In my own life, the thing that seems to help most is paying attention to what I’m doing.
Not so much in terms of analyzing patterns, though there’s nothing wrong with that, but in terms of attending to the individual events and being aware of how I am reacting and what I am reacting to, and doing so insofar as possible without imposing my expectations or my judgments on what I perceive.
Mostly, what seems to be going on is that when I don’t really pay attention, my brain happily fills in the resulting gaps in my awareness with all kinds of cached/default assumptions, which are then reinforced by their association with my representations of stuff that’s really there.
Put differently: I seem to be equipped with a buggy inference engine that, at least by default, infers the presence of X in the absence of compelling new evidence, based on my prior probability for X, and then turns around and uses the (inferred) presence of X as though it were new evidence, raising the posterior probability of X.
It’s a self-reinforcing loop: I end up seeing what I want to see. (Or what I fear seeing, or what I am otherwise predisposed to see.)
Whereas when I do pay attention, my brain isn’t quite so prone to “fill in the gaps” with X, or at least not so prone to confuse inferred X with perceived X, and my estimate of the probability of X in any given situation is therefore not artificially sustained. (And for the obviously wrong Xes, that’s often sufficient—once I eliminate the artificial support, natural inconsistencies will take care of the rest.)
Not sure how much use this community is for that, though.
I would encourage your friend to experiment with a meditation practice that works for her… just some way of establishing the habit of being present with what is actually happening right now and paying attention to it.
Different things work for different people in this space—a good friend of mine has a practice of putting everything he touches back exactly where he found it, for example, which he does not think of as a meditative practice but seems to me to achieve the same goal.
I’ve found that sort of self-awareness is incredibly helpful. My newest trick has been asking WHY I’m violating my previous plans—for instance, if I plan to diet, and end up over-eating, I’ll ask myself, in the moment, why I’m doing this. It helps me form better plans in the future, as I can better predict my own future reasoning. For instance, I might over-eat because I got lost in work for eight hours and then realized I was utterly ravenous, or I might realize that I enjoy the pleasure of food more than I enjoy the idea of losing weight and drop the idea entirely :)
In my own life, the thing that seems to help most is paying attention to what I’m doing.
Not so much in terms of analyzing patterns, though there’s nothing wrong with that, but in terms of attending to the individual events and being aware of how I am reacting and what I am reacting to, and doing so insofar as possible without imposing my expectations or my judgments on what I perceive.
Mostly, what seems to be going on is that when I don’t really pay attention, my brain happily fills in the resulting gaps in my awareness with all kinds of cached/default assumptions, which are then reinforced by their association with my representations of stuff that’s really there.
Put differently: I seem to be equipped with a buggy inference engine that, at least by default, infers the presence of X in the absence of compelling new evidence, based on my prior probability for X, and then turns around and uses the (inferred) presence of X as though it were new evidence, raising the posterior probability of X.
It’s a self-reinforcing loop: I end up seeing what I want to see. (Or what I fear seeing, or what I am otherwise predisposed to see.)
Whereas when I do pay attention, my brain isn’t quite so prone to “fill in the gaps” with X, or at least not so prone to confuse inferred X with perceived X, and my estimate of the probability of X in any given situation is therefore not artificially sustained. (And for the obviously wrong Xes, that’s often sufficient—once I eliminate the artificial support, natural inconsistencies will take care of the rest.)
Not sure how much use this community is for that, though.
I would encourage your friend to experiment with a meditation practice that works for her… just some way of establishing the habit of being present with what is actually happening right now and paying attention to it.
Different things work for different people in this space—a good friend of mine has a practice of putting everything he touches back exactly where he found it, for example, which he does not think of as a meditative practice but seems to me to achieve the same goal.
It’s a slow process, though.
I’ve found that sort of self-awareness is incredibly helpful. My newest trick has been asking WHY I’m violating my previous plans—for instance, if I plan to diet, and end up over-eating, I’ll ask myself, in the moment, why I’m doing this. It helps me form better plans in the future, as I can better predict my own future reasoning. For instance, I might over-eat because I got lost in work for eight hours and then realized I was utterly ravenous, or I might realize that I enjoy the pleasure of food more than I enjoy the idea of losing weight and drop the idea entirely :)