I’ve been finding PJ Eby’s article The Multiple Self quite useful for fighting procrastination and needless feelings of guilt about getting enough done / not being good enough at things.
I have difficulty describing the article briefly, as I’m afraid that I accidentally omit important points and make people take it less seriously than it deserves, but I’ll try. The basic idea is that the conscious part of our mind only does an exceedingly small part of all the things we spend doing in our daily lives. Instead, it tells the unconscious mind, which actually does everything of importance, what it should be doing. As an example—I’m writing this post right now, but I don’t actually consciously think about hitting each individual key and their exact locations on my keyboard. Instead I just tell my mind what I want to write, and “outsource” the task of actually hitting the keys to an “external” agent. (Make a function call to a library implementing the I/O, if you want to use a programming metaphor.) Of course, ultimately the words I’m writing come from beyond my conscious mind as well. My conscious mind is primarily concerned with communicating Eby’s point well to my readers, and is instructing the rest of my brain to come up with eloquent words and persuasive examples to that effect. And so on.
Thinking about this some more, you quickly end up at the conclusion that “you” don’t actually do anything, you’re just the one who makes the decisions about what to do. (Eby uses the terminological division you / yourself, as in “you don’t do anything—yourself does”.) Of course, simply saying that is a bit misleading, as yourself normally also determines what you want to do. I would describe this as saying that one’s natural feelings of motivation and willingness to do things are what you get when you leave your mind “on autopilot”, shifting to different emotional states based on a relatively simple set of cached rules. That works at times, but the system is rather stupid and originally evolved for guiding the behavior of animals, so in a modern environment it often gets you in trouble. You’re better off consciously giving it new instructions.
I’ve found this model of the mind to be exceedingly liberating, as it both absolves you of responsibility and empowers you. As an example, yesterday I was procrastinating about needing to write an e-mail that I should have written a week ago. Then I remembered Eby’s model and realized that hey, I don’t need to spend time and energy fighting myself, I can just outsource the task of starting writing to myself. So I basically just instructed myself to get me into a state where I’m ready and willing to start writing. A brief moment later, I had the compose mail window open and was thinking about what I should say, and soon got the mail written. This has also helped me on other occasions when I’ve had a need to start doing something. If I’m not getting started on something and start feeling guilty about it, I can realize that hey, it’s not my fault that I’m not getting anything done, it’s the fault of myself for having bad emotional rules that aren’t getting me naturally motivated. Then I can focus my attention on “how do I instruct myself to make me motivated about this” and get doing whatever it is that needs doing.
I’ll make this into a top-level post once I’ve ascertained that this technique actually works in the long term and I’m not just experiencing a placebo effect, but I thought I’d mention it in a comment already.
This somehow reminds me of the stories when Tom Schelling was trying to quit smoking, using game theory against himself (or his other self). The other self in question was not the unconscious, but the conscious “decision-making” self in different circumstances. So that discussion is somewhat orthogonal to this one. I think he did things like promising to give a donation to the American Nazi Party if he smokes. Not sure how that round ended, but he did finally quit.
So that discussion is somewhat orthogonal to this one. I think he did things like promising to give a donation to the American Nazi Party if he smokes.
Hmm. I’d be worried it’d backfire and I’d start subtlety disliking Jews. Then you’re a smoker and a bigot.
Reminds me of The User Illusion, which adds that the consciousness has an astoundingly low bandwidth—around 16bps—around 6 orders of magnitude lower than the senses transmit to the brain.
I’ve glanced at that site before and its metaphors have the ring of truthiness (in a non-pejorative sense) about them; the programming metaphors and the focus on subconscious mechanisms seem to resonate with the way I already think about how my own brain works.
I’ve been finding PJ Eby’s article The Multiple Self quite useful for fighting procrastination and needless feelings of guilt about getting enough done / not being good enough at things.
I have difficulty describing the article briefly, as I’m afraid that I accidentally omit important points and make people take it less seriously than it deserves, but I’ll try. The basic idea is that the conscious part of our mind only does an exceedingly small part of all the things we spend doing in our daily lives. Instead, it tells the unconscious mind, which actually does everything of importance, what it should be doing. As an example—I’m writing this post right now, but I don’t actually consciously think about hitting each individual key and their exact locations on my keyboard. Instead I just tell my mind what I want to write, and “outsource” the task of actually hitting the keys to an “external” agent. (Make a function call to a library implementing the I/O, if you want to use a programming metaphor.) Of course, ultimately the words I’m writing come from beyond my conscious mind as well. My conscious mind is primarily concerned with communicating Eby’s point well to my readers, and is instructing the rest of my brain to come up with eloquent words and persuasive examples to that effect. And so on.
Thinking about this some more, you quickly end up at the conclusion that “you” don’t actually do anything, you’re just the one who makes the decisions about what to do. (Eby uses the terminological division you / yourself, as in “you don’t do anything—yourself does”.) Of course, simply saying that is a bit misleading, as yourself normally also determines what you want to do. I would describe this as saying that one’s natural feelings of motivation and willingness to do things are what you get when you leave your mind “on autopilot”, shifting to different emotional states based on a relatively simple set of cached rules. That works at times, but the system is rather stupid and originally evolved for guiding the behavior of animals, so in a modern environment it often gets you in trouble. You’re better off consciously giving it new instructions.
I’ve found this model of the mind to be exceedingly liberating, as it both absolves you of responsibility and empowers you. As an example, yesterday I was procrastinating about needing to write an e-mail that I should have written a week ago. Then I remembered Eby’s model and realized that hey, I don’t need to spend time and energy fighting myself, I can just outsource the task of starting writing to myself. So I basically just instructed myself to get me into a state where I’m ready and willing to start writing. A brief moment later, I had the compose mail window open and was thinking about what I should say, and soon got the mail written. This has also helped me on other occasions when I’ve had a need to start doing something. If I’m not getting started on something and start feeling guilty about it, I can realize that hey, it’s not my fault that I’m not getting anything done, it’s the fault of myself for having bad emotional rules that aren’t getting me naturally motivated. Then I can focus my attention on “how do I instruct myself to make me motivated about this” and get doing whatever it is that needs doing.
I’ll make this into a top-level post once I’ve ascertained that this technique actually works in the long term and I’m not just experiencing a placebo effect, but I thought I’d mention it in a comment already.
This somehow reminds me of the stories when Tom Schelling was trying to quit smoking, using game theory against himself (or his other self). The other self in question was not the unconscious, but the conscious “decision-making” self in different circumstances. So that discussion is somewhat orthogonal to this one. I think he did things like promising to give a donation to the American Nazi Party if he smokes. Not sure how that round ended, but he did finally quit.
Hmm. I’d be worried it’d backfire and I’d start subtlety disliking Jews. Then you’re a smoker and a bigot.
lol. Not a problem if you’re Jewish ;)
Self-hatred is even worse than being a bigot!
Reminds me of The User Illusion, which adds that the consciousness has an astoundingly low bandwidth—around 16bps—around 6 orders of magnitude lower than the senses transmit to the brain.
Interesting.
I’ve glanced at that site before and its metaphors have the ring of truthiness (in a non-pejorative sense) about them; the programming metaphors and the focus on subconscious mechanisms seem to resonate with the way I already think about how my own brain works.
Couldn’t that be more succinctly stated as “its metaphors have the ring of truth about them”?
Maybe, but a lot of Freud’s metaphors had/have a similar ring.
Fair enough!
I read the original article and some of the other PJE material. I think he’s really onto something. This is how far I got:
Identify the ’10% controlling part’
Everything else is not under direct control (which is where most self-help methods fail)
It is under indirect control
So far makes sense from personal experience/general knowledge.
Here are my methods for indirect control.
This is the part that I remain skeptical about . Not PJE’s fault, but I do need more data/experience to confirm.
Thanks, Kaj, that was useful.