Right. And it’s not transparent how arduous any given hack will be until you have lots of general mind hack practice. I can now pretty well estimate how long and unpleasant any given change will be and make a cost-benefit evaluation, but in the beginning I had to decide that becoming happier was my top priority and was therefore worth as long as it took, and as much effort as it called for, however long and effortful that was.
Another way this can work is for the external situation to get bad enough that changing one’s habits, however unpleasant, still feels like an improvement over the status quo. I’m told recovering addicts call this “hitting bottom.”
In my own case, this happened a couple of years ago when I suffered a stroke… the status quo was no longer remotely tolerable; I had to change my habits (both mental and physical… they aren’t cleanly separable).
The end result was a much better baseline mood than I had before the stroke, which still seems an implausible win.
Still, on balance, I suspect that your approach was way better. :-)
I like this way of talking about “hitting bottom”… as if it’s just reality doing the priority-setting work for you, but if you were a little smarter, you would have done it for yourself. I have found that thinking of “hitting bottom” as a prerequisite to getting better is SPECTACULARLY counterproductive; but until you said that, I didn’t have a compact alternative (besides just not thinking that way, which works about as well as not thinking of bears).
Right. And it’s not transparent how arduous any given hack will be until you have lots of general mind hack practice. I can now pretty well estimate how long and unpleasant any given change will be and make a cost-benefit evaluation, but in the beginning I had to decide that becoming happier was my top priority and was therefore worth as long as it took, and as much effort as it called for, however long and effortful that was.
Yes, exactly.
Another way this can work is for the external situation to get bad enough that changing one’s habits, however unpleasant, still feels like an improvement over the status quo. I’m told recovering addicts call this “hitting bottom.”
In my own case, this happened a couple of years ago when I suffered a stroke… the status quo was no longer remotely tolerable; I had to change my habits (both mental and physical… they aren’t cleanly separable).
The end result was a much better baseline mood than I had before the stroke, which still seems an implausible win.
Still, on balance, I suspect that your approach was way better. :-)
I like this way of talking about “hitting bottom”… as if it’s just reality doing the priority-setting work for you, but if you were a little smarter, you would have done it for yourself. I have found that thinking of “hitting bottom” as a prerequisite to getting better is SPECTACULARLY counterproductive; but until you said that, I didn’t have a compact alternative (besides just not thinking that way, which works about as well as not thinking of bears).