{This is actually a reply to this comment, but for some reason it doesn’t have a Reply button.}
I first started to pay attention to the relationship of social factors and akrasia after PJ Eby mentioned it in our earlier discussion. His term (psychosomatic marker, if I remember correctly) didn’t stick with me, but I noticed that when I procrastinate, I almost always find that a social pressure is involved.
The term is “somatic marker” as in the “somatic marker hypothesis”. The somatic marker hypothesis in neurobiology basically says that our brains use remembered body states as markers (think XML tags) to categorize and rank our thoughts, as a decision-making shortcut. (This idea is supported by such things as microexpressions, tics, and the like.)
I don’t consider procrastination to be chronic if it’s something you could easily get yourself to do if you decided to/wanted to, but just never get around to. That might be akrasia, but it’s not procrastination in my book.
To me, procrastination is when you have something you know you ought to be doing, but you find yourself doing other things in a specific effort to avoid thinking about the thing you’re procrastinating.
In such cases, there is always an aversive somatic marker associated with the task, and the critical one is nearly always associated with the social consequences of task failure.
It’s actually pretty rare for the aversive marker to be associated with the difficulty or time involved in task performance itself. And even then, it’s likely to be social in nature. For example, a belief that working hard means you’re dumb, because if you’re really good at something it should be easy. In other words, an unconscious emotional concern about one’s social image, rather than a practical concern about the task.
My use of the term “somatic markers” is just referring to the idea that our aversive responses can be observed as bodily reflexes. If you think about something you don’t like, you may unconsciously frown, flinch, tense, or otherwise physically respond without any conscious intent to do so.
The relevance to fixing problems such as procrastination, then, is that the repeatable evocation of a somatic marker can be used as the basis for testing an attempt at changing your response. If you reliably flinch every time you think of the thing, and then after applying a belief-change or deconditioning technique, you no longer flinch, then it’s a good indication that the intervention has been successful.
I use this approach because traditional self-help techniques don’t have any way for you to know (for example) whether you’ve said an affirmation enough times or adequately visualized, or whatever the heck else the technique is supposed to be. And people routinely assume that just because they intellectually understand that nothing bad is going to happen or that they have to do something, this somehow should update the unconscious bit where the somatic markers are stored… and that’s mostly not the case.
It also doesn’t hurt that somatic markers are part of the mechanism by which our unconscious desires take effect: the physical response of flinching or other aversive behaviors are just the outward effect of whatever neuropeptide or other reactions are actually changing our inner states. So if we change the mental representations that trigger the outer markers, it’s an excellent bet that the neurochemical changes in between aren’t happening anymore, either.
And in practice, the usual result of realizing you no longer have an automatic aversive response in a certain context, is to laugh with surprise as you realize you could actually just do something else in that situation… something that didn’t occur to you before, because the aversive response kept you from even thinking that far ahead.
A wide variety of self-help techniques out there will work for removing various types of somatic markers; The Work of Byron Katie, Sedona, and the Decision-Maker Process are among the ones I’ve used with myself or clients, but all are far more effective when you add in testing based on somatic markers. Otherwise, there is no real way to know whether you are doing a technique correctly, or just “thinking” you’ve fixed something.
I’ll bet the reason Vladimir Golovin’s post has no Reply button is that he added it before sharing the article with Less Wrong in general. (or, if you prefer, he posted it to the post before posting it.)
Yup, that’s it. I did the same thing here. I never noticed because I have a reply button for my own comments whether I make them to posts on LW proper or in my drafts.
Great! That was annoying. Also, it would be a good idea to replace the “Post to” dropdown list on the article submit page with an equivalent set of radiobuttons—should make things easier to figure out for first-time top-level article posters.
{This is actually a reply to this comment, but for some reason it doesn’t have a Reply button.}
The term is “somatic marker” as in the “somatic marker hypothesis”. The somatic marker hypothesis in neurobiology basically says that our brains use remembered body states as markers (think XML tags) to categorize and rank our thoughts, as a decision-making shortcut. (This idea is supported by such things as microexpressions, tics, and the like.)
I don’t consider procrastination to be chronic if it’s something you could easily get yourself to do if you decided to/wanted to, but just never get around to. That might be akrasia, but it’s not procrastination in my book.
To me, procrastination is when you have something you know you ought to be doing, but you find yourself doing other things in a specific effort to avoid thinking about the thing you’re procrastinating.
In such cases, there is always an aversive somatic marker associated with the task, and the critical one is nearly always associated with the social consequences of task failure.
It’s actually pretty rare for the aversive marker to be associated with the difficulty or time involved in task performance itself. And even then, it’s likely to be social in nature. For example, a belief that working hard means you’re dumb, because if you’re really good at something it should be easy. In other words, an unconscious emotional concern about one’s social image, rather than a practical concern about the task.
My use of the term “somatic markers” is just referring to the idea that our aversive responses can be observed as bodily reflexes. If you think about something you don’t like, you may unconsciously frown, flinch, tense, or otherwise physically respond without any conscious intent to do so.
The relevance to fixing problems such as procrastination, then, is that the repeatable evocation of a somatic marker can be used as the basis for testing an attempt at changing your response. If you reliably flinch every time you think of the thing, and then after applying a belief-change or deconditioning technique, you no longer flinch, then it’s a good indication that the intervention has been successful.
I use this approach because traditional self-help techniques don’t have any way for you to know (for example) whether you’ve said an affirmation enough times or adequately visualized, or whatever the heck else the technique is supposed to be. And people routinely assume that just because they intellectually understand that nothing bad is going to happen or that they have to do something, this somehow should update the unconscious bit where the somatic markers are stored… and that’s mostly not the case.
It also doesn’t hurt that somatic markers are part of the mechanism by which our unconscious desires take effect: the physical response of flinching or other aversive behaviors are just the outward effect of whatever neuropeptide or other reactions are actually changing our inner states. So if we change the mental representations that trigger the outer markers, it’s an excellent bet that the neurochemical changes in between aren’t happening anymore, either.
And in practice, the usual result of realizing you no longer have an automatic aversive response in a certain context, is to laugh with surprise as you realize you could actually just do something else in that situation… something that didn’t occur to you before, because the aversive response kept you from even thinking that far ahead.
A wide variety of self-help techniques out there will work for removing various types of somatic markers; The Work of Byron Katie, Sedona, and the Decision-Maker Process are among the ones I’ve used with myself or clients, but all are far more effective when you add in testing based on somatic markers. Otherwise, there is no real way to know whether you are doing a technique correctly, or just “thinking” you’ve fixed something.
I’ll bet the reason Vladimir Golovin’s post has no Reply button is that he added it before sharing the article with Less Wrong in general. (or, if you prefer, he posted it to the post before posting it.)
Yup, that’s it. I did the same thing here. I never noticed because I have a reply button for my own comments whether I make them to posts on LW proper or in my drafts.
This has now been fixed.
Comments now correctly follow the Post they belong to and you can reply to them :)
Great! That was annoying. Also, it would be a good idea to replace the “Post to” dropdown list on the article submit page with an equivalent set of radiobuttons—should make things easier to figure out for first-time top-level article posters.