stopped completely without any additional effort. I think I permanently lowered my level of neuroticism by doing this.
There is research that claims that suffering might serve as an honest signal to get help from your group and that humans suffer more than other animals due to this reason.
you might have taught your system 1 that emotional suffering is useless for signaling purposes and it stopped using it.
If it’s true it could be an extremely impactful and even groundbreaking intervention.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between the American emphasis on comfort and loss of utility for suffering as a social signal?
At least within notable chunks of American culture that I currently have a lens on—don’t live in the US at present, so do take this with a massive salt-boulder—it seems that visibly suffering quickly earns the sufferer a large amount of sympathy/compassion/support/etc.
This begets more visible suffering—to the point of harmful neuroticism—in order to garner more support from the community, and I doubt this is in any way a conscious effort on behalf of any of the involved parties. Similar to an unruly child that keeps throwing temper-tantrums because her parents quickly give in and reward the unwanted behavior—neither the child nor parents are really aware of the feedback loop in which they are trapped.
Moreover, in my observation, cultures where publicly visible suffering is ignored (or even punished!) don’t seem to suffer from the same levels of neurotic behavior that I regularly see in specific American subcultures—although increased suicide rates do seem to be an issue for when those cultures have yet to evolve mechanisms whereby suffering can be alleviated.
The main emotion that was a problem was feeling very hurt/insecure by some perceived slight or something, which resulted in in the moment reactions, like crying or getting upset with someone
For what it’s worth, I had a similar journey. Not as much with strong emotions being triggered by trivial things, but I would routinely blame others for my negative feelings.
Coming to understand that I, and only I, was responsible for both my situation and my emotional responses was a difficult journey, but it also helped me address those negative feelings in a useful way.
The next level is presumably, resuming offloading only the emotions for which sharing the processing work is beneficial (shockingly few qualify though)
I used to have really strong emotions that could be triggered by trivial things, which caused both me and the people I was around a lot of suffering.
I managed to permanently stop this, reducing my emotional suffering by about 90%! I did this by resolving to completely own and deal with my emotions myself, and told relevant people about this commitment. Then I was just pretty miserable and lonely feeling for about 3 months, and then these emotional reactions just stopped completely without any additional effort. I think I permanently lowered my level of neuroticism by doing this.
There is research that claims that suffering might serve as an honest signal to get help from your group and that humans suffer more than other animals due to this reason.
you might have taught your system 1 that emotional suffering is useless for signaling purposes and it stopped using it.
If it’s true it could be an extremely impactful and even groundbreaking intervention.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between the American emphasis on comfort and loss of utility for suffering as a social signal?
At least within notable chunks of American culture that I currently have a lens on—don’t live in the US at present, so do take this with a massive salt-boulder—it seems that visibly suffering quickly earns the sufferer a large amount of sympathy/compassion/support/etc.
This begets more visible suffering—to the point of harmful neuroticism—in order to garner more support from the community, and I doubt this is in any way a conscious effort on behalf of any of the involved parties. Similar to an unruly child that keeps throwing temper-tantrums because her parents quickly give in and reward the unwanted behavior—neither the child nor parents are really aware of the feedback loop in which they are trapped.
Moreover, in my observation, cultures where publicly visible suffering is ignored (or even punished!) don’t seem to suffer from the same levels of neurotic behavior that I regularly see in specific American subcultures—although increased suicide rates do seem to be an issue for when those cultures have yet to evolve mechanisms whereby suffering can be alleviated.
[Deleted]
The main emotion that was a problem was feeling very hurt/insecure by some perceived slight or something, which resulted in in the moment reactions, like crying or getting upset with someone
For what it’s worth, I had a similar journey. Not as much with strong emotions being triggered by trivial things, but I would routinely blame others for my negative feelings.
Coming to understand that I, and only I, was responsible for both my situation and my emotional responses was a difficult journey, but it also helped me address those negative feelings in a useful way.
The next level is presumably, resuming offloading only the emotions for which sharing the processing work is beneficial (shockingly few qualify though)