This is really basic, but it's well known that people who are stuck with certain emotions (and behaviors) can begin to transform them by:
a) understanding what the feeling is, and
b) why they are feeling it.
Once you have that information, and are sure of it, you can extrapolate where it's coming from and correctly associate it with your real situation/problems. Often that means lessening the burden of the emotion because you realize it's "just X".
For example, a couple of years ago I started to have panic attacks when ruminating about weird things like the infinite vacuum of space, the simulation hypothesis, the nature of sensory signals, etc. Then I thought about why I would get scared and how I felt that fear, and realized it was because I was scared of being disconnected - essentially afraid of being alone. I recognize that as the true fear, and it's a lot easier to manage than "nothing is real and nothing makes sense", which is essentially just my imagination extending that base fear.
Of course the truth is that the pandemic era caused a lot of alienation, created deeper political and cultural rifts, and destabilized the entire world. That's my actual situation, so it's no wonder I feel that way, and I can address it however I see fit.
It's a way to ground yourself and break out of things that hold you back mentally.
Think of a triangle. Each corner is think, feel or do. You can change the inputs on each corner and it'll affect the other corners. Having a feeling problem? Interrogate your thinking or actions around the feeling. Change them and see what happens to your feeling.
There’s almost nothing that that person can do to improve her situation in the near term. As such, many of those people deliberately choose to ignore said material realities. The great lines from Pulp’s “Common people” are an example of this attitude:
> You'll never watch your life slide out of view
> And you dance and drink and screw
> Because there's nothing else to do
Many people are miserable because they live miserable lives, identifying the emotions involved and the needs that aren't being met is good but the emotions are there and the needs aren't being met for very practical reasons, and reframing isn't going to do jack to solve it. That's first-order emotional suffering.
Then there are the emotional pathologies that develop on top of that, the second-order emotional suffering, and that can be treated by therapy. For example, if you're miserable because you're poor, therapy won't help solve the anguish and stress of making rent, but it can solve second-order emotions like feelings of shame and self-hatred. Or if you have a life altering accident, it won't solve the baseline misery dealt by the terrible life consequences, but it can help with the residual panic attacks from the trauma of the accident.
They deal with very tough situations, but have learned to find happiness in them.
A lot of emotional misery is found in other groups, often groups with more material wealth, because they haven’t learned to find happiness in their circumstances.
Happiness is just as often about letting yourself be happy than anything else, and that’s a cultural and emotional situation independent of circumstances.
I’ve seen poverty that I suspect is out-of-bounds, for many folks on this forum.
I can say that the most astonishing thing, to me, is the healthy attitude, of many of the folks I’ve met, that live under those circumstances.
“Healthy” does not mean “happy.” They desperately want to escape their circumstances, but they do accept their challenges, and do their best to live [a hard] life.
I haven’t experienced what you have to that extent directly. I was poor growing up by American standards, and that is a different bar.
I’m curious about your take on this - Someone being able to enjoy their kids growing up, or see the value they bring to the people in their lives, or feel the importance in their role in keeping everyone alive, is a large part of my definition of happiness. It goes more towards ‘contentment’? Or purpose.
It includes processing the hard things, and finding the value in getting through them too, and the feeling of being good at what someone does and who they are.
For others, their definition of happy is the excited state of enjoyment (laughing, glee, etc).
For most, it’s a mix of the two.
Near as I can tell, getting rich often requires a significant degree of not being reasonable or content with the status quo. Sometimes ‘getting rich’ here is more about not being poor. Sometimes, it can be ‘there is never enough’.
Being content for someone in that state can happen of course, and after someone gets to a certain degree of wealth, tools to make it easier to get or maintain it are more readily available, but so are tools to hurt oneself. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt themselves on this front over the years.
A lot of the contentment elements here are also quite difficult to feel productively for someone with material wealth. Mucking out a chicken coop because it’s nasty and you need healthy chickens to survive is a very concrete thing with a clear chain from ‘problem’ to ‘solved’.
Trying to get Alpha out of stocks is not.
The fact that stuff happens in life that makes you suffer is something you generally learn to deal with early on, and most people can handle a bit of suffering, but where things get challenging is when the "second order" stuff stops you from being able to see the goal you're shooting for, the light at the end what makes the suffering something you were able to tolerate.
Of course, distractions and addictions are our coping methods du jour - but they are backward escapes and keep us stuck.
We need to get people to break away from those behaviors and get on the hard road of self-actualization, and those who have an easier situation should be the first ones to do it.
It seems a bit cheap to attack the qualities of it for not being able to solve a theoretical.
My point was that I think the OP was saying this: “a person is sad because she’s not aware of her inner problems, she should become aware of those inner problems, potentially solve them, she’ll then be less sad, potentially even happy”.
I think that the onus of OP’s point (and of persons making similar points) is that the person from my example might not want to go through the “become aware of her inner problems” step.
I was saying that many persons choose to not go through that step because it would be futile, mostly because of material and societal external conditions that they cannot control and which make solving the problems causing the inner problems impossible.
Hopefully things are clearer now.
It's simply about untangling your mind. Often people get so wound up in pathology due to their problems that they make things worse than they need to be, so in that sense it can make things easier.
I never said in my example that my realization caused my problem to vanish. In fact, in some ways things quickly got worse, because now I'd started trying to deal with it without deflection.
> a person is sad because she’s not aware of her inner problems
A person is sad because something's fucked. If she doesn't even know what that is she's going to have a have a harder time dealing with it. Maybe it's something simple to fix, maybe it's not.
So I guess for me there were two crucial factors. The process was more important than the output, and I gained value from it without considering I'll ever do it again.
But I will say that Factorio is terrible for my mental health.
It's super fun, and in small bursts it can be great. But it's a crutch on par with alcohol for me. I tend to binge when bored or unhappy. I'd encourage you to find other ways to deal with whatever it is you're distracting yourself from. Using tools like the above, or meditation, can help you confront and neutralize it.
While it may seem a waste of time, visualizing an emotion, giving it a colour, consistency, texture, material lets you be an observer to it. By forcing yourself to study it, you need to step outside of its bounds, separating the you from the emotion itself. That distance you have created and held for a few moments is a welcome relief and often makes it apparent that you are a separate entity from your pain. The further away you are from it, the less painful it is. And the more you look at it, the weaker it seems. At the end of the exercise you are more aware that whatever tormenting you was just a fleeting moment with little power over you.
I find it is a brilliant and incredibly powerful concept to internalise. You can find this is the exact idea expressed in stuff like Dune's Litany Against Fear (by reciting it, you are visualizing your fear as a third party, outside of you), or meditation (remaining a passive observer to your thoughts)
Book #3 in my linktree talks a lot in this vein if you find it an interesting metaphor.
So the purpose of the exercise is to communicate information between different parts of the brain?
Does it really help? If so, do you have any explanation for the underlying mechanisms? Metaphors are convenient, but unless they're a proxy-explanation for some harder-to-understand mechanisms, I don't really see their value...
The mind is more than a singular entity, it is made up of a lot of processes each with their own evolved purposes and ways of looking at things, but also their own limitations as regards expression of their state. Understanding what each part is saying, and why it is saying it, can help integrate and align the components towards the same goal.
Think of it like a meeting, where everyone there has their own narrow view of what's going on in the business and what they think needs to happen is based on that, so during the meeting you're sharing all your different perspectives so you can make an informed decision and orient everyone towards a plan of action. Doesn't always work and not everybody walks away happy, but they're generally satisfied with at least being heard.
Something fascinating I think we're just getting to the point of being able to explore is taking the words, colors, artistic expressions, etc. that we come up with in examining our emotional state, and feeding them into an AI like stable diffusion. I can't help but think there is real potential here that could be very empowering to patients and help people manage their thoughts and emotions in a personal, healthy way.
What are these things a distraction from, in your opinion? I would have thought introspection the opposite of distraction.
1) that the website is directed towards people who struggle with general feelings of discontent
2) that the purpose of the exercises is to help people feel better
So it would be a distraction from the feelings of discontent. You feel discontent, but you assign them color, body part, etc., in other words, you externalize them, which I suppose distracts you from the thing you're feeling.
In what way is it supposed to encourage introspection?
You actually pay attention to how you’re feeling. Hopefully you do it on a regular basis so that you get better at it, it comes more easily, you do it faster and with less effort and sometimes you slip into it unconsciously as a matter of habit. Some people are easily and unconsciously in contact with their emotions, as others are with their bodies. Others aren’t. I am much more aware of my posture and breathing for years of running, yoga and weightlifting. Even though I do far less of all of those than I did before I had children I know my body much better now than I did at 20. Some people need equivalent things for emotions.
I see, so it's similar to the mindfulness concept taught in Gestalt therapy? I guess that's why I don't like it - paying attention to how I'm feeling doesn't really change the way I'm feeling, which frustrates me, because I'm expecting it to affect my feelings, when in reality... it just makes me more conscious, and things stay as bad as they were before.
Assuming it's not supposed to change how you feel (directly) - what is the purpose of being conscious of how you feel?
That second perspective also adds a layer of relief between you and the emotions. You're now looking at them rather than being at their mercy. You can act now. You're back in a role of agency. Even if the options available to you are limited, it's very rare that you actually do not have any, but the element of your brain that's overwhelmed by the emotions can't see that.
Even if the only option you recognize from the second perspective is, "I cannot currently think of anything I can do to improve the situation, so I choose to continue with my current course of action, waiting and looking for a change I can make as things change (and things are always changing)," you're now in a situation where you've exercised some level of agency. You're not powerless. You're waiting and thinking and observing for now. And that sits differently.
Because it can manifest in how you communicate and treat others. Recognizing your emotional state doesn't necessarily change it, but it can change how you react to your feeling. Recognition precedes reaction -- or rather, reaction with conscious intent.
That awareness can often lead me to a solution because I wasn't even aware of the problem until I sought awareness. I'll be kicking around the house pissed off, not even aware of it, and then do a dumb mindfullness activity, and thus the annoyance is brought full into my conscious attention, "oh right I'm pissed off right now. Why? Shit, I forgot to eat breakfast, I'm hungry." or "I didn't walk today, that probably isn't helping," or, "I'm stressed about the three tickets I gotta get done, lemme just write them out as a TODO to at least externalize the stress." And then I can feel a bit better.
Or, not, I'll be like "I'm too pissed off to even think about why I'm pissed off." At least I'm not a slave to my emotions then, which is an important value to me: control. Even if I'm going to be angry or sad or whatever regardless, I like the additional awareness.
It does directly help some people and even more people realise how they are feeling and do something about it once previously subconscious knowledge is conscious.
The OP is of a piece of that.
Here's a short 12 minute video with the author of the book describing the process.
It's interesting to me that you think focusing on your emotions might be a way to distract ourselves, it makes me curious about distract ourselves from what? I think some people find they actually spend a lot of time distracting themselves from their emotions, so naming and describing and locating their emotions is kind of the opposite of distracting themselves. (But distracting yourself can be a fine thing and useful coping mechanism too; in fact Peyton includes "distraction" as a method of "self-regulation" in the same section on "self-regulation" I'm about to quote from. but, I think, a different thing than naming emotions).
Anyway, I'm no expert and I'm not trying to convince you, if it's not something that seems to resonate with you, then maybe it's not for you, right now anyway. But since you asked, I figured I'd post an excerpt from the thing I was just reading that touched on what you are asking about, in a way that really struck me -- although I don't know if just these few paragraphs will be as striking as the whole book so far as been on me!
> If you have doubts that talking about feelings will help you, you are in good company. Research shows that most people don't believe that putting words to emotions helps at all. People don't think that it makes things better to name what's happening, even though the effectiveness of that approach can be seen with fMRI. Perhaps this is because many people cope by paying no attention to their emotions or their bodies and the naming of feelings is unfamiliar and thus uncomfortable. But the experience of naming what is happening not only works to calm us down; when it is done with a caring other it can also create relationships of warmth and trust, no matter how old we are. Bringing these relationships inside (importing them into our own brain and carrying them there as a memory) helps people feel more secure in the world. This can have unexpected long-term benefits, including improving immune system function; the sense of meaning and purpose in life; resiliency in the face of trauma, depression or posttraumatic stress; and relationships with others and with ourselves…
> …Putting words to inner experience is helpful in another way, too. When people can't read the messages being sent by the body, they are in what scientists call alexithymia, or body blindness. Did you ever meet anyone who was stressed out and angry but didn't seem to realize it? They might not even have known that they had an increased heart rate or tension in their belly or that their eyebrows were pulling together. These people have a hard time knowing what their emotions are, let alone being able to talk about them. When people don't know what they are feeling, there's nothing they can do to remedy the situation. People who are body-blind show increased stress on their immune system and have a harder time with their relationships. There is also a link between being body-blind and being depressed. These people also suffer more from posttraumatic stress, and some research even shows that they have shorter lives.
> To sum up, developing a conscious practice of naming emotions is one of the sweeteest and most counterintuitive forms of self-regulation (in which the brain takes care of itself without accessing external behaviors or substances, as opposed to self-management, which uses work-arounds such as addictions). When naming emotions is done with warmth, it can foster the mothering relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala that securely attached children receive from their childhoods. Happily, as people start to name what is happening, they can learn to accompany themselves through emotional experience and support themselves and their immune systems while doing so.
1. Mindfulness
2. Religion
3. White lies
4. Meditation
5. Astrology
6. ENTP whatever that pop psych test is
7. Sharing feelings
8. Psychology
9. Being very supportive of someone making obvious mistakes
10. Description placards on abstract art
11. Professionalism
12. Using the word "spaces" i.e. "creating spaces for contemplation"
This is just me thinking out loud, not necessarily describing you here, but I've noticed that I myself share a sort of way of thinking with the 4chan / net-present crowd I grew up with. I'm not sure if our personalities drew us to similar places on the internet, or if we were sort of fostered into a similar set of personalities because of the nature of these environments and cultures.
My best effort to define this vague sort of culture / personality / ideology is a sort of radical valuing of the truth, and seeking truth in all things.
> Sure it's rude to call him fat, but if I was fat I'd want someone to tell me, how are we supposed to get better if we don't know what's wrong with us?
> Depression is bullshit, everyone feels sad, you're gonna pay a psychologist 200 bucks an hour to tell you that? Life sucks, so it goes
> Yeaaah I'm not going to "talk about my feelings," that sounds like a waste of time, let's just go do xyz instead
I would feel angry if someone suggested meditation. What a fucking joke, sitting around doing nothing for 8 minutes to an hour? Come on. I would see people being really supportive and roll my eyes. "Yeah right, secretly they hate eachother / judge eachother. Take food away from both of them for just two days and watch how quickly they'll stab eachother in the back."
Again, this is not me describing you, your comment just happened to remind me of how I used to be. Looking back, I don't understand why I was so full of hate, judgement, and arrogance. I really believed that the happy people HAD to be lying about it, because I wasn't happy. I really believed everyone was secretly judging eachother, cause that's what I was doing. I really believed that various psychological techniques just had to be total bullshit, because I never genuinely tried them in good faith, and just assumed they were konk science.
I learned over time that being aware of my feelings was important and difficult, and that the various strategies I assumed were bullshit (like the ones in this post) actually can be interesting and effective ways to learn more about myself, if I set aside my anger, hatred, judgement, and genuinely tried them. I realized I was carrying a LOT of anger around, some of it directed at me for having insanely high standards for myself, my morals and values, and my failure to live those standards out perfectly, a lot of it directed outwards at other people for not being the way I thought people should be.
Regardless, activities like this, silly though they may be, were all tools in a toolbelt of self discovery. As a general rule I've learned that new skills and experiences are earned through discomfort or suffering of some kind, and thus naturally to develop myself, my Mind, my personality, I had to suffer through some stuff I really thought was just so stupid, and some of it I still do, but I try to keep an open mind and do genuinely find myself surprised at what I learn when trying these things out.
If I stop assuming I already have all the answers and give an earnest and good faith try to some of this stuff, I learn. That's basically the TLDR.
Yes, and yes.
> I've noticed that I myself share a sort of way of thinking with the 4chan / net-present crowd I grew up with
That explains it. I spent a part of my youth there, too, while it still had the "secret club" vibes. I guess it left some influence on my way of thinking.
> I really believed that the happy people HAD to be lying about it, because I wasn't happy. I really believed everyone was secretly judging eachother, cause that's what I was doing. I really believed that various psychological techniques just had to be total bullshit, because I never genuinely tried them in good faith, and just assumed they were konk science.
I resonate with this a lot.
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Thanks for this. It's useful to see your perspective described from outside, by someone who actually understands. Makes it easier to take myself less seriously.
I see in your "about" section that there is a "please feel free to email me" sentence - if it's okay, I'd maybe like to contact you for further conversation.
always open to this!
it makes me feel validated that others identify with similar feelings, and the ties to the net community. I honestly just threw the comment out there as the first time really putting those thoughts and this theory i've been kicking around into words, half convinced I really was just, idk, a uniquely angry internet person
Would you be able to write any more about how you moved away from this perspective?
The long work was I read a lot of philosophy and talked to a lot of people, but there's two critical things I think caused me to dramatically shift my direction and perspective: first, I read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. It was a good first start to an open mind because his writing style is something I'd put on the list above, but, I was convinced by his research and experience that what he was writing about in terms of managing human relationships was effective, and I wanted to be effective, so I resolved to grit my teeth and try his ideas. They primarily resolved around empathy and letting go of pride, so the behavior necessary was the opposite of my running theory of how to live.
Second was I started dating a girl that was also basically the opposite of my personality and some of my interpersonal values. She was basically the nicest person at my university, the least selfish person still that I've ever met, and because we were dating I got to see again and again that nope, it really was genuine, she really did just feel and act that way. I'd interrogate her about it and she'd put up with it, telling me she didn't really have an ulterior motive, she just felt that's how she wanted to behave. Likely because of how she behaved she was by far and away one of the most well known people in our slice of university life and enormously successful in all things she did, and last I heard that continues in her current life somewhere buried inside the USA government. Thinking on this, my experience with her could probably be replicated by finding someone suspiciously selfless and trying to talk to them about it, maybe befriend them.
I was ambitious and had high standards for myself so I thought ok, apparently high empathy, selfless strategies get phenomenal results, I wanna be a Big Successful Business Guy, I need to try this, even if I'm faking it. But faking putting yourself in someone else's shoes is just putting yourself in someone else's shoes. I found myself very very slowly saying yes to more things, sometimes because I was being a sly little experimenter in the project, sometimes just surprising myself with a new interest.
The more stuff I tried the more stuff I found to be effective at achieving things for myself. Meditation, for example. I tried it enough to learn about it, then one night out in a field at my friend's ranch when we were all laying about looking at the starts I did the breathing technique someone had shown me and went through the exercise, and never again have I been as relaxed or calm as i was that night. So that's a good feeling, that I enjoyed, and forced me to recognize that meditation can be a good thing.
That superdense period of personal epoch shifting was basically all of college, 4 years. There were some stunts abroad, including a year after college where my ugly personality caused me to tremendously fail at a job I was brought out to Taiwan for, that probably contributed a lot to the journey.
Since the "unlocking" of empathy it's just been more and more times where when I bother to learn someone's perspective and feelings, I'm finding myself understand and emphathising ("I've felt that") or at least sympathizing ("I haven't felt that but I can understand why in that situation someone might"). So it's been a journey now of I guess nearly ten years.
Now I've read a great deal of philosophy and participated in some direct action and have a logical and ethical basis for living this way and thinking this way. I feel as strongly on the side of empathy now as I previously thought it was bullshit, but I'm happy I'm a skeptical person because my position was hard-fought, and I can be confident in the basis for it (using logic, deduction, evidence, etc). Skepticism isn't inherently bad, it just means you need some convincing, and imo that can be good because it can lead to better formed, more well researched, more effective positions.
Btw the other poster said drugs so just throwing it out there that I've never done anything more than some weed and alcohol so don't think it's necessary for changing ones fundamental perspective, though, I have heard plenty of similar stories about this, particular regarding shrooms.
Edit: now I'm thinking on it more and I also feel like just not being surrounded by people who are all reinforcing this depressive skepticism was probably important. Like on 4chan if you dared show hope or be happy you'd be mocked relentlessly. The attitude had to be aloof and mercilessly aggrandizing or you wouldn't survive. It was similar in my friend group before college. We told each other we were toughening each other up, and I don't regret it because I've been able to transform it into a healthy way of not taking myself too seriously.
But anyway by being with people with whom I can actually have these conversations without being mocked, it makes a difference. Note here that we're getting a generally positive reaction to sharing our thoughts. If we were being downvoted and mocked, there'd be no room for learning or change.
Back in college the force of my skeptical personality was likely so strong that even empathetic people would probably be forced to react with caution to avoid pain from my lashing out at them. Barriers go up when you're hella toxic. I'm chewing on the idea.
Like "who knew you could feel more than one emotion at a time?"... people don't know this? Hell, a lot of the time I feel entirely contradictory emotions simultaneously, it's incredibly common.
During a session recently my therapist said something like "that sounds like depression" and I responded "yes, that's kinda my default state. Labeling it doesn't make it go away and just because these thoughts come from a place of depression doesn't mean they are wrong" and she seemed a bit confused as to how to proceed from there, like just pointing it out is enough for most people or something.
When someone posts a comment about physics or math that you don't understand, do you also think "Otherwise, seeing the overwhelmingly positive reaction to such bullsh-t makes me feel like this whole place is fake." ?
"When you are surrounded by jerks, maybe you are the jerk".
Ironically, the behavior or you exhibit -- lashing out and being upset and not having an awareness of why -- is the issue the OP in addressing.
I find that the easiest way to get explanations is to be direct about what I don't understand.
In this case, I don't understand the bigger picture of the whole concept - I just feel that it's bullshit. If someone is going to explain it to me, I think it's useful for them to know where exactly I'm standing, rather than to tiptoe around with fake politeness.
I don't care much about reputation of people - if their reputation is valid, my opinion of them won't matter in the big picture - I'm just a random person on the internet. I care about ideas themselves, no matter who expressed them.
> When someone posts a comment about physics or math that you don't understand, do you also think "Otherwise, seeing the overwhelmingly positive reaction to such bullsh-t makes me feel like this whole place is fake." ?
If I feel that someone is bullshitting (e.g. posting a "proof" of Riemann hypotheses for hundredth time), I'll express how I feel.
It's the way I feel - it's not an attack, just expression of my feeling, and I think there's nothing wrong with it. If you're bothered by how I feel, that's just the way you feel, and it's okay. But I'm allowed to express it as much as you are.
Now what? Do that every day? It feels patronizing and seems like just a way to distract myself. Might as well spend my time playing Factorio, it'll distract me as much.
I hope there is some crucial factor that I don't understand yet, and that someone will explain it to me in a reply. Otherwise, seeing the overwhelmingly positive reaction to such bullsh-t makes me feel like this whole place is fake.
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Due to the negative tone of the above comment, I feel I should point out that it is a criticism of (or attempt to understand better) the concept, not the website itself. The website was very smooth and easy to work through, the author must have put a lot of effort into making it. Kudos, and if it helps people, that's a good thing regardless of my opinion and understanding (or lack thereof).