When you notice you are demotivated → see if there’s a negative felt sense blocking your progress, or lack of a positive felt sense that would give you direction
When you are feeling bad about something, but aren’t entirely sure why (so you can fix your issue)
When you are feeling good about something, and aren’t entirely sure why (so you can arrange to feel more like that in the future), or just want to feel it more strongly
When you want to do something creative and are looking for inspiration
The SSC subreddit also brought up an interesting example of felt sense being important in language learning:
One of my hobbies is language learning, and one concept in one community I’m a part of is the idea of mentalese. When learning a language, you shouldn’t be mentally translating to and from English. When you read or hear a different language, you should turn that into mentalese, which is a lot less aggravating, a lot more precise, and a lot easier than translating to English. You shouldn’t translate grammar at all, but at most, you can have a slight mental echo of individual word translation, as you create initial meanings for new words by hooking them to old ones. Then, in speaking or writing, you should try to directly output that language, instead of translating from English. (This also means it’s easy to practice reading/listening correctly, with a given artificial input, but hard to practice output, because you can’t be given something in particular to output to be checked automatically. With output, you just gotta try writing or speaking naturally. With input, you can practice understanding individual sentences using something like Anki.)
I picked up on 2 models of how this works from the post.
One is that it’s basically about responding to your feelings, to better align your life with your subconscious motivations.
The other is that it’s about shaping your feelings, to make life more interesting.
Both can be useful, but I think it’s a useful distinction to draw. I came away at first feeling like “I am feeling pretty neutral right now. Is that a strong feeling of neutrality, something I can focus on that might have some sort of therapeutic message for me, or is it just the absence of feeling? I think it’s the latter, but in that case, does that mean focusing is irrelevant to me?”
I think focusing can be useful even when you’re feeling neutral. That’s probably a good way to feel if you’re doing a lot of analytical brainwork. But when you’re done, it can be hard to switch gears to a more playful, sensory, and engaged mood. I’ve been using my own version of focusing to try and do that, which is helpful. But only if I’m clear that I’m not suffering/don’t need the “therapeutic version” of focusing.
What should trigger a person to try to tap into a felt sense? In other words, can you add “When” to the title?
Well, some from the post would be
When you notice you are demotivated → see if there’s a negative felt sense blocking your progress, or lack of a positive felt sense that would give you direction
When you are feeling bad about something, but aren’t entirely sure why (so you can fix your issue)
When you are feeling good about something, and aren’t entirely sure why (so you can arrange to feel more like that in the future), or just want to feel it more strongly
When you want to do something creative and are looking for inspiration
The SSC subreddit also brought up an interesting example of felt sense being important in language learning:
I picked up on 2 models of how this works from the post.
One is that it’s basically about responding to your feelings, to better align your life with your subconscious motivations.
The other is that it’s about shaping your feelings, to make life more interesting.
Both can be useful, but I think it’s a useful distinction to draw. I came away at first feeling like “I am feeling pretty neutral right now. Is that a strong feeling of neutrality, something I can focus on that might have some sort of therapeutic message for me, or is it just the absence of feeling? I think it’s the latter, but in that case, does that mean focusing is irrelevant to me?”
I think focusing can be useful even when you’re feeling neutral. That’s probably a good way to feel if you’re doing a lot of analytical brainwork. But when you’re done, it can be hard to switch gears to a more playful, sensory, and engaged mood. I’ve been using my own version of focusing to try and do that, which is helpful. But only if I’m clear that I’m not suffering/don’t need the “therapeutic version” of focusing.