Worth noting that both this and the fixing the motor cortex skill they advocate are very closely related to traditional buddhist insight practices and that without supporting emotional integration (Tune Your Emotional Processing, with Focusing as the particular version that Squirrelinhell advocated though a variety of self therapy modalities can work) it can be destabilizing.
I’m interested in more details about the failure modes to watch out for here. i.e. what sort of things might you notice happening to you if you were en route to being destabilized?
The post does explicitly warn about this, but I happened to a) already have some flavor of focusing by the time I started, and b) never actually ran at it that hard, so, I might still be underestimating how worried to be about it despite the warnings.
One possible issue that comes to mind is that if you start paying more attention to the low-level movements of your thoughts, you might start noticing thoughts that parts of you get triggered by, e.g. if they feel like particular kinds of thoughts are shameful to have. One concrete failure mode that I think many rationalists would be susceptible to, would be to notice something like
blank mind → noticing having a blank mind → verbal thought “my mind is blank” → feeling of despair → blank mind → …
and then feeling additional despair and shame over your mind being stuck in an unproductive cycle and feeling that you should be able to do better. That may then create another layer of shame and despair on top of the original one. Although the original instructions say that you shouldn’t use this to police your mind, getting triggered in this way may create a compulsion to do so anyway.
Another could be mysterious feelings of dread and feeling bad, if you started noticing various thoughts/emotions that parts of you had been trying to block. Though I would expect that the most natural consequence of that would be you just losing the motivation to use the technique pretty rapidly, with it becoming another of those “that felt really useful but for some reason I don’t feel any interest in doing it anymore, shrug” things.
I think the main risk there would be if you had used this technique extensively enough to build up an increased introspective awareness that was harmless at first but then started catching more of whatever blocked trauma you had and had by that point been built up sufficiently that just stopping the practice wasn’t enough to bring it down anymore. That kind of a scenario would be similar to the cases where people start getting trauma symptoms from doing mindfulness practices; if one has already tried that kind of a thing before and hasn’t felt bad, then it might be an indication (on top of the base rate, which I think is reasonably low) that it’s low-risk.
There’s also the fact that the thought processes themselves may be protecting you from various traumas or doing other subconscious things for you. Since this tuning process isn’t based on introspection but on conscious judging of your subconscious processes, you could accidentally tune yourself away from emotionally load-bearing coping strategies.
I meant that emotional integration (like focusing) is helpful for avoiding destabilization.
I would say the signs are the normal sort you ’d see in mental health breakdowns:
Depression, social withdrawal
Hostility or suspiciousness, extreme reaction to criticism
Deterioration of personal hygiene
Flat, expressionless affect
Inability to cry or express joy or inappropriate laughter or crying
Oversleeping or insomnia; forgetful, unable to concentrate
Odd or irrational statements; seeming difficulty with communicating in a normal way
However, a few people seem to have an overall cognitive strategy that crucially depends on not looking at things too closely (or something like that), and this is actively bad for some of them. If you try this for a minute and hate it, especially in an “I feel like I’m going crazy” kind of way, I do not recommend continuing. Go touch some grass instead. I’ve never seen this cause damage in just a few minutes (or at all, as far as I can tell), but I do think there’s a danger of dismantling somebody’s central coping mechanism if they push past their own red flags about it over and over again, or for a whole hour at once.
The “notice something new” exercise in that post is extremely similar to “pay attention to the delta between thoughts”. Seems to me that it’s directing attention toward the same psychological event type, just not in the context of attempting to solve a problem.
Worth noting that both this and the fixing the motor cortex skill they advocate are very closely related to traditional buddhist insight practices and that without supporting emotional integration (Tune Your Emotional Processing, with Focusing as the particular version that Squirrelinhell advocated though a variety of self therapy modalities can work) it can be destabilizing.
I’m interested in more details about the failure modes to watch out for here. i.e. what sort of things might you notice happening to you if you were en route to being destabilized?
The post does explicitly warn about this, but I happened to a) already have some flavor of focusing by the time I started, and b) never actually ran at it that hard, so, I might still be underestimating how worried to be about it despite the warnings.
One possible issue that comes to mind is that if you start paying more attention to the low-level movements of your thoughts, you might start noticing thoughts that parts of you get triggered by, e.g. if they feel like particular kinds of thoughts are shameful to have. One concrete failure mode that I think many rationalists would be susceptible to, would be to notice something like
and then feeling additional despair and shame over your mind being stuck in an unproductive cycle and feeling that you should be able to do better. That may then create another layer of shame and despair on top of the original one. Although the original instructions say that you shouldn’t use this to police your mind, getting triggered in this way may create a compulsion to do so anyway.
Another could be mysterious feelings of dread and feeling bad, if you started noticing various thoughts/emotions that parts of you had been trying to block. Though I would expect that the most natural consequence of that would be you just losing the motivation to use the technique pretty rapidly, with it becoming another of those “that felt really useful but for some reason I don’t feel any interest in doing it anymore, shrug” things.
I think the main risk there would be if you had used this technique extensively enough to build up an increased introspective awareness that was harmless at first but then started catching more of whatever blocked trauma you had and had by that point been built up sufficiently that just stopping the practice wasn’t enough to bring it down anymore. That kind of a scenario would be similar to the cases where people start getting trauma symptoms from doing mindfulness practices; if one has already tried that kind of a thing before and hasn’t felt bad, then it might be an indication (on top of the base rate, which I think is reasonably low) that it’s low-risk.
There’s also the fact that the thought processes themselves may be protecting you from various traumas or doing other subconscious things for you. Since this tuning process isn’t based on introspection but on conscious judging of your subconscious processes, you could accidentally tune yourself away from emotionally load-bearing coping strategies.
Compulsive deconstructors shouldn’t be handed a full toolbox is one way I have thought of it.
I meant that emotional integration (like focusing) is helpful for avoiding destabilization.
I would say the signs are the normal sort you ’d see in mental health breakdowns:
One of my “responsible use” notes in “How To Observe Abstract Objects” seems directly relevant here:
The “notice something new” exercise in that post is extremely similar to “pay attention to the delta between thoughts”. Seems to me that it’s directing attention toward the same psychological event type, just not in the context of attempting to solve a problem.