My advice is give money to charity up to your tax deduction level as a starting point, then use the rest of your money according to your personal utility function ;)
I’m sorry, i didn’t fully understand your living situation at first :(
I hope you work out your mental health issues, the only advice i can offer is to remember the days your mental state is optimal and crystallize that feeling in your memory possibly linking it with a hand movement like tapping your leg in a specific place.
Every day you have a good day add to the memory and the Neuro-Lingustic Programming should allow you to fall into that state of calmness and focus when you need it by repeating the hand movement.
This takes at least a week of effort before you notice the effects, but it helped me out alot at a tough time in my life.
Its more like a feeling that washes over your mind. The most memorable moment i had was sitting in Physics class unable to focus on what my teacher was saying because of distracting high school drama that i knew i shouldn’t focus on because we were reviewing for the AP exam.
I tapped my leg with two fingers which was my one for “calm” and the mental urge to check my phone for text messages faded and i was able switched my focus back to the lecture. I wouldn’t say its entire mental states as much as partial emotional states.
Neurotypicals can just remember entire mental states like that and just restore from backup?
Not entire mental states, but emotional states, and the states aren’t consciously remembered, but triggered like reflex behaviors. The suggested exercise is basically classical conditioning, except that one doesn’t have to figure out what the unconditioned stimulus is in order to associate the response (the emotional state) with the conditioned stimulus (tapping oneself with a finger).
Ah. Not sure what could be used as a baseline or how to detect it thou. And extinction would be a huge problem.
Sorry, i thought the anecdote would be more explanatory then the old Pascal’s one that i grew up with :(
Extinction is best prevented by reinforcing the stimuli randomly, its like in a casino, a random reward is much more enticing then a pattern reinforcement. Basically, you just pick a random day that went well and run your mental macro/hand motion while relishing in the memory/emotion of the day. As for baseline, if you don’t notice it after about 5-7 times worth of training your brain on different memory’s over the course of about a week then it probably wont work for you. Just remember to use variable interval reinforcement to prevent extinction and pick a hand motion that feels simple, but unobtrusive to do in public.
(also, does that kind of conditioning really work with that kind of thing?)
The majority of the literature on it debunks it as not very useful.. but i noticed positive effects when i self tested the theory. If you have an inspiring or happy moment come up feel free to start testing it, i just felt like the majority of my other suggestions weren’t very useful because i didn’t know your living situation and this was my personal psychotherapy tool for a while.
I feel like the majority of our emotions are heavily influenced by the placebo effect, but some people do require the occasional SSRI as well. Relationships are the best example of this, one word can have an immeasurable emotional effect if mentally misconstrued incorrectly.
If it’s the placebo effect, and I start out believing it’s only the placebo effect and it’s not gonna work on me, it’s not gonna work on me.
If I didn’t have the problem I could just cure everything to the maximal ability of any placebo effect to handle by tying my mind in a knot and then blinking.
My advice is give money to charity up to your tax deduction level as a starting point, then use the rest of your money according to your personal utility function ;)
Someone from LW saying that dosn’t add any new information.
I’m sorry, i didn’t fully understand your living situation at first :( I hope you work out your mental health issues, the only advice i can offer is to remember the days your mental state is optimal and crystallize that feeling in your memory possibly linking it with a hand movement like tapping your leg in a specific place. Every day you have a good day add to the memory and the Neuro-Lingustic Programming should allow you to fall into that state of calmness and focus when you need it by repeating the hand movement. This takes at least a week of effort before you notice the effects, but it helped me out alot at a tough time in my life.
Neurotypicals can just remember entire mental states like that and just restore from backup?
Its more like a feeling that washes over your mind. The most memorable moment i had was sitting in Physics class unable to focus on what my teacher was saying because of distracting high school drama that i knew i shouldn’t focus on because we were reviewing for the AP exam. I tapped my leg with two fingers which was my one for “calm” and the mental urge to check my phone for text messages faded and i was able switched my focus back to the lecture. I wouldn’t say its entire mental states as much as partial emotional states.
that honestly sounds like gibberish to me.
Translation attempt:
Not entire mental states, but emotional states, and the states aren’t consciously remembered, but triggered like reflex behaviors. The suggested exercise is basically classical conditioning, except that one doesn’t have to figure out what the unconditioned stimulus is in order to associate the response (the emotional state) with the conditioned stimulus (tapping oneself with a finger).
Ah. Not sure what could be used as a baseline or how to detect it thou. And extinction would be a huge problem.
Sorry, i thought the anecdote would be more explanatory then the old Pascal’s one that i grew up with :(
Extinction is best prevented by reinforcing the stimuli randomly, its like in a casino, a random reward is much more enticing then a pattern reinforcement. Basically, you just pick a random day that went well and run your mental macro/hand motion while relishing in the memory/emotion of the day. As for baseline, if you don’t notice it after about 5-7 times worth of training your brain on different memory’s over the course of about a week then it probably wont work for you. Just remember to use variable interval reinforcement to prevent extinction and pick a hand motion that feels simple, but unobtrusive to do in public.
The “pick a random day that went well and … relishing in the memory/emotion of the day” part is problematic for multiple reasons.
(also, does that kind of conditioning really work with that kind of thing?)
The majority of the literature on it debunks it as not very useful.. but i noticed positive effects when i self tested the theory. If you have an inspiring or happy moment come up feel free to start testing it, i just felt like the majority of my other suggestions weren’t very useful because i didn’t know your living situation and this was my personal psychotherapy tool for a while.
Sounds like placebo.
I feel like the majority of our emotions are heavily influenced by the placebo effect, but some people do require the occasional SSRI as well. Relationships are the best example of this, one word can have an immeasurable emotional effect if mentally misconstrued incorrectly.
If it’s the placebo effect, and I start out believing it’s only the placebo effect and it’s not gonna work on me, it’s not gonna work on me.
If I didn’t have the problem I could just cure everything to the maximal ability of any placebo effect to handle by tying my mind in a knot and then blinking.