Don’t give your opinions (e.g. probabilities, value judgements) greater weight than other people’s, despite having access to information (your running inner speech, for example) that other people don’t have. I’m not confident of my justification of this practice, so I won’t put it here.
Do respond to inner speech, arguing with it using all the rational-argumentation techniques at your disposal. For example, “I’m a terrible person” should not go unchallenged (and the claim is very susceptible to rational challenges: fundamental attribution error, overgeneralization, doesn’t admit the possibility of change, et cetera).
You will feel better if you do something, even if starting to do something feels horrible. Trying to do nothing in order to “recover willpower” or “get in the mood” doesn’t work.
I would recommend “Feeling Good” by Burns, as an (somewhat verbose, but easy-to-read) introduction to CBT.
Here are the high-level habits that I think can be generalised to other domains:
Being able to identify the states that I don’t want to be in, including what they feel like from inside and their most common triggers. Prior to CBT I had low luminosity with respect to my thoughts and feelings, and often did things like confusing low mood with being tired, or playing computer games for hours or days on end even though I usually felt worse afterwards and didn’t even particularly enjoy them while I was playing them.
Setting up a separate cognitive thread whose only job is to monitor my thoughts and feelings and alert me to anything that corresponds to those thought patterns or states that I want to avoid, such as boredom, low mood, or anxiety.
Practising metacognition in a timely fashion—it’s no good to realise after the conversation has ended that you should have been more curious, that you were unduly worried about what the other person thought of you, or anything like that. So the third habit is being able to challenge a problem state immediately rather than dealing with it much later. This takes the form of the monitoring thread combined with a cached list of responses to my most common negative states/thoughts, eg. if I go to a party and it turns out that I’m over- or underdressed, my automatic negative thought of “everyone will think less of me for dressing wrongly for the occasion” can be neutralised by the equally automatic responses “will they really?”, “if they do, why should I care about being judged by strangers on something relatively trivial?”, and “I and everyone else that I will interact with will enjoy themselves more if I stop worrying about my clothing”.
As to how I got to stage 3, it mostly involved lots and lots of practice of (2) and (1). At a certain level of mindfulness, my natural bent towards problem-solving kicked in to help me brainstorm appropriate challenges to undesirable thoughts and start applying them fairly consistently, with immediate benefits that created a positive feedback loop—the better my mood is, the clearer my thinking is, which in turn makes it easier to monitor myself for lapses and challenge them before they become really problematic.
So to summarise, the most important aspect of CBT/metacognition is to notice when something is wrong and be able to explicitly label it as such. And the way to get those skills is to cultivate paranoia with respect to the part of yourself you want to change. I have dozens of assorted charts, tables, blog posts, daily monitoring reports, and the like from a period of approximately three months, until being aware of my mood and thoughts started becoming automatic.
Can you list some of the habits you learned in CBT, or any details of what “practicing metacognition in a timely fashion” involves?
My takeaways from CBT:
Don’t give your opinions (e.g. probabilities, value judgements) greater weight than other people’s, despite having access to information (your running inner speech, for example) that other people don’t have. I’m not confident of my justification of this practice, so I won’t put it here.
Do respond to inner speech, arguing with it using all the rational-argumentation techniques at your disposal. For example, “I’m a terrible person” should not go unchallenged (and the claim is very susceptible to rational challenges: fundamental attribution error, overgeneralization, doesn’t admit the possibility of change, et cetera).
You will feel better if you do something, even if starting to do something feels horrible. Trying to do nothing in order to “recover willpower” or “get in the mood” doesn’t work.
I would recommend “Feeling Good” by Burns, as an (somewhat verbose, but easy-to-read) introduction to CBT.
Here are the high-level habits that I think can be generalised to other domains:
Being able to identify the states that I don’t want to be in, including what they feel like from inside and their most common triggers. Prior to CBT I had low luminosity with respect to my thoughts and feelings, and often did things like confusing low mood with being tired, or playing computer games for hours or days on end even though I usually felt worse afterwards and didn’t even particularly enjoy them while I was playing them.
Setting up a separate cognitive thread whose only job is to monitor my thoughts and feelings and alert me to anything that corresponds to those thought patterns or states that I want to avoid, such as boredom, low mood, or anxiety.
Practising metacognition in a timely fashion—it’s no good to realise after the conversation has ended that you should have been more curious, that you were unduly worried about what the other person thought of you, or anything like that. So the third habit is being able to challenge a problem state immediately rather than dealing with it much later. This takes the form of the monitoring thread combined with a cached list of responses to my most common negative states/thoughts, eg. if I go to a party and it turns out that I’m over- or underdressed, my automatic negative thought of “everyone will think less of me for dressing wrongly for the occasion” can be neutralised by the equally automatic responses “will they really?”, “if they do, why should I care about being judged by strangers on something relatively trivial?”, and “I and everyone else that I will interact with will enjoy themselves more if I stop worrying about my clothing”.
As to how I got to stage 3, it mostly involved lots and lots of practice of (2) and (1). At a certain level of mindfulness, my natural bent towards problem-solving kicked in to help me brainstorm appropriate challenges to undesirable thoughts and start applying them fairly consistently, with immediate benefits that created a positive feedback loop—the better my mood is, the clearer my thinking is, which in turn makes it easier to monitor myself for lapses and challenge them before they become really problematic.
So to summarise, the most important aspect of CBT/metacognition is to notice when something is wrong and be able to explicitly label it as such. And the way to get those skills is to cultivate paranoia with respect to the part of yourself you want to change. I have dozens of assorted charts, tables, blog posts, daily monitoring reports, and the like from a period of approximately three months, until being aware of my mood and thoughts started becoming automatic.