This is both a declaration of a wish, and a question, should anyone want to share their own experience with this idea and perhaps tactics for getting through it.
I often find myself with a disconnect between what I know intellectually to be the correct course of action, and what I feel intuitively is the correct course of action. Typically this might arise because I’m just not in the habit of / didn’t grow up doing X, but now when I sit down and think about it, it seems overwhelmingly likely to be the right thing to do. Yet, it’s often my “gut” and not my mind that provides me with the activation energy needed to take action.
I wish I had some toolkit for taking things I intellectually know to be right / true, and making them “feel” true in my deepest self, so that I can then more readily act on them. I just don’t know how to do that—how to move something from my head to my stomach, so to speak.
I think the solution is to become more emotionally integrated. take the time to understand your emotional mind and the reasons behind why it believes the things it does. some say therapy helps with this; your mileage may vary. I’ve found introspection + living life more fully helps a lot.
Thank you. I think, even upon identifying the reasons for why the emotional mind believes the things it does, I hit a twofold sticking point:
I consider the constraints themselves (rarely in isolation but more like the personality milieu that they are enmeshed with) to be part of my identity, and attempting to break them is scary in both a deep existential loss of self sense, and in a “this may well be load bearing in ways I can’t fully think through” sense
Even orthogonal to the first bullet, it’s somehow hard to change them even though with my analytical mind I can see what’s going on. It’s almost like the emotional Bayesian updating has brought these beliefs / tendencies to a very sharp peak long ago, but now circumstances have changed but the peak is too sharp to belief it away with new experience.
If it sounds like I’m trying to find reasons to not make the change, perhaps that’s another symptom of the problem. There’s a saboteur in the machine!
One version of decision theory I liked states essentially that the human brain has two systems. One does rational calculations, the other slaps on a bias for uncertainty avoidance before pushing it for action. Maybe evaluate your perception of the uncertainty associated with the course of action that makes rational sense. How uncertain is it really?
This is a plausible rational reason to be skeptical of one’s own rational calculations: that there is uncertainty, and that one should rationally have a conservativeness bias to account for it. What I think is happening though is that there’s an emotional blocker than is then being cleverly back-solved by finding plausible rational (rather than emotional and irrational) reasons for it, of which this is one. So it’s not that this is a totally bogus reason, it’s that this actually provides a plausible excuse for what is actually motivated by something different.
I wish I had some toolkit for taking things I intellectually know to be right / true, and making them “feel” true in my deepest self, so that I can then more readily act on them.
I think you cannot do this any more than force yourself to believe something. Indeed, both systems are learning from what you see to be true and what succeeds; if you believe that intuitive system is not judging correctly, you should try experiencing things more deeply (reflect on success more, come back to see if the thing flourishes/helps others/whatever); if you believe that reasoning system is not judging correctly, you should try it on more everyday actions and check if all emotionally relevant factors got included.
The systems will approximately agree because they both try to discern truth, not because they are bound to be equal to each other.
P.S. turns out I essentially rephrased @leogao ; still posting this in hopes an explanation is useful
This is both a declaration of a wish, and a question, should anyone want to share their own experience with this idea and perhaps tactics for getting through it.
I often find myself with a disconnect between what I know intellectually to be the correct course of action, and what I feel intuitively is the correct course of action. Typically this might arise because I’m just not in the habit of / didn’t grow up doing X, but now when I sit down and think about it, it seems overwhelmingly likely to be the right thing to do. Yet, it’s often my “gut” and not my mind that provides me with the activation energy needed to take action.
I wish I had some toolkit for taking things I intellectually know to be right / true, and making them “feel” true in my deepest self, so that I can then more readily act on them. I just don’t know how to do that—how to move something from my head to my stomach, so to speak.
Any suggestions?
I think the solution is to become more emotionally integrated. take the time to understand your emotional mind and the reasons behind why it believes the things it does. some say therapy helps with this; your mileage may vary. I’ve found introspection + living life more fully helps a lot.
Thank you. I think, even upon identifying the reasons for why the emotional mind believes the things it does, I hit a twofold sticking point:
I consider the constraints themselves (rarely in isolation but more like the personality milieu that they are enmeshed with) to be part of my identity, and attempting to break them is scary in both a deep existential loss of self sense, and in a “this may well be load bearing in ways I can’t fully think through” sense
Even orthogonal to the first bullet, it’s somehow hard to change them even though with my analytical mind I can see what’s going on. It’s almost like the emotional Bayesian updating has brought these beliefs / tendencies to a very sharp peak long ago, but now circumstances have changed but the peak is too sharp to belief it away with new experience.
If it sounds like I’m trying to find reasons to not make the change, perhaps that’s another symptom of the problem. There’s a saboteur in the machine!
One version of decision theory I liked states essentially that the human brain has two systems. One does rational calculations, the other slaps on a bias for uncertainty avoidance before pushing it for action. Maybe evaluate your perception of the uncertainty associated with the course of action that makes rational sense. How uncertain is it really?
This is a plausible rational reason to be skeptical of one’s own rational calculations: that there is uncertainty, and that one should rationally have a conservativeness bias to account for it. What I think is happening though is that there’s an emotional blocker than is then being cleverly back-solved by finding plausible rational (rather than emotional and irrational) reasons for it, of which this is one. So it’s not that this is a totally bogus reason, it’s that this actually provides a plausible excuse for what is actually motivated by something different.
I think you cannot do this any more than force yourself to believe something. Indeed, both systems are learning from what you see to be true and what succeeds; if you believe that intuitive system is not judging correctly, you should try experiencing things more deeply (reflect on success more, come back to see if the thing flourishes/helps others/whatever); if you believe that reasoning system is not judging correctly, you should try it on more everyday actions and check if all emotionally relevant factors got included.
The systems will approximately agree because they both try to discern truth, not because they are bound to be equal to each other.
P.S. turns out I essentially rephrased @leogao ; still posting this in hopes an explanation is useful