Yes :) But you wrote this comment and chapters 6-7 5 years ago, are there any new developments since then?
I tried them and would like to have the following comments:
instant motivation does not seem to work for me for the goals where you really, truly, are running away from something bad and there is no positive goal to pursue. Example: stopping smoking: the best possible outcome of not smoking is staying as healthy as today, the worst outcome of smoking is early painful death. Example: the kind of jobs one does only to pay bills. In both cases there are no possible positive outcomes to imagine: the best case outcome is things staying as they are now.
I tried chapter 7 on tomatoes, as I hated them since childhood. When I go back to 3 or 4 years old I simply don’t remember how I felt hence I have no feeling to overwrite the current body feeling (gag reflex, sour face).
you wrote this comment and chapters 6-7 5 years ago, are there any new developments since then?
Quite a lot of them. Sadly, none of them make the overall picture any easier to understand. There seem to be an almost infinite number of “things that work” for some set of problems, but almost nothing that works for all the problems, for all of the people, all of the time. The basic idea of negative motivation is still valid, though, as is the idea that the primary negative motivations that are problematic derive from identity issues or pseudo-moral “shoulds”.
instant motivation does not seem to work for me for the goals where you really, truly, are running away from something bad and there is no positive goal to pursue
Yes, that was explicitly stated as a qualifier on the technique: if you can’t pass the “mmm” test, it’s not going to work.
Example: stopping smoking: the best possible outcome of not smoking is staying as healthy as today, the worst outcome of smoking is early painful death
For such outcomes, I suggest the methods used by Allen Carr: essentially they work by systematically eliminating all the perceived benefits of the activity you wish to cease. His books are basically step-by-step persuasion walking you through the reasoning to achieve a realization that the thing you think you’re getting is in fact of no value to you. (This is quite different from negative motion or deciding the act isn’t “worth” it: rather, it is the systematic demolishing of any positive motivation towards the act, through deliberately induced disillusionment.)
Example: the kind of jobs one does only to pay bills. In both cases there are no possible positive outcomes to imagine: the best case outcome is things staying as they are now.
The trick to this kind of issue is realizing that your brain is using the wrong baseline for measurement of gain/loss. The correct baseline to use in such a scenario is not how things are now, but how they would be if you didn’t have the job. Not having the job is the default case, since if you do nothing, that is the result you will get. ;-)
(I am, of course, omitting any details of how to do this change-of-baseline in this comment, due to the difficulty of describing it briefly, in this medium, in a way that would actually be implementable by anyone without the prerequisite skills of introspection and mind-changing.)
I have no feeling to overwrite the current body feeling (gag reflex, sour face).
You’re probably overthinking the technique, which doesn’t involve higher cognition at all. Certainly, there is nothing in it about “overwriting” anything. The method is simply intensifying a response long enough to trigger a refractory period, during which the response can’t be re-triggered at the same intensity as before, leading to having a new experience or reaction in the context of the original triggering thought or external stimulus. (Not entirely unlike “flooding” as a desensitization technique, though I have no idea whether the mechanism is really the same.)
By the time I wrote about that technique, though, I had already mostly stopped using it, because I’d exhausted all the low-hanging fruit in my personal experience. Some people also get much more value out of it than others; I’ve had a few people who used it extensively and came back gushing to me about completely transforming their lives… while others are like “meh”.
The optimum use seems to be for situations that trigger an immediate and visceral conditioned response that interferes with your ability to think clearly. It can be used to eliminate beliefs when the belief was formed later and as a result of the conditioned feeling, but does not work when it’s the other way around.
(That is, if the feeling and belief arose at the same time, from the same event, or if the feeling is the result of a belief, then the feeling elimination technique will probably be of little value. Of course, your conscious estimation of which situation applies is unreliable, which means that until you’ve exhausted your own low-hanging fruit, it’s better to just go ahead and try it, rather than guessing.)
In contrast to the feeling elimination technique, most everything I teach these days can be considered—in one way or another—a Ritual For Changing One’s Mind. Or, more precisely, I recommend rituals developed by other people, and my work focuses more on identifying what it is in your mind that needs changing, and how to know what to change it to.
And unfortunately, the methods of Changing One’s Mind are the relatively easy part of that. Sort of like knowing how to use an IDE (programmer’s development tool) doesn’t tell you what code to write or how to know where a bug is in your code.
For such outcomes, I suggest the methods used by Allen Carr: essentially they work by systematically eliminating all the perceived benefits of the activity you wish to cease.
I have read Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Drinking Alcohol. I got the impression he is playing on the reader’s pride basically. He did not deny alcohol numbs in the brain whatever bothers you, he said the price is that it numbs everything else to. So basically he was playing a “you don’t value the everything else in you?” game and maybe it is just a quirk of mine, I don’t know, but whenever people try to play my pride I charge head-in, such as “Yes, I am absolutely worthless.Now what? Your move.” I don’t really know why I do this. Partially sometimes really feeling like this but partially really not liking the pride play as a method… I just think building anything on people’s self-worth is really fragile, right?
The trick to this kind of issue is realizing that your brain is using the wrong baseline for measurement of gain/loss. The correct baseline to use in such a scenario is not how things are now, but how they would be if you didn’t have the job.
Is this related to the old saying “learn to desire what you have” or “count your blessings” or the Stoic technique of negative visualization i.e. how much it would suck to lose what you have? Visualize not having it, then having it, pass a mmm-test, that sort of thing?
The optimum use seems to be for situations that trigger an immediate and visceral conditioned response that interferes with your ability to think clearly.
I see—this is why the examples are like foods one dislikes or social anxiety for speaking or I assume approach anxiety at dating etc. I will try it with physical challenges, I remember feeling inferior when I was a child when I was clumsy at things like climbing up ropes and it is possible it is keeping me away from trying such sports.
In contrast to the feeling elimination technique, most everything I teach these days can be considered—in one way or another—a Ritual For Changing One’s Mind.
Do you write about this i.e. new websites as TTD or DS are not maintained much lately?
Any self-help technique can be trivially defeated by arguing with it. And anything can be argued with, because the whole point (evolutionarily speaking) of our critical faculties is to find things we can attack in that which we have defined as our enemy. The truth, relevance, or usefulness of the argument is beside the point.
When I read that book I didn’t even notice anything about pride or self-worth, honestly. I wasn’t reading it because I drink (I don’t), but as research into his approach. I found it fascinating because the various arguments I noticed seemed pretty universal to almost anything one might want to quit.
Anyway, I wasn’t looking for things to argue with, so I didn’t find any. In general, it’s not useful to read a self-help book looking for things to argue with: skim over those, and look for things you agree with, or at least things you can consider with an open mind. Carr’s books explicitly point out the need for this consideration at the beginning, and you will get more value out of them if you heed that advice.
Do you write about this i.e. new websites as TTD or DS are not maintained much lately?
Mostly I do online workshops with my paying subscribers, and the occasional tweet about things I’m noticing or realizing as they come up.
Yes :) But you wrote this comment and chapters 6-7 5 years ago, are there any new developments since then?
I tried them and would like to have the following comments:
instant motivation does not seem to work for me for the goals where you really, truly, are running away from something bad and there is no positive goal to pursue. Example: stopping smoking: the best possible outcome of not smoking is staying as healthy as today, the worst outcome of smoking is early painful death. Example: the kind of jobs one does only to pay bills. In both cases there are no possible positive outcomes to imagine: the best case outcome is things staying as they are now.
I tried chapter 7 on tomatoes, as I hated them since childhood. When I go back to 3 or 4 years old I simply don’t remember how I felt hence I have no feeling to overwrite the current body feeling (gag reflex, sour face).
Quite a lot of them. Sadly, none of them make the overall picture any easier to understand. There seem to be an almost infinite number of “things that work” for some set of problems, but almost nothing that works for all the problems, for all of the people, all of the time. The basic idea of negative motivation is still valid, though, as is the idea that the primary negative motivations that are problematic derive from identity issues or pseudo-moral “shoulds”.
Yes, that was explicitly stated as a qualifier on the technique: if you can’t pass the “mmm” test, it’s not going to work.
For such outcomes, I suggest the methods used by Allen Carr: essentially they work by systematically eliminating all the perceived benefits of the activity you wish to cease. His books are basically step-by-step persuasion walking you through the reasoning to achieve a realization that the thing you think you’re getting is in fact of no value to you. (This is quite different from negative motion or deciding the act isn’t “worth” it: rather, it is the systematic demolishing of any positive motivation towards the act, through deliberately induced disillusionment.)
The trick to this kind of issue is realizing that your brain is using the wrong baseline for measurement of gain/loss. The correct baseline to use in such a scenario is not how things are now, but how they would be if you didn’t have the job. Not having the job is the default case, since if you do nothing, that is the result you will get. ;-)
(I am, of course, omitting any details of how to do this change-of-baseline in this comment, due to the difficulty of describing it briefly, in this medium, in a way that would actually be implementable by anyone without the prerequisite skills of introspection and mind-changing.)
You’re probably overthinking the technique, which doesn’t involve higher cognition at all. Certainly, there is nothing in it about “overwriting” anything. The method is simply intensifying a response long enough to trigger a refractory period, during which the response can’t be re-triggered at the same intensity as before, leading to having a new experience or reaction in the context of the original triggering thought or external stimulus. (Not entirely unlike “flooding” as a desensitization technique, though I have no idea whether the mechanism is really the same.)
By the time I wrote about that technique, though, I had already mostly stopped using it, because I’d exhausted all the low-hanging fruit in my personal experience. Some people also get much more value out of it than others; I’ve had a few people who used it extensively and came back gushing to me about completely transforming their lives… while others are like “meh”.
The optimum use seems to be for situations that trigger an immediate and visceral conditioned response that interferes with your ability to think clearly. It can be used to eliminate beliefs when the belief was formed later and as a result of the conditioned feeling, but does not work when it’s the other way around.
(That is, if the feeling and belief arose at the same time, from the same event, or if the feeling is the result of a belief, then the feeling elimination technique will probably be of little value. Of course, your conscious estimation of which situation applies is unreliable, which means that until you’ve exhausted your own low-hanging fruit, it’s better to just go ahead and try it, rather than guessing.)
In contrast to the feeling elimination technique, most everything I teach these days can be considered—in one way or another—a Ritual For Changing One’s Mind. Or, more precisely, I recommend rituals developed by other people, and my work focuses more on identifying what it is in your mind that needs changing, and how to know what to change it to.
And unfortunately, the methods of Changing One’s Mind are the relatively easy part of that. Sort of like knowing how to use an IDE (programmer’s development tool) doesn’t tell you what code to write or how to know where a bug is in your code.
I have read Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Drinking Alcohol. I got the impression he is playing on the reader’s pride basically. He did not deny alcohol numbs in the brain whatever bothers you, he said the price is that it numbs everything else to. So basically he was playing a “you don’t value the everything else in you?” game and maybe it is just a quirk of mine, I don’t know, but whenever people try to play my pride I charge head-in, such as “Yes, I am absolutely worthless.Now what? Your move.” I don’t really know why I do this. Partially sometimes really feeling like this but partially really not liking the pride play as a method… I just think building anything on people’s self-worth is really fragile, right?
Is this related to the old saying “learn to desire what you have” or “count your blessings” or the Stoic technique of negative visualization i.e. how much it would suck to lose what you have? Visualize not having it, then having it, pass a mmm-test, that sort of thing?
I see—this is why the examples are like foods one dislikes or social anxiety for speaking or I assume approach anxiety at dating etc. I will try it with physical challenges, I remember feeling inferior when I was a child when I was clumsy at things like climbing up ropes and it is possible it is keeping me away from trying such sports.
Do you write about this i.e. new websites as TTD or DS are not maintained much lately?
Any self-help technique can be trivially defeated by arguing with it. And anything can be argued with, because the whole point (evolutionarily speaking) of our critical faculties is to find things we can attack in that which we have defined as our enemy. The truth, relevance, or usefulness of the argument is beside the point.
When I read that book I didn’t even notice anything about pride or self-worth, honestly. I wasn’t reading it because I drink (I don’t), but as research into his approach. I found it fascinating because the various arguments I noticed seemed pretty universal to almost anything one might want to quit.
Anyway, I wasn’t looking for things to argue with, so I didn’t find any. In general, it’s not useful to read a self-help book looking for things to argue with: skim over those, and look for things you agree with, or at least things you can consider with an open mind. Carr’s books explicitly point out the need for this consideration at the beginning, and you will get more value out of them if you heed that advice.
Mostly I do online workshops with my paying subscribers, and the occasional tweet about things I’m noticing or realizing as they come up.