For naturally struggling people, the main motivation for behavior is the need to get away from bad things. If you give them a productivity or self-help technique, they might apply it to get rid of their largest problems… and then, when the biggest source of pain is gone, they momentarily don’t have anything major to flee from, so they lose their motivation to apply the technique. To keep using the technique, they’d need to have positive motivation that’d make them want to do things instead of just not wanting to do things.
This is actually only one of three things that stop naturally struggling people from successfully applying self-help techniques on an ongoing basis.
The first of the other two is simply that, if you’re trying to use a self-help technique in order to get away from something, then you are simply perpetuating the negative motivation, so you’re still in an essentially struggling state. (I was stuck like that for years.)
Explaining the second requires an explanation about the “mental muscles” concept, but to save time I’ll just give a cross-reference and an example. A mental muscle is essentially my term for Marvin Minsky’s concept of a brain “resource” (described in his book, “The Emotion Machine”). Examples of mental muscles might be, “explaining how things work” or “figuring out the right answer”. In other words, a mental muscle is the brain circuitry that implements a kind of thinking strategy.
Anyway, naturally struggling people tend to favor certain of these patterns at the expense of others, or use them in counterproductive ways. For example, people who spent most of their lives being rewarded for figuring out right answers, and punished for doing things they “don’t know how to do yet”, will have difficulty applying self-help techniques because they will not want to proceed until they know enough.
However, a fundamental requirement of both positively-motivating techniques and techniques for fixing negative motivations, is that they require you to be curious, and ask yourself questions to which you do not currently know the answer (at least consciously). This can be supremely unsettling to a person who’s terrified of not-knowing.
In the “pain brain” mode… this, by the way, is the main reason why people procrastinate, this is the fundamental reason why people put off doing things… because once your brain has one of these crisis overrides it will go, “Okay conserve energy: don’t do anything.”
So I would qualify the above quote now by saying that chronic procrastination is almost always the result of a perceived SASS threat (another concept I didn’t have yet in ’08) associated with the procrastinated task or its outcome. That is, in rough order of frequency:
A threat associated with failure to complete the task in some way
A threat associated with successful completion of the task
A threat associated with the task itself
This may be influenced by selection bias, since people tend to self-select out of the third category before they can become my clients. Either you figure it out pretty easily, or you just avoid getting into situations where you’ll have that kind of task. (For example, if you’re terrified of initiating conversation with strangers, you probably won’t look for a job in door-to-door sales.)
By “SASS threat”, btw, I mean specifically that your brain is predicting a situation that it expects to cause a reduction in Status, Affiliation, Safety, or Stimulation below your learned-safe reference levels.
Most of these threat predictions are completely bogus in the modern world, and in any case tend to be based on generalizations from childhood that might be bogus even in the ancestral environment. (The brain prefers to err on the side of safety, though.) They can be cleared up by relatively simple self-reflective techniques to get the emotional brain to notice that they’re bogus. (Our brains don’t have automatic garbage collection, so they don’t re-verify beliefs onece learned, unless it happens situationally. Through reflection, you can easily cause yourself to update, though.)
Another of Eby’s theses is that negative motivation is, for the most part, impossible to overcome via willpower.… Therefore attempts to overcome procrastination or akrasia via willpower expenditure are fundamentally misguided.
It would probably be more accurate to say that willpower is negative motivation, or at any rate, a correlate of it. If you are using (what most people call) willpower on an ongoing basis, this is prima facie evidence that you are already being negatively motivated in that moment.
Positive motivation isn’t willpower - you just do something you want. And if you didn’t have any motivation, you wouldn’t be motivated to use willpower, either! Ergo, if you’re using willpower, you’re responding to a perceived threat, even if you consciously dress it in more socially-acceptable terminology.
For example, instead of “I’m afraid my parents will yell at me or throw me out”, our social “far” brain will say, “I want to be a better student and get good grades”. And instead of, “I’m afraid people won’t like me because I’m an ugly fat loser”, it says, “I want to get fit.”
This means it’s critical to separate these self-deceiving positive spins from your actual threat-based motivation, in order to actually switch off the negative motivation.
In contrast to negative motivation, positive motivation is basically just doing things because you find them fun. Watching movies, playing video games, whatever.
Um, no. Fun is fun. Motivation is the desire to have something good. If I’m hungry, anticipating cooking a nice meal, thinking, “oooh.… I can almost taste it now...”, THAT’s positive motivation. I may or may not have “fun” making the meal, but I will be positively motivated throughout.
That’s an important distinction—you can easily be positively motivated in the absence of any fun whatsoever.
(Needless to say, these are the endpoints in a spectrum, so it’s not like you’re either 100% struggling or 100% successful.)
One other refinement I’ve made since 2008 is that the concept of mental muscles makes it easier to see that being struggling or motivated is a function of which thought processes you’re using at a given point in time. At one point, I was under the mistaken belief that there was some sort of switch that got flipped to move you from one to the other, or something to turn on or off semi-permanently.
Now, though, I realize that some of the thinking processes involved in “struggling” are useful in some contexts and not in others. It’s a matter of learning which mental muscles are situationally appropriate, and using the ones that help, while relaxing the ones that don’t. For example, “finding flaws in advance” is a useful strategy if you have to pass a test or build a bridge—it’s not so useful if your goal is to, say, learn to play a musical instrument, where your flaws can’t be known until after you begin making attempts.
So, I now consider “naturally struggling” to simply mean “habitually using the wrong mental muscles for the job at hand, creating self-defeating results”.
I love that you point out that we drastically overestimate threats to our safety (and probably status/affiliation). I’ve often had to call myself, and friends, on exactly that.
I’m curious about this concern. You don’t seem particularly high-status here. You actually seem (at least to me) to have lower status than the average contributor. Are you really concerned about such matters?
Since he uses this material in his business, the results of which are his livelihood, his marketable image is highly important, yes, and this article can show up when potential clients search for his name or materials, making it something he has to protect and correct to the best of his ability.
If a larger business had had their materials similarly summarized, I would have anticipated copyright infringement and takedown notices rather than politely phrased requests for editing.
Surely not if the material being summarized was free promotional material...
The issue wouldn’t be in the summary, but in the presumption that it was a complete summary, which in turn would cause many people to decide that they now know everything there is to know about the subject, and see no reason to pursue it further.
Given that in this case it amounted to only a tiny fraction of the free materials, and was based on outdated models, that would be an inaccurate perception.
So, even though I made a joke about status, I actually do have an interest in ensuring that reviews of my work are accurately qualified.
reversing the negative status he had acquired. I would judge that he has above average status now.
I’ve actually had above-average karma pretty much since the site began, so I wonder what definition of “status” you’re using here. Status as perceived by what group, as ranked among what other group?
I’ve actually had above-average karma pretty much since the site began, so I wonder what definition of “status” you’re using here. Status as perceived by what group, as ranked among what other group?
Would you say that your recent contributions have been met with more appreciation than some of the earlier ones? If I recall correctly you mentioned in a recent post that you put effort into adapting your communication style to fit this audience. This has paid off and my perception is that your claims are being attributed more authority now than they were in the past.
A rough indication of your status could be, for example, by how many threads there are in which every pjeby comment is downvoted. I expect most pjeby comments to be upvoted or remain neutral now. This is some indication of higher status. That someone else makes a positive post referring to your work rather than a negative one disrespecting it is also an indication of higher status.
(All of which just means that I disagree with BindBreaker’s estimation of your status at this particular time.)
The last time I really checked (which was back in the early days), you had a far higher than normal proportion of posts with negative karma, which is the main thing that I use to evaluate a poster’s status. In general I find total karma to be unreliable because karma seems generally linked to post count (in the old days, this link was quite direct).
However, looking back now I see that your recent comments appear to have been much more generally appreciated. I am not as active as I would like and therefore haven’t seen many of these comments. This was quite an interesting discovery, as it made me aware of a greater need to evaluate status in the present state and account for shifts over time, so thanks, I guess.
The last time I really checked (which was back in the early days), you had a far higher than normal proportion of posts with negative karma, which is the main thing that I use to evaluate a poster’s status. In general I find total karma to be unreliable because karma seems generally linked to post count (in the old days, this link was quite direct).
Back when there was no limit to the number of downvotes one account could make, someone—either several people or one person with multiple accoutns—went through his comment history and systematically downvoted every post. (I inferred this at the time from the fact that the number of downvotes—particularly for out-of-the-way replies and meta stuff—was too consistent. And possibly other evidence I don’t recall, which would’ve come from noticing large shifts in karma at once.)
Yeah, when your karma drops 50-100 points in an hour or so, and it’s by almost exactly the number of comments you’ve made in the last week or so, and it happens every week or so, it’s pretty strong evidence of a systematic downvoting campaign.
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.
[SASS threats] Most of these threat predictions are completely bogus in the modern
world.
This rings true in general, and yet I can see at least one or two negative hangups in my own life and the life of friends and family where there is a significant non-bogus threat associated with failure (or success) of a particular task.
Do you have techniques which address such situations? It would seem getting rid of the negative motivator completely could be impossible in such situations, short of delusion or intentional forgetfulness/detachment.
It would seem getting rid of the negative motivator completely could be impossible in such situations, short of delusion or intentional forgetfulness/detachment.
You need to remember that positive and negative motivation are managed by distinct brain subsystems. You can have a positive preference for something, without also having a negative preference for the lack of it.
For example, I can have a strong preference for health, without being in constant fear of getting sick.
It’s also true, for instance, that failure to look both ways when you cross the street carries a “significant non-bogus threat”, but for a normal person, this doesn’t induce any negative motivation.
In short, removing the negative motivation is not the same as eliminating your preference—the two motivational systems have a fairly high degree of redundancy.
This is actually only one of three things that stop naturally struggling people from successfully applying self-help techniques on an ongoing basis.
The first of the other two is simply that, if you’re trying to use a self-help technique in order to get away from something, then you are simply perpetuating the negative motivation, so you’re still in an essentially struggling state. (I was stuck like that for years.)
Explaining the second requires an explanation about the “mental muscles” concept, but to save time I’ll just give a cross-reference and an example. A mental muscle is essentially my term for Marvin Minsky’s concept of a brain “resource” (described in his book, “The Emotion Machine”). Examples of mental muscles might be, “explaining how things work” or “figuring out the right answer”. In other words, a mental muscle is the brain circuitry that implements a kind of thinking strategy.
Anyway, naturally struggling people tend to favor certain of these patterns at the expense of others, or use them in counterproductive ways. For example, people who spent most of their lives being rewarded for figuring out right answers, and punished for doing things they “don’t know how to do yet”, will have difficulty applying self-help techniques because they will not want to proceed until they know enough.
However, a fundamental requirement of both positively-motivating techniques and techniques for fixing negative motivations, is that they require you to be curious, and ask yourself questions to which you do not currently know the answer (at least consciously). This can be supremely unsettling to a person who’s terrified of not-knowing.
This was my thinking circa 2008 or so; I have a more refined model of akrasia in general now.
So I would qualify the above quote now by saying that chronic procrastination is almost always the result of a perceived SASS threat (another concept I didn’t have yet in ’08) associated with the procrastinated task or its outcome. That is, in rough order of frequency:
A threat associated with failure to complete the task in some way
A threat associated with successful completion of the task
A threat associated with the task itself
This may be influenced by selection bias, since people tend to self-select out of the third category before they can become my clients. Either you figure it out pretty easily, or you just avoid getting into situations where you’ll have that kind of task. (For example, if you’re terrified of initiating conversation with strangers, you probably won’t look for a job in door-to-door sales.)
By “SASS threat”, btw, I mean specifically that your brain is predicting a situation that it expects to cause a reduction in Status, Affiliation, Safety, or Stimulation below your learned-safe reference levels.
Most of these threat predictions are completely bogus in the modern world, and in any case tend to be based on generalizations from childhood that might be bogus even in the ancestral environment. (The brain prefers to err on the side of safety, though.) They can be cleared up by relatively simple self-reflective techniques to get the emotional brain to notice that they’re bogus. (Our brains don’t have automatic garbage collection, so they don’t re-verify beliefs onece learned, unless it happens situationally. Through reflection, you can easily cause yourself to update, though.)
It would probably be more accurate to say that willpower is negative motivation, or at any rate, a correlate of it. If you are using (what most people call) willpower on an ongoing basis, this is prima facie evidence that you are already being negatively motivated in that moment.
Positive motivation isn’t willpower - you just do something you want. And if you didn’t have any motivation, you wouldn’t be motivated to use willpower, either! Ergo, if you’re using willpower, you’re responding to a perceived threat, even if you consciously dress it in more socially-acceptable terminology.
For example, instead of “I’m afraid my parents will yell at me or throw me out”, our social “far” brain will say, “I want to be a better student and get good grades”. And instead of, “I’m afraid people won’t like me because I’m an ugly fat loser”, it says, “I want to get fit.”
This means it’s critical to separate these self-deceiving positive spins from your actual threat-based motivation, in order to actually switch off the negative motivation.
Um, no. Fun is fun. Motivation is the desire to have something good. If I’m hungry, anticipating cooking a nice meal, thinking, “oooh.… I can almost taste it now...”, THAT’s positive motivation. I may or may not have “fun” making the meal, but I will be positively motivated throughout.
That’s an important distinction—you can easily be positively motivated in the absence of any fun whatsoever.
One other refinement I’ve made since 2008 is that the concept of mental muscles makes it easier to see that being struggling or motivated is a function of which thought processes you’re using at a given point in time. At one point, I was under the mistaken belief that there was some sort of switch that got flipped to move you from one to the other, or something to turn on or off semi-permanently.
Now, though, I realize that some of the thinking processes involved in “struggling” are useful in some contexts and not in others. It’s a matter of learning which mental muscles are situationally appropriate, and using the ones that help, while relaxing the ones that don’t. For example, “finding flaws in advance” is a useful strategy if you have to pass a test or build a bridge—it’s not so useful if your goal is to, say, learn to play a musical instrument, where your flaws can’t be known until after you begin making attempts.
So, I now consider “naturally struggling” to simply mean “habitually using the wrong mental muscles for the job at hand, creating self-defeating results”.
I love that you point out that we drastically overestimate threats to our safety (and probably status/affiliation). I’ve often had to call myself, and friends, on exactly that.
Thanks—I edited the OP with a link to this list of corrections.
Thanks! It might also be nice if your article called itself a summary of some of my freely available writings on the topic of pain/gain motivation.
I wouldn’t want to hurt my Status by appearing to only have this tiny handful of things to say. ;-)
I can’t conceive that anyone familiar with your contributions on this site would think that you only have a tiny handful of things to say. ;-)
:D Fair enough, edited.
So did you think it was a good summary otherwise?
Within that scope, yes. If I had any other issues with it, I wouldn’t have been too shy to say so. ;-)
I’m curious about this concern. You don’t seem particularly high-status here. You actually seem (at least to me) to have lower status than the average contributor. Are you really concerned about such matters?
Since he uses this material in his business, the results of which are his livelihood, his marketable image is highly important, yes, and this article can show up when potential clients search for his name or materials, making it something he has to protect and correct to the best of his ability.
If a larger business had had their materials similarly summarized, I would have anticipated copyright infringement and takedown notices rather than politely phrased requests for editing.
Surely not if the material being summarized was free promotional material...
The issue wouldn’t be in the summary, but in the presumption that it was a complete summary, which in turn would cause many people to decide that they now know everything there is to know about the subject, and see no reason to pursue it further.
Given that in this case it amounted to only a tiny fraction of the free materials, and was based on outdated models, that would be an inaccurate perception.
So, even though I made a joke about status, I actually do have an interest in ensuring that reviews of my work are accurately qualified.
“Status” was capitalized to reference a specific meaning—my brain’s emotional perception of status in the abstract—and it was a joke, hence the ‘;-)’
Pjeby has re-branded himself here, reversing the negative status he had acquired. I would judge that he has above average status now.
Ouch. That sounds painful. ;-)
I’ve actually had above-average karma pretty much since the site began, so I wonder what definition of “status” you’re using here. Status as perceived by what group, as ranked among what other group?
Would you say that your recent contributions have been met with more appreciation than some of the earlier ones? If I recall correctly you mentioned in a recent post that you put effort into adapting your communication style to fit this audience. This has paid off and my perception is that your claims are being attributed more authority now than they were in the past.
A rough indication of your status could be, for example, by how many threads there are in which every pjeby comment is downvoted. I expect most pjeby comments to be upvoted or remain neutral now. This is some indication of higher status. That someone else makes a positive post referring to your work rather than a negative one disrespecting it is also an indication of higher status.
(All of which just means that I disagree with BindBreaker’s estimation of your status at this particular time.)
The last time I really checked (which was back in the early days), you had a far higher than normal proportion of posts with negative karma, which is the main thing that I use to evaluate a poster’s status. In general I find total karma to be unreliable because karma seems generally linked to post count (in the old days, this link was quite direct).
However, looking back now I see that your recent comments appear to have been much more generally appreciated. I am not as active as I would like and therefore haven’t seen many of these comments. This was quite an interesting discovery, as it made me aware of a greater need to evaluate status in the present state and account for shifts over time, so thanks, I guess.
Back when there was no limit to the number of downvotes one account could make, someone—either several people or one person with multiple accoutns—went through his comment history and systematically downvoted every post. (I inferred this at the time from the fact that the number of downvotes—particularly for out-of-the-way replies and meta stuff—was too consistent. And possibly other evidence I don’t recall, which would’ve come from noticing large shifts in karma at once.)
Yeah, when your karma drops 50-100 points in an hour or so, and it’s by almost exactly the number of comments you’ve made in the last week or so, and it happens every week or so, it’s pretty strong evidence of a systematic downvoting campaign.
Hi Eby,
I think with this refinement process you went from something clear, simple and easy to understand to something difficult and technical.
Nevertheless I think your 2008 theory is correct and probably you did not make it worse, it is just harder to understand now.
I should also like to add this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/21r/pain_and_gain_motivation/cipw
Unfortunately, “true” and “easy to understand” are not synonyms. ;-)
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.
This rings true in general, and yet I can see at least one or two negative hangups in my own life and the life of friends and family where there is a significant non-bogus threat associated with failure (or success) of a particular task.
Do you have techniques which address such situations? It would seem getting rid of the negative motivator completely could be impossible in such situations, short of delusion or intentional forgetfulness/detachment.
You need to remember that positive and negative motivation are managed by distinct brain subsystems. You can have a positive preference for something, without also having a negative preference for the lack of it.
For example, I can have a strong preference for health, without being in constant fear of getting sick.
It’s also true, for instance, that failure to look both ways when you cross the street carries a “significant non-bogus threat”, but for a normal person, this doesn’t induce any negative motivation.
In short, removing the negative motivation is not the same as eliminating your preference—the two motivational systems have a fairly high degree of redundancy.