Frequently expose myself to shocking/horrific pictures, so that I am generally less sensitive. I’ve been doing this for a while, watching horror movies while doing cardio exercise, and it’s been going well. One might also try pulling pics from (WARNING) shock sites and using spaced repetition to schedule exposures.
I was thinking it might generally help you to suppress your emotions, which I think is the key to success in many areas. Watching a horror movie is a conflict between your caveman-brain screaming at you to run and your rational brain telling you not to. If you can listen to reason rather than instinct on this, perhaps you will be better able to do so when faced with other situations. For example, if you are in a religious community your instinct tells you to conform, whereas your reason (hopefully) tells you the religion is false.
I also think it might help with general rationality—it’s not good to have massive holes in your mental map where there are things you’re too scared to think about.
Ironically, ever since I’ve started watching horror movies, I haven’t had a single nightmare, whereas I used to have them rather often.
It may be a useful survival trait in some sense, but it’s not useful in others. Often I run into situations where people lose their heads over something that is not a real issue.
“EEWW!” “Oh, the bucket is full of maggots? OK, let’s go dump it in the woods.” “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that! EEWW!”
Or people will freak out over some feces or urine, and stand around discussing how disgusting it is rather than just cleaning it up.
I imagine doctors have similar opinions about normal people and blood (not a reflex I’ve had much luck with controlling consciously).
More importantly, this is a kind of mindfulness meditation, which generalizes—if you can step back from maggots or feces and ask yourself ‘is this really something to be perturbed by?’, then surely you can do the same for many other issues. (I have read that sometimes Buddhists or Hindus would meditate in front of rotting corpses, but that’s probably taking it a bit too far.)
Feeling revulsion about things seems like a useful survival trait.
I’m not planning to lose my sense of revulsion any time soon, only to become able to ignore/suppress emotions when they’re not useful, like when deciding on a charity to sponsor or whether to eat revolting celery or non-revolting cupcakes.
Controlling your emotions is probably better-taught by participating in an adult-
literacy program, or voice-only technical support
Horror movies are entertaining, and if you have cardio equipment you can easily do 2 hours of exercise painlessly while watching one. If you already use spaced repetition, it might take at most 10 hours total over the course of your lifetime to get a hundred shock pictures and rate the due ones daily for how much you flinched when you saw them.
The first option in particular seems orders of magnitude more efficient than spending hours answering boring tech-support calls for low pay.
Oh, nono. I didn’t mean for low pay, I meant for free. Sorry about that.
A senior citizen computer program would also work well for the same reasons (immediate feedback about communication)
Working or volunteering at a rest home might be even better. Controlling revulsion might be useful, but controlling frustration and helplessness may be even more useful.
Just curious what the benefit is.
I was thinking it might generally help you to suppress your emotions, which I think is the key to success in many areas. Watching a horror movie is a conflict between your caveman-brain screaming at you to run and your rational brain telling you not to. If you can listen to reason rather than instinct on this, perhaps you will be better able to do so when faced with other situations. For example, if you are in a religious community your instinct tells you to conform, whereas your reason (hopefully) tells you the religion is false.
I also think it might help with general rationality—it’s not good to have massive holes in your mental map where there are things you’re too scared to think about.
Ironically, ever since I’ve started watching horror movies, I haven’t had a single nightmare, whereas I used to have them rather often.
I’m not sure that this is the best way to do this. Feeling revulsion about things seems like a useful survival trait.
Controlling your emotions is probably better-taught by participating in an adult-literacy program, or voice-only technical support
Edit—please disregard this post
It may be a useful survival trait in some sense, but it’s not useful in others. Often I run into situations where people lose their heads over something that is not a real issue.
“EEWW!” “Oh, the bucket is full of maggots? OK, let’s go dump it in the woods.” “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do that! EEWW!”
Or people will freak out over some feces or urine, and stand around discussing how disgusting it is rather than just cleaning it up.
I imagine doctors have similar opinions about normal people and blood (not a reflex I’ve had much luck with controlling consciously).
More importantly, this is a kind of mindfulness meditation, which generalizes—if you can step back from maggots or feces and ask yourself ‘is this really something to be perturbed by?’, then surely you can do the same for many other issues. (I have read that sometimes Buddhists or Hindus would meditate in front of rotting corpses, but that’s probably taking it a bit too far.)
I’m not planning to lose my sense of revulsion any time soon, only to become able to ignore/suppress emotions when they’re not useful, like when deciding on a charity to sponsor or whether to eat revolting celery or non-revolting cupcakes.
Horror movies are entertaining, and if you have cardio equipment you can easily do 2 hours of exercise painlessly while watching one. If you already use spaced repetition, it might take at most 10 hours total over the course of your lifetime to get a hundred shock pictures and rate the due ones daily for how much you flinched when you saw them.
The first option in particular seems orders of magnitude more efficient than spending hours answering boring tech-support calls for low pay.
Oh, nono. I didn’t mean for low pay, I meant for free. Sorry about that. A senior citizen computer program would also work well for the same reasons (immediate feedback about communication)
Working or volunteering at a rest home might be even better. Controlling revulsion might be useful, but controlling frustration and helplessness may be even more useful.
Edit—please disregard this post
Just the image of the OP doing situps while watching ISIS propaganda is so very Patrick Bateman in American Psycho...