If your candidate for “do something different” is “pay more attention to mundane experience”, then you need to define specific ways we can do that. If you literally just mean we should consciously try to elevate the level of mental attention with which we attend to daily tasks, then that’s Zen. Hard Zen. Back during my Zen phase, I used to try this. Even a few minutes were unbearably difficult. It may be a valuable technique, but if it’s really what you mean it needs more respect and rigor than you give it here.
For what it’s worth, the bulk of my learning and improvement was from a more limited form of this: specifically, I decided never to force myself to do anything—i.e., never to override my natural impulses in order to get myself to do something. Instead, I vowed to always seek to understand what my resistance consisted of, and change that directly, instead.
That’s a more narrowly-focused approach to studying “mundane experience”, and it gave me immensely greater insight into what procrastination actually is. It also means that over the long haul I’ve spent less and less time fighting myself, and more time with my natural impulses being to do that which is “best” for me in some larger sense.
That having been said, I’ve recently realized that almost all of my work in this area has been focused on fixing “not doing what I should” and almost none of it has been on fixing “doing what I should not”… like, for example, reading and replying to LW comments and losing track of how much time I’m spending on it. ;-) So, I have a new area to begin research in.
Now this, I am interested in. Think you understand enough about how you did what you did to be able to communicate it? That is, to explain more clearly about how to find understanding of my resistances and change them directly?
Observe what your brain is doing before you experience the resistance. In other words, notice what your brain is predicting will happen if you do the thing you’re about to do.
This handout gives an explanation of my “input-belief-prediction-feeling” model and gives some questions that can be useful in identifying the process by which you’re creating resistance.
What I do is establish a “test” condition—something I can think about in relation to the project or task that reliably reproduces the resistance response I’m trying to understand. Then, I can run the test repeatedly and try to see what images or sounds are flashing to my mind (the “prediction”) before the feeling of resistance arises. Once you have the prediction, you can then ask what you must have to believe in order for that (unconscious) prediction to come true.
IOW, our emotions and (de)motivation are driven by unconscious prediction of expected outcomes, to which our body responds with defensive or aggressive postures. And usually the predictions are simply cached thoughts that no longer connect with the rest of your belief system.
When you get enough practical experience with this, you realize that belief system updating is a very hit-or-miss process for human brains. Updates have to be in context of a particular memory trace, and unless that trace is actually shared across your belief system, it’s a one-at-a-time process. Sort of like having a subroutine in code vs. copy/paste—our brains have a lot of “copy/paste”, although there’s also a lot of abstraction. You just never know going in what the effective scope of your changes will be.
For what it’s worth, the bulk of my learning and improvement was from a more limited form of this: specifically, I decided never to force myself to do anything—i.e., never to override my natural impulses in order to get myself to do something. Instead, I vowed to always seek to understand what my resistance consisted of, and change that directly, instead.
That’s a more narrowly-focused approach to studying “mundane experience”, and it gave me immensely greater insight into what procrastination actually is. It also means that over the long haul I’ve spent less and less time fighting myself, and more time with my natural impulses being to do that which is “best” for me in some larger sense.
That having been said, I’ve recently realized that almost all of my work in this area has been focused on fixing “not doing what I should” and almost none of it has been on fixing “doing what I should not”… like, for example, reading and replying to LW comments and losing track of how much time I’m spending on it. ;-) So, I have a new area to begin research in.
Now this, I am interested in. Think you understand enough about how you did what you did to be able to communicate it? That is, to explain more clearly about how to find understanding of my resistances and change them directly?
Thanks.
Observe what your brain is doing before you experience the resistance. In other words, notice what your brain is predicting will happen if you do the thing you’re about to do.
This handout gives an explanation of my “input-belief-prediction-feeling” model and gives some questions that can be useful in identifying the process by which you’re creating resistance.
What I do is establish a “test” condition—something I can think about in relation to the project or task that reliably reproduces the resistance response I’m trying to understand. Then, I can run the test repeatedly and try to see what images or sounds are flashing to my mind (the “prediction”) before the feeling of resistance arises. Once you have the prediction, you can then ask what you must have to believe in order for that (unconscious) prediction to come true.
IOW, our emotions and (de)motivation are driven by unconscious prediction of expected outcomes, to which our body responds with defensive or aggressive postures. And usually the predictions are simply cached thoughts that no longer connect with the rest of your belief system.
When you get enough practical experience with this, you realize that belief system updating is a very hit-or-miss process for human brains. Updates have to be in context of a particular memory trace, and unless that trace is actually shared across your belief system, it’s a one-at-a-time process. Sort of like having a subroutine in code vs. copy/paste—our brains have a lot of “copy/paste”, although there’s also a lot of abstraction. You just never know going in what the effective scope of your changes will be.