Glad to see you’re writing about this! I think motivation is a really central topic and there’s lots more to be said about it than has been said so far around here.
When we’re struggling with motivation to do X, it’s because only S2 predicts/believes that X will lead to reward. S1 isn’t convinced. Your S2 models say X is good, but S1 models don’t see it. This isn’t necessarily a bug. S2 reasoning can be really shitty, people can come up with all kinds of dumb plans for things that won’t help, and it’s not so bad that their S1 models don’t go along with them.
I think these days S1 and S2 have become semantic stopsigns, and in general I recommend that people stop using these terms both in their thinking and verbally, and instead try to get more specific about what parts of their mind actually disagree and why. I can report, for example, that CFAR doesn’t use these terms internally.
Anna Salamon used to say, in the context of teaching internal double crux at CFAR workshops, that there’s no such thing as an S1 vs. S2 conflict. All conflicts are “S1 vs. S1.” “Your S2,” whatever that means, may be capable of engaging in logical reasoning and having explicit verbal models about things, but the part of you that cares about the output of all of that reasoning is a part of your S1 (in my internal dialect, just “a part of you”), and you’ll make more progress once you start identifying what part that is.
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Here’s an example of what getting more specific might look like. Suppose I’m a high school student and “my S1” says play video games and “my S2″ says do my homework. What is actually going on here?
One version could be that I know I get social reinforcement from my parents and my teachers to do homework, or more sinisterly that I get socially punished for not doing it. So in this case “my S2” is a stopsign blocking an inquiry into the power structure of school, and generally the lack of power children have in modern western society, which is both harder and less comfortable to think about than “akrasia.”
Another version is someone told me to do my homework so I’ll go to a good college so I’ll get a good job. In this case “my S2” is a stopsign blocking an inquiry into why I care about any of the nodes in this causal diagram—maybe I want to go to a good college because it’ll make me feel better about myself, maybe I want to get a good job to avoid disappointing my parents, etc.
That’s on the S2 side, but “my S1” is also blocking inquiry. Why do I want to play video games? Not “my S1,” just me; I can own that desire. There are obvious stories to tell about video games being more immediately pleasurable and addictive than most other things I could do, and those stories have some weight, but they’re also a distraction; much easier to think about than why I wouldn’t rather do anything else. In my actual experience, the times in my life I have played video games the most, the reasons were mostly emotional: I was really depressed and lonely and felt like a failure, and video games (and lots of other stuff) distracted me from feeling those things. Those feelings were very painful to think about, and that pain prevented me from even looking at the structure of this problem, let alone debugging it, for a long time.
(One sign I was doing this is that the video games I chose were not optimized for pleasure. I deliberately avoided video games that could be fun in a challenging way, because I didn’t want to feel bad about doing poorly at them. Another sign is that everything else I did was also chosen for its ability to distract: for example, watching anime (never live-action TV, too uncomfortably close to real life), reading fiction (never nonfiction, again too uncomfortably close to real life), etc.)
An inference I take from this model is that you are best able to focus on long-term S2 goals (those which have the least inherent ability to influence you) if you have taken care of the rest of things which motivate you. Eat enough, sleep enough, spend time with friends. When you’re trying to fight the desire to address those things, you’re using willpower, and willpower is a stopgap measure.
Strongly agree, except that I wouldn’t use the term “S2 goals.” That’s a stopsign. Again I suggest getting more specific: what part of you has those goals and why? Where did they come from?
So part of what I need to do now is really figure out how to do green-brain, growth-orientation motivation over red-brain, deficit-reduction motivation.
If I understand correctly what you mean by this, I have a lot of thoughts about how to do this. The short, unsatisfying version, which will probably surprise no one, is “find out what you actually want by learning how to have feelings.”
The long version can be explained in terms of Internal Family Systems. The deal is that procrastinative behaviors like playing a lot of video games are evidence that you’re trying to avoid feeling a bad feeling, and that that bad feeling is being generated by a part of you that IFS calls an “exile.” Exiles are producing bad feelings in order to get you to avoid a catastrophic situation that resembles a catastrophic situation earlier in your life that you weren’t prepared for; for example, if you were overwhelmed by criticism from your parents as a child, you might have an exile that floods you with pain whenever people criticize you, especially people you really respect in a way that might cause you to project your parents onto them.
Exiles are paired with parts called protectors, whose job it is to protect exiles from being triggered. In the criticism example, that might look like avoiding people who criticize you, avoiding doing things you might get criticized for, or feeling sleepy or confused when someone manages to criticize you anyway.
Behavior that’s driven by exile / protector dynamics (approximately “red-brain, deficit-reduction,” if I understand you correctly) can become very dysfunctional, as the goal of avoiding psychological pain becomes a worse and worse proxy for avoiding bad situations. In extreme cases it can almost completely block your access to what you want, as that becomes less of a priority than avoiding pain. In the criticism example, you might be so paralyzed by the possibility that someone could criticize you for doing things that you stop doing anything.
There are lots of different ways to get exiles and protectors to chill the fuck out, and once they do you get to find out what you actually want when you aren’t just trying to avoid pain. It’s good times. See also my comment on Kaj’s IFS post.
Glad to see you’re writing about this! I think motivation is a really central topic and there’s lots more to be said about it than has been said so far around here.
I think these days S1 and S2 have become semantic stopsigns, and in general I recommend that people stop using these terms both in their thinking and verbally, and instead try to get more specific about what parts of their mind actually disagree and why. I can report, for example, that CFAR doesn’t use these terms internally.
Anna Salamon used to say, in the context of teaching internal double crux at CFAR workshops, that there’s no such thing as an S1 vs. S2 conflict. All conflicts are “S1 vs. S1.” “Your S2,” whatever that means, may be capable of engaging in logical reasoning and having explicit verbal models about things, but the part of you that cares about the output of all of that reasoning is a part of your S1 (in my internal dialect, just “a part of you”), and you’ll make more progress once you start identifying what part that is.
---
Here’s an example of what getting more specific might look like. Suppose I’m a high school student and “my S1” says play video games and “my S2″ says do my homework. What is actually going on here?
One version could be that I know I get social reinforcement from my parents and my teachers to do homework, or more sinisterly that I get socially punished for not doing it. So in this case “my S2” is a stopsign blocking an inquiry into the power structure of school, and generally the lack of power children have in modern western society, which is both harder and less comfortable to think about than “akrasia.”
Another version is someone told me to do my homework so I’ll go to a good college so I’ll get a good job. In this case “my S2” is a stopsign blocking an inquiry into why I care about any of the nodes in this causal diagram—maybe I want to go to a good college because it’ll make me feel better about myself, maybe I want to get a good job to avoid disappointing my parents, etc.
That’s on the S2 side, but “my S1” is also blocking inquiry. Why do I want to play video games? Not “my S1,” just me; I can own that desire. There are obvious stories to tell about video games being more immediately pleasurable and addictive than most other things I could do, and those stories have some weight, but they’re also a distraction; much easier to think about than why I wouldn’t rather do anything else. In my actual experience, the times in my life I have played video games the most, the reasons were mostly emotional: I was really depressed and lonely and felt like a failure, and video games (and lots of other stuff) distracted me from feeling those things. Those feelings were very painful to think about, and that pain prevented me from even looking at the structure of this problem, let alone debugging it, for a long time.
(One sign I was doing this is that the video games I chose were not optimized for pleasure. I deliberately avoided video games that could be fun in a challenging way, because I didn’t want to feel bad about doing poorly at them. Another sign is that everything else I did was also chosen for its ability to distract: for example, watching anime (never live-action TV, too uncomfortably close to real life), reading fiction (never nonfiction, again too uncomfortably close to real life), etc.)
Strongly agree, except that I wouldn’t use the term “S2 goals.” That’s a stopsign. Again I suggest getting more specific: what part of you has those goals and why? Where did they come from?
If I understand correctly what you mean by this, I have a lot of thoughts about how to do this. The short, unsatisfying version, which will probably surprise no one, is “find out what you actually want by learning how to have feelings.”
The long version can be explained in terms of Internal Family Systems. The deal is that procrastinative behaviors like playing a lot of video games are evidence that you’re trying to avoid feeling a bad feeling, and that that bad feeling is being generated by a part of you that IFS calls an “exile.” Exiles are producing bad feelings in order to get you to avoid a catastrophic situation that resembles a catastrophic situation earlier in your life that you weren’t prepared for; for example, if you were overwhelmed by criticism from your parents as a child, you might have an exile that floods you with pain whenever people criticize you, especially people you really respect in a way that might cause you to project your parents onto them.
Exiles are paired with parts called protectors, whose job it is to protect exiles from being triggered. In the criticism example, that might look like avoiding people who criticize you, avoiding doing things you might get criticized for, or feeling sleepy or confused when someone manages to criticize you anyway.
Behavior that’s driven by exile / protector dynamics (approximately “red-brain, deficit-reduction,” if I understand you correctly) can become very dysfunctional, as the goal of avoiding psychological pain becomes a worse and worse proxy for avoiding bad situations. In extreme cases it can almost completely block your access to what you want, as that becomes less of a priority than avoiding pain. In the criticism example, you might be so paralyzed by the possibility that someone could criticize you for doing things that you stop doing anything.
There are lots of different ways to get exiles and protectors to chill the fuck out, and once they do you get to find out what you actually want when you aren’t just trying to avoid pain. It’s good times. See also my comment on Kaj’s IFS post.