This quote was written in 1965 by a psychoanalyst, so I don’t even know if they had the same diagnostic criteria for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that they do today. He’s talking about “styles” of behavior. Based on a little searching, it seems to me that a preoccupation with rules is characteristic of what is called Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. As is so often the case, there’s a broad spectrum from quirky behavior to personality disorder.
What makes it a disorder is if it is interferring with your enjoyment of life. It is irrational to choose according to arbitrary rules when doing so makes you miss out on outcomes that are preferable but require you going outside of your rules.
A little searching on the Internet says the treatment for the disorder is talk therapy. It’s possible that could work.
I would say first of all you have to recognize when living according to rules is making your life better and when living based on rules is boxing you in. Having rules can make decisions easier, but it can make you miss out on a lot of life. Seek feedback from friends and family members about areas in which you might be too rigid. Make sure you tell them you really want honest feedback. Then take baby steps to break out of routines. Doing so will also build your courage.
Accept that it’s OK to make mistakes. Failure is a great source of learning. If you have an attitude that says, “I am going to make mistakes,” then you might not feel so much anxiety about making a less-than-optimal choice. (I recommend the book The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar. I learned a lot about avoiding perfectionism from that book.)
You might find that something like an improv comedy class makes you more spontaneous and able to see how rules for behavior aren’t as fixed as you might think they are. People get by and thrive by doing things totally differently from how you do, and you might like a different way better, if you gave yourself the chance.
Try something that you wouldn’t have ever thought you’d do before. See how it doesn’t feel that bad. (Again, you might start small: browse through the section of the bookstore where you would normally never be caught dead.)
“She made rules about food because it made it easier to decide what to eat”—This actually works for such a person? Interesting, I think a lot of people have the opposite problem. I wish I found it easy to follow my own rules.
The rules were supposed to approximate her actual tastes, but more rigid and outright made up when she was unsure if she liked something. I don’t think it would work if she suddenly decided she disliked peanut butter.
Nancy: probably not enough care. But hm, “want to” follow or “feel like” following? Because I may “want to” be conscientious and work hard towards my goals, but I “feel like” slacking off.
Tentative hypothesis: some people start with the intention of making rules they’d want to follow, and others don’t. The first set might find themselves with a rule they don’t follow, but the second assuredly will.
This goes beyond the temperamental difference between people who find rules a reassuring way of limiting choices and those who find rules an irritant at best.
How much care do you put into crafting your rules?
This is a valid attempt to deal with conflicting stimuli from the world—to create standards to which you adhere consciously because you don’t trust your intuitions to motivate you rationally in the environment with which you must interact.
And really, such attention is partially what it means to be conscious/human—to audit your actions ‘from the outside’ instead of merely reacting. And with today’s bizarre and skewed ‘food environment’, as it were, this becomes VERY necessary, especially for people with a predilection for analyzing their own behavior even in such supposedly mundane (but really fundamental) things as food consumption.
I seem to have run into a strange inferential distance.
The word “obsessive-compulsive” seems to have suggested the wrong picture. I do not mean rules as impulses to perform stereotyped ritual behaviors.
What I’m trying to describe is a way to handle explicit choices. “Are you coming home this weekend?”, “Do I want some chocolate?”, “Am I enjoying this movie?”. Much (most?) of the time, a simple “yes, good” or “no, bad” gut feeling somehow gets generated with no conscious input. That’s a decision.
But some of the time, there’s no such gut feeling. Introspection returns “I have no freaking clue what I want.”. This is quite distressing, especially when there’s pressure to decide immediately.
A known set of rules can thus be useful. “Which movie should I watch?” “ERROR: decision-making system unavailable.” “Okay, then let’s go with the most educational.”
Problems with this approach are absence of relevant rules, bad rules, and inability to access the rule-based decision-making system as well as the emotional reaction-based one.
Someone coming up to me as I agonize and telling me “You don’t need rules” is not helping. What do I use instead?
I wonder if it would help for you to try to satisfice. You’re not trying to choose the best option, you just have some minimum acceptable standard, and you’re trying to pick one of the options (any of the options) that meets that standard. You could pick more-or-less randomly, or you could look for any inclination in favor of one of the options and then go with that one.
For instance, if there are 4 movies that you’re trying to choose between, and all 4 seem like movies that you’re likely to enjoy, then it doesn’t really matter which one you pick. You just need to pick one of them. There are a few ways to do this, some more random, some using more general rules or heuristics which can be used for many different kinds of decisions since they apply to the decision-making process, not the particular content.
Just pick one of the movies. Don’t think or try to come up with reasons, just select one. Maybe your selection will be influenced by preferences of yours that you’re not aware of, or maybe it’ll just be random. Doesn’t matter, you picked one.
Decide you’re going to pick one, and then wait until something good about one of the options comes to mind and pick that one. It doesn’t matter what it is—it could be some good feature that it has, or just a vague feeling.
Pick randomly. Label the options 1-4, look at a clock, and take the minutes mod 4.
Let someone else decide. If you’re going to watch the movie with a friend, tell them “any of these 4, you pick.” Even if the decision is only for you (e.g., you’re going to watch the movie alone), you could still ask someone else to pick (or give a recommendation) if they’re around when you’re trying to decide. Just ask “what do you think?”
Try to guess what the other person would prefer. If you’re going to watch the movie with a friend, ask yourself which of the 4 he would like. Try to do this quickly, with pattern-matching and associations (“this one seems like his kind of movie”), not reasoning. As soon as you have an inclination towards one of the options, go with it.
Try to guess what you would prefer, treating yourself as if you were another person. Ask “which of these would MixedNuts like?” and use pattern-matching and association.
Try to predict your decision. “If MixedNuts had to choose between these movies, I bet he’d go with that one.” (Or, based on past behavior in terms of going home for the weekend, and what’s scheduled for this weekend, I bet that he will go home this weekend.) Then just do that.
Variety-seeking. See which of the options is something that you haven’t done much of in awhile. e.g., I haven’t seen many comedies lately, so I’ll pick the comedy movie. (Or, I’ve been going home a lot lately, so I won’t go home this weekend.)
Does this work in reverse, with a bad feeling about all other options?
I don’t know. If you’re feeling stuck, and not particularly motivated to do anything, I generally think that it’s good to try to find and feed positive motivations to do something. Avoidance motivations (for rejecting bad options) could just keep you stuck. And we want to keep things simple—one of the keys to all of these procedures is that you just need one option to stand out (positively) for whatever reason—you don’t need to go through every option to rule all but one of them out. But if there are only 2 options and you do get a clear feeling against one of them, then maybe it is okay to base your decision on that—it’s equally simple (with only two options) and it does get you through this decision. So I wouldn’t aim to find a bad feeling, but if that was the first feeling that came up then you could go with it.
Ask someone else
I do that as much as possible, but it fails more often that not. Polite bastards.
You could try alternative ways of getting other people involved. e.g., Have them list the pros and cons of each option, and you listen and see if one thing jumps out at you. Or you could describe the options to them, with instructions for them to try to guess which one you’d. Or maybe just talking about the decision can help you clarify which option you prefer.
Though variety-seeking contradicts the others, and conflicting rules are Bad.
True. You may want to forget about that one if it could interfere with the others. There are ways to integrate it with the others, if you determine ahead of time when it applies. For instance, there may be certain domains where you want variety/balance. Or you may sometimes feel like you’re in a rut and want to mix things up, and then you can decide that starting now I’m going to make variety-seeking decisions (until I no longer feel this way). The important thing is that when you’re faced with a particular decision, you don’t need to decide whether or not to seek variety because you have already determined that.
But variety-seeking is more of an advanced technique which you may want to skip for now. It’s probably best to pick one or two of the heuristics which seem like they could work for you and try them out. Over time you can expand your repertoire.
Might be helpful to set up meta-rules. In any given situation, a hierarchy of which rules apply, or which to fall back on if the main ones are inconclusive. For example, variety-seeking could be one of the low-ranked options, seldom used but still significant for it’s tendency to shake up the results of other rules.
Do you know the book “How we decide” by Jonah Lehrer?
In the first chapter, section 3 there is a case of a patient who lost his orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) due to a cancer and suddenly he couldn’t make decisions anymore because all emotions where cut off and all choices suddenly became equal in value. So sometimes there are underlying neurological problems that can cause this.
Quote:
I suggested two alternative dates, both in the coming month
and just a few days apart from each other. The patient pulled
out his appointment book and began consulting the calendar.
The behavior that ensued, which was witnessed by several in
vestigators, was remarkable. For the better part of a half hour,
the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two
dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements,
possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one
could reasonably think about concerning a simple date. .. . He
was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis,
an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and
possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen
to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him
to stop.
Yeah, that’s what happens. For me it’s intermittent, but it does remove all choice-related emotions, so all choices become hard at the same time. As Lehrer says, an explicit cost-benefit analysis is way too long—that’s what simple rules are for.
It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop.
Oh yeah, cry me a fucking river. This guy has to do that for every single decision, but no, go ahead, whine about having to listen to him make just one.
For me it’s intermittent, but it does remove all choice-related emotions, so all choices become hard at the same time.
This sounds like a symptom of something. Have you noticed whether any other symptoms tend to co-occur with it (especially other things related to mood or emotions)? Have you noticed any other patterns in these episodes (how often it happens, how long it lasts, whether it has any particular triggers, and whether anything in particular tends to trigger its end)? Have you mentioned it to a medical/psychological professional?
Have you noticed whether any other symptoms tend to co-occur with it (especially other things related to mood or emotions)?
Choice numbness is a special case of emotional numbness is a special case of disconnecting from the world. It comes with akrasia and not-akrasia (a thingy that prevents me from doing stuff I explicitly want to, but doesn’t react when I throw willpower at it—like running into an invisible wall in a video game). My field of attention gets restricted (I can only focus on one thing and not very much, objects in the center of my visual field become more interesting, I bump into walls), and my thoughts slow and confused. I crumble completely under any kind of pressure, even more than usually. I have to monitor motor control more finely (like moving a leg with my hand to remind the motor system how to move it, or focusing on a particular point and willing myself there). If there’s emotional numbness, my emotions will feel sort of like detached objects.
Have you noticed any other patterns in these episodes (how often it happens, how long it lasts, whether it has any particular triggers, and whether anything in particular tends to trigger its end)?
It happens when I’m dehydrated, tired, lacking balanced amounts of sunshine, at the wrong level of socialization, or at apparently random. The general state tends to last , curing it usually involves a complete reboot (change of context, rest, then sleep), but it can go in and out of choice numbness. Pressure to answer cements it.
Have you mentioned it to a medical/psychological professional?
Nope. I’ve had horrible luck with psychiatrists and therapists so far, and I expect anything doctor-findable would have been found by now.
That suggests a couple more strategies that you could use for deciding-while-numb.
One is to choose the option that is most likely to improve your mental state (or at least avoid making it worse), e.g. the option that seems most likely to increase your energy rather than draining you.
The other is to try to make your decisions while non-numb, as much as possible (especially for more important decisions). You can do this in different ways, depending on the context. When you’re numb you could put off making a decision until later (when you’re non-numb), or you could guess what you would choose if you were non-numb, or you could try to remember which option you were leaning towards when you had been non-numb and choose that one. When you’re non-numb, if you know of any upcoming decisions you could make the decisions right then (rather than waiting and potentially becoming numb), or you could at least note which option you’re leaning towards (so that you can use that information if you happen to become numb).
I don’t know the details of your experiences with doctors & therapists, but this really does sound like the sort of thing that they should be able to help with. Especially if you’re in this state often, figuring out if you can prevent it should be a higher priority than figuring out how to cope with it. Maybe you just haven’t taken the right test yet, or you haven’t found the right doctor or therapist. If you’ve had horrible luck so far, does that mean that regression to the mean will be working in your favor as long as you keep trying?
I agree with nearly everything you said there and think it’s good advice, so I upvoted your comment. However, I care about statistics and you made a common error here:
If you’ve had horrible luck so far, does that mean that regression to the mean will be working in your favor as long as you keep trying?
Regression to the mean doesn’t work that way. The fact that a random event came out one way several times in a row doesn’t make it more likely that it will come out the other way the next time. For instance, if you flip a fair coin and it comes up heads ten times in a row, the probability that it will come up tails on the next flip is still no greater than 50%. The only way that having found multiple bad psychiatrists will improve mixednuts’ chances of finding a good one next time appreciably is if he starts crossing off an appreciably large proportion of the bad psychiatrists in his area, leaving the good ones dominating the remaining population. This effect isn’t regression to the mean. The error you made is known as the Gambler’s Fallacy.
I’m familiar with the gambler’s fallacy. I wasn’t being very clear about what I had in mind when I referenced regression to the mean, so here’s my model. If someone has been to a few good therapists (better than the typical therapist) and they haven’t been able to help, then “find a better therapist” would be tough advice to follow. But if they’ve been to a few lousy therapists (worse than the typical therapist) then finding a better therapist should be doable, since they’ll have a good shot at doing that even if they just pick a new one at random.
Alternatively, if they’ve been to a few good therapists but haven’t found the right one, that’s evidence that “the right therapist for me” is a small category, but if they’ve been to a few bad therapists and haven’t found the right one, “the right therapist for me” could still include a fairly large subset of therapists.
Edit: The more general point is that being unlucky is a reason for optimism, since it means that things are likely to get better just from your luck returning to normal.
A known set of rules can thus be useful. “Which movie should I watch?” “ERROR: decision-making system unavailable.” “Okay, then let’s go with the most educational.”
Or maybe if you don’t feel like going to any movie why not do something else? Is there something that you would like to do? I don’t watch movies either, but I love reading good books. I suppose when you read LW and write comments here you don’t apply a decision procedure in order to do it, but instead you simply enjoy it somehow. Is that correct?
Someone coming up to me as I agonize and telling me “You don’t need rules” is not helping. What do I use instead?
Sorry, I think the internet is not the right medium, personal conversation with a knowledgeable individual would probably help more.
It’s intermittent, but covers all choices when it happens.
Or maybe if you don’t feel like going to any movie why not do something else? Is there something that you would like to do?
Yeah, go to sleep and never have to make a decision again. Oddly enough, this is rarely available.
You seem to be confusing a lack of emotional reaction with a neutral reaction. If I can’t choose a movie, it doesn’t mean I’m reluctant to see one, or that I won’t enjoy it.
“Do something else, then” is rarely applicable. You aren’t going to cancel an appointment because you can’t decide on a date, or answer “Do you want to go to the park?” with “I don’t know. Let’s talk about the history of cheesemaking.”
For a definition of ‘rules’ that includes heuristics, and with the further qualification of either ‘quickly’ or ‘without putting a lot of effort into every single decision’, that assumption seems pretty accurate to me—it’s more that most people are more comfortable making rules of thumb for themselves, or doing semi-arbitrary things in instances where their rules don’t provide the answer (and then usually making a new rule of thumb out of the arbitrary decision, if it turns out well). Am I missing something?
Sorry, I meant “verbalizable/conscious rules”. When I type this words on the keyboard I don’t use any conscious rules to decide how fast to move each finger. The problem is when you have to apply rules/perform conscious rituals all the time even for decisions that shouldn’t matter that much.
A little searching on the Internet says the treatment for the disorder is talk therapy. It’s possible that could work.
talk therapy doesn’t work see “House of Cards” by Robyn Dawes. Instead use CBT cognitive behavioral therapy.
The cognitive part is understanding that your rituals/behavior are irrational and the behavioral part is actually acting on that understanding against the subjective pull to do otherwise. Good advice on the latter can be found in the link below, with video:
This quote was written in 1965 by a psychoanalyst, so I don’t even know if they had the same diagnostic criteria for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that they do today. He’s talking about “styles” of behavior. Based on a little searching, it seems to me that a preoccupation with rules is characteristic of what is called Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. As is so often the case, there’s a broad spectrum from quirky behavior to personality disorder.
What makes it a disorder is if it is interferring with your enjoyment of life. It is irrational to choose according to arbitrary rules when doing so makes you miss out on outcomes that are preferable but require you going outside of your rules.
A little searching on the Internet says the treatment for the disorder is talk therapy. It’s possible that could work.
I would say first of all you have to recognize when living according to rules is making your life better and when living based on rules is boxing you in. Having rules can make decisions easier, but it can make you miss out on a lot of life. Seek feedback from friends and family members about areas in which you might be too rigid. Make sure you tell them you really want honest feedback. Then take baby steps to break out of routines. Doing so will also build your courage.
Accept that it’s OK to make mistakes. Failure is a great source of learning. If you have an attitude that says, “I am going to make mistakes,” then you might not feel so much anxiety about making a less-than-optimal choice. (I recommend the book The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar. I learned a lot about avoiding perfectionism from that book.)
You might find that something like an improv comedy class makes you more spontaneous and able to see how rules for behavior aren’t as fixed as you might think they are. People get by and thrive by doing things totally differently from how you do, and you might like a different way better, if you gave yourself the chance.
Try something that you wouldn’t have ever thought you’d do before. See how it doesn’t feel that bad. (Again, you might start small: browse through the section of the bookstore where you would normally never be caught dead.)
Be courageous. Be spontaneous. Have fun.
The problem is not to muster the courage to break rules, it’s to decide what to do when you don’t have relevant rules.
“She made rules about food because it made it easier to decide what to eat”—This actually works for such a person? Interesting, I think a lot of people have the opposite problem. I wish I found it easy to follow my own rules.
The rules were supposed to approximate her actual tastes, but more rigid and outright made up when she was unsure if she liked something. I don’t think it would work if she suddenly decided she disliked peanut butter.
I see, that makes sense.
Nancy: probably not enough care. But hm, “want to” follow or “feel like” following? Because I may “want to” be conscientious and work hard towards my goals, but I “feel like” slacking off.
Tentative hypothesis: some people start with the intention of making rules they’d want to follow, and others don’t. The first set might find themselves with a rule they don’t follow, but the second assuredly will.
This goes beyond the temperamental difference between people who find rules a reassuring way of limiting choices and those who find rules an irritant at best.
How much care do you put into crafting your rules?
This is a valid attempt to deal with conflicting stimuli from the world—to create standards to which you adhere consciously because you don’t trust your intuitions to motivate you rationally in the environment with which you must interact. And really, such attention is partially what it means to be conscious/human—to audit your actions ‘from the outside’ instead of merely reacting. And with today’s bizarre and skewed ‘food environment’, as it were, this becomes VERY necessary, especially for people with a predilection for analyzing their own behavior even in such supposedly mundane (but really fundamental) things as food consumption.
There seems to be an irrational underlying assumption here “I need rules to decide.”
edit: see also my other reply above.
I seem to have run into a strange inferential distance.
The word “obsessive-compulsive” seems to have suggested the wrong picture. I do not mean rules as impulses to perform stereotyped ritual behaviors.
What I’m trying to describe is a way to handle explicit choices. “Are you coming home this weekend?”, “Do I want some chocolate?”, “Am I enjoying this movie?”. Much (most?) of the time, a simple “yes, good” or “no, bad” gut feeling somehow gets generated with no conscious input. That’s a decision.
But some of the time, there’s no such gut feeling. Introspection returns “I have no freaking clue what I want.”. This is quite distressing, especially when there’s pressure to decide immediately.
A known set of rules can thus be useful. “Which movie should I watch?” “ERROR: decision-making system unavailable.” “Okay, then let’s go with the most educational.”
Problems with this approach are absence of relevant rules, bad rules, and inability to access the rule-based decision-making system as well as the emotional reaction-based one.
Someone coming up to me as I agonize and telling me “You don’t need rules” is not helping. What do I use instead?
I wonder if it would help for you to try to satisfice. You’re not trying to choose the best option, you just have some minimum acceptable standard, and you’re trying to pick one of the options (any of the options) that meets that standard. You could pick more-or-less randomly, or you could look for any inclination in favor of one of the options and then go with that one.
For instance, if there are 4 movies that you’re trying to choose between, and all 4 seem like movies that you’re likely to enjoy, then it doesn’t really matter which one you pick. You just need to pick one of them. There are a few ways to do this, some more random, some using more general rules or heuristics which can be used for many different kinds of decisions since they apply to the decision-making process, not the particular content.
Just pick one of the movies. Don’t think or try to come up with reasons, just select one. Maybe your selection will be influenced by preferences of yours that you’re not aware of, or maybe it’ll just be random. Doesn’t matter, you picked one.
Decide you’re going to pick one, and then wait until something good about one of the options comes to mind and pick that one. It doesn’t matter what it is—it could be some good feature that it has, or just a vague feeling.
Pick randomly. Label the options 1-4, look at a clock, and take the minutes mod 4.
Let someone else decide. If you’re going to watch the movie with a friend, tell them “any of these 4, you pick.” Even if the decision is only for you (e.g., you’re going to watch the movie alone), you could still ask someone else to pick (or give a recommendation) if they’re around when you’re trying to decide. Just ask “what do you think?”
Try to guess what the other person would prefer. If you’re going to watch the movie with a friend, ask yourself which of the 4 he would like. Try to do this quickly, with pattern-matching and associations (“this one seems like his kind of movie”), not reasoning. As soon as you have an inclination towards one of the options, go with it.
Try to guess what you would prefer, treating yourself as if you were another person. Ask “which of these would MixedNuts like?” and use pattern-matching and association.
Try to predict your decision. “If MixedNuts had to choose between these movies, I bet he’d go with that one.” (Or, based on past behavior in terms of going home for the weekend, and what’s scheduled for this weekend, I bet that he will go home this weekend.) Then just do that.
Variety-seeking. See which of the options is something that you haven’t done much of in awhile. e.g., I haven’t seen many comedies lately, so I’ll pick the comedy movie. (Or, I’ve been going home a lot lately, so I won’t go home this weekend.)
Ooo! Good advice is good! Thanks!
I do that for decisions that don’t matter much (e.g. picking a movie). It’s more problematic when I know I will regret picking the wrong one badly.
Good idea, thanks. Does this work in reverse, with a bad feeling about all other options?
I do that as much as possible, but it fails more often that not. Polite bastards.
All good ideas, thanks a lot! (Though variety-seeking contradicts the others, and conflicting rules are Bad.)
I don’t know. If you’re feeling stuck, and not particularly motivated to do anything, I generally think that it’s good to try to find and feed positive motivations to do something. Avoidance motivations (for rejecting bad options) could just keep you stuck. And we want to keep things simple—one of the keys to all of these procedures is that you just need one option to stand out (positively) for whatever reason—you don’t need to go through every option to rule all but one of them out. But if there are only 2 options and you do get a clear feeling against one of them, then maybe it is okay to base your decision on that—it’s equally simple (with only two options) and it does get you through this decision. So I wouldn’t aim to find a bad feeling, but if that was the first feeling that came up then you could go with it.
You could try alternative ways of getting other people involved. e.g., Have them list the pros and cons of each option, and you listen and see if one thing jumps out at you. Or you could describe the options to them, with instructions for them to try to guess which one you’d. Or maybe just talking about the decision can help you clarify which option you prefer.
True. You may want to forget about that one if it could interfere with the others. There are ways to integrate it with the others, if you determine ahead of time when it applies. For instance, there may be certain domains where you want variety/balance. Or you may sometimes feel like you’re in a rut and want to mix things up, and then you can decide that starting now I’m going to make variety-seeking decisions (until I no longer feel this way). The important thing is that when you’re faced with a particular decision, you don’t need to decide whether or not to seek variety because you have already determined that.
But variety-seeking is more of an advanced technique which you may want to skip for now. It’s probably best to pick one or two of the heuristics which seem like they could work for you and try them out. Over time you can expand your repertoire.
Might be helpful to set up meta-rules. In any given situation, a hierarchy of which rules apply, or which to fall back on if the main ones are inconclusive. For example, variety-seeking could be one of the low-ranked options, seldom used but still significant for it’s tendency to shake up the results of other rules.
Do you know the book “How we decide” by Jonah Lehrer? In the first chapter, section 3 there is a case of a patient who lost his orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) due to a cancer and suddenly he couldn’t make decisions anymore because all emotions where cut off and all choices suddenly became equal in value. So sometimes there are underlying neurological problems that can cause this.
Quote:
Yeah, that’s what happens. For me it’s intermittent, but it does remove all choice-related emotions, so all choices become hard at the same time. As Lehrer says, an explicit cost-benefit analysis is way too long—that’s what simple rules are for.
Oh yeah, cry me a fucking river. This guy has to do that for every single decision, but no, go ahead, whine about having to listen to him make just one.
I’ll check the book out, thanks.
This sounds like a symptom of something. Have you noticed whether any other symptoms tend to co-occur with it (especially other things related to mood or emotions)? Have you noticed any other patterns in these episodes (how often it happens, how long it lasts, whether it has any particular triggers, and whether anything in particular tends to trigger its end)? Have you mentioned it to a medical/psychological professional?
Agreed.
Choice numbness is a special case of emotional numbness is a special case of disconnecting from the world. It comes with akrasia and not-akrasia (a thingy that prevents me from doing stuff I explicitly want to, but doesn’t react when I throw willpower at it—like running into an invisible wall in a video game). My field of attention gets restricted (I can only focus on one thing and not very much, objects in the center of my visual field become more interesting, I bump into walls), and my thoughts slow and confused. I crumble completely under any kind of pressure, even more than usually. I have to monitor motor control more finely (like moving a leg with my hand to remind the motor system how to move it, or focusing on a particular point and willing myself there). If there’s emotional numbness, my emotions will feel sort of like detached objects.
It happens when I’m dehydrated, tired, lacking balanced amounts of sunshine, at the wrong level of socialization, or at apparently random. The general state tends to last , curing it usually involves a complete reboot (change of context, rest, then sleep), but it can go in and out of choice numbness. Pressure to answer cements it.
Nope. I’ve had horrible luck with psychiatrists and therapists so far, and I expect anything doctor-findable would have been found by now.
Thanks!
That suggests a couple more strategies that you could use for deciding-while-numb.
One is to choose the option that is most likely to improve your mental state (or at least avoid making it worse), e.g. the option that seems most likely to increase your energy rather than draining you.
The other is to try to make your decisions while non-numb, as much as possible (especially for more important decisions). You can do this in different ways, depending on the context. When you’re numb you could put off making a decision until later (when you’re non-numb), or you could guess what you would choose if you were non-numb, or you could try to remember which option you were leaning towards when you had been non-numb and choose that one. When you’re non-numb, if you know of any upcoming decisions you could make the decisions right then (rather than waiting and potentially becoming numb), or you could at least note which option you’re leaning towards (so that you can use that information if you happen to become numb).
I don’t know the details of your experiences with doctors & therapists, but this really does sound like the sort of thing that they should be able to help with. Especially if you’re in this state often, figuring out if you can prevent it should be a higher priority than figuring out how to cope with it. Maybe you just haven’t taken the right test yet, or you haven’t found the right doctor or therapist. If you’ve had horrible luck so far, does that mean that regression to the mean will be working in your favor as long as you keep trying?
I agree with nearly everything you said there and think it’s good advice, so I upvoted your comment. However, I care about statistics and you made a common error here:
Regression to the mean doesn’t work that way. The fact that a random event came out one way several times in a row doesn’t make it more likely that it will come out the other way the next time. For instance, if you flip a fair coin and it comes up heads ten times in a row, the probability that it will come up tails on the next flip is still no greater than 50%. The only way that having found multiple bad psychiatrists will improve mixednuts’ chances of finding a good one next time appreciably is if he starts crossing off an appreciably large proportion of the bad psychiatrists in his area, leaving the good ones dominating the remaining population. This effect isn’t regression to the mean. The error you made is known as the Gambler’s Fallacy.
I’m familiar with the gambler’s fallacy. I wasn’t being very clear about what I had in mind when I referenced regression to the mean, so here’s my model. If someone has been to a few good therapists (better than the typical therapist) and they haven’t been able to help, then “find a better therapist” would be tough advice to follow. But if they’ve been to a few lousy therapists (worse than the typical therapist) then finding a better therapist should be doable, since they’ll have a good shot at doing that even if they just pick a new one at random.
Alternatively, if they’ve been to a few good therapists but haven’t found the right one, that’s evidence that “the right therapist for me” is a small category, but if they’ve been to a few bad therapists and haven’t found the right one, “the right therapist for me” could still include a fairly large subset of therapists.
Edit: The more general point is that being unlucky is a reason for optimism, since it means that things are likely to get better just from your luck returning to normal.
That makes sense. Thanks for clearing it up.
Or maybe if you don’t feel like going to any movie why not do something else? Is there something that you would like to do? I don’t watch movies either, but I love reading good books. I suppose when you read LW and write comments here you don’t apply a decision procedure in order to do it, but instead you simply enjoy it somehow. Is that correct?
Sorry, I think the internet is not the right medium, personal conversation with a knowledgeable individual would probably help more.
It’s intermittent, but covers all choices when it happens.
Yeah, go to sleep and never have to make a decision again. Oddly enough, this is rarely available.
You seem to be confusing a lack of emotional reaction with a neutral reaction. If I can’t choose a movie, it doesn’t mean I’m reluctant to see one, or that I won’t enjoy it.
“Do something else, then” is rarely applicable. You aren’t going to cancel an appointment because you can’t decide on a date, or answer “Do you want to go to the park?” with “I don’t know. Let’s talk about the history of cheesemaking.”
For a definition of ‘rules’ that includes heuristics, and with the further qualification of either ‘quickly’ or ‘without putting a lot of effort into every single decision’, that assumption seems pretty accurate to me—it’s more that most people are more comfortable making rules of thumb for themselves, or doing semi-arbitrary things in instances where their rules don’t provide the answer (and then usually making a new rule of thumb out of the arbitrary decision, if it turns out well). Am I missing something?
Sorry, I meant “verbalizable/conscious rules”. When I type this words on the keyboard I don’t use any conscious rules to decide how fast to move each finger. The problem is when you have to apply rules/perform conscious rituals all the time even for decisions that shouldn’t matter that much.
talk therapy doesn’t work see “House of Cards” by Robyn Dawes. Instead use CBT cognitive behavioral therapy.
The cognitive part is understanding that your rituals/behavior are irrational and the behavioral part is actually acting on that understanding against the subjective pull to do otherwise. Good advice on the latter can be found in the link below, with video:
http://www.ocduk.org/2/foursteps.htm