Update: It’s been a week of no complaining. Really, it’s more like “complain less” as I haven’t managed to fully stop myself from complaining out of habit. I think I’ve learnt a bit more about how much I complain, and how to re-channel the need to complain into something productive. But it hasn’t been as useful as not mocking myself. I think I’ll see if more dakka changes things.
I recall a comment here on LessWrong where this worked successfully.
I used to have really strong emotions that could be triggered by trivial things, which caused both me and the people I was around a lot of suffering.
I managed to permanently stop this, reducing my emotional suffering by about 90%! I did this by resolving to completely own and deal with my emotions myself, and told relevant people about this commitment. Then I was just pretty miserable and lonely feeling for about 3 months, and then these emotional reactions just stopped completely without any additional effort. I think I permanently lowered my level of neuroticism by doing this.
The reason I really remember that comment is mainly the follow-up comment by user Alex_Shleizer, which suggests why it might work, and wonders whether this could be even a groundbreaking treatment.
There is research that claims that suffering might serve as an honest signal to get help from your group and that humans suffer more than other animals due to this reason.
You might have taught your system 1 that emotional suffering is useless for signaling purposes and it stopped using it.
If it’s true it could be an extremely impactful and even groundbreaking intervention.
I have often wondered if having a “no complaining” experiment would be similarly useful.
Ooh, good idea. I’ll try that out today.
Update: It’s been a week of no complaining. Really, it’s more like “complain less” as I haven’t managed to fully stop myself from complaining out of habit. I think I’ve learnt a bit more about how much I complain, and how to re-channel the need to complain into something productive. But it hasn’t been as useful as not mocking myself. I think I’ll see if more dakka changes things.
I recall a comment here on LessWrong where this worked successfully.
- Comment by user Adele Lopez, May 2020
The reason I really remember that comment is mainly the follow-up comment by user Alex_Shleizer, which suggests why it might work, and wonders whether this could be even a groundbreaking treatment.