Wow, that is scary. I read about attachment style, and it was eerie how well it described my relationship.
EDIT: Actually, I think I would really appreciate if anyone had any interesting sources on attachment styles in adults.
eugman
Karma: 525
I have to say, this and the previous post have significantly improved my life. I am really looking forward to any more posts along these lines.
Sorry for not specifying. The one referenced at the end of this article: Pain and gain motivation
Well a large part of it was perfect timing. Those two posts have acted as mental condensation nuclei; they provided something for everything else to coalesce around. I am definitely not suggesting anyone else will have similar results. I’ll write in detail this week how they have been useful.
So, a few important pieces of background information. I have depression or something similar. I don’t know because I am self diagnosed. I’ve recently entered into my first relationship which has had two effects: there is now a strong motivation to cure my depression, and there is a strong motivation to understand my own thought processes. I have some uncommon thought patterns, and if I can understand them and explain them, it makes everything much easier.
So, essentially, I’ve been heavily introspective recently and desperate to try anything that might improve my situation. I read about pain and gain motivation and it all clicks. Quite possibly my biggest problem is that most of my motivation has been negative, which does not work when you are taking heavy course loads. So I applied the irresistible motivation technique. It was somewhat useful at first, but I’ve been able to start replacing a lot of the negative motivation with positive and that has been some critical threshold. I’ve reach a point of sustained happiness I haven’t seen in years.
This post has also been useful, but not as much. I’ve very commonly run into Ugh fields with simple tasks such as checking email or updating my website. It’s been a chronic problem and I had assumed that there was nothing I could do about it, or the solution was to set a self imposed rule to check my email everyday, etc. What I needed was a formalization of the concept and an idea of what to do about it. Now I see I was attacking a symptom and not a cause. I’ve been able to dismantle a number of Ugh fields and expect more improvement.
One of the reasons I read Overcoming Bias and continue to read Less Wrong is that they often provided a formalization of concepts I already know intuitively. Reading these kinds of articles gives me something to work off of.
Yes and no. I still have to actively apply them, or some of the more general concepts, in order to keep the old feelings at bay. It literally feels as if there are two modes of thought available to me now and the old one caused my problems. However, I can’t think of a specific way to test them.
Also, I’m aware that my relationship has produced much of the change. Much of my depression was caused by low self-esteem and using grades as a metric of personal value. However, it had felt as if there has been a plateau. I was feeling a lot better, and more motivated to fight my feelings of depression but it wasn’t working.
The problem was that I was attacking the symptoms directly. If I had irrational thoughts, I would try to counter them directly, instead of the cause. That’s why I said that these articles acted as catalysts. They were not sufficient, but they were necessary.
Hello, I lurked for a long time. I’ve started dipping my toes in the water.
Has anyone read The Integral Trees by Larry Niven? Something I always wonder about people supporting cryonics is why do they assume that the future will be a good place to live in? Why do they assume they will have any rights? Or do they figure that if they are revived, FAI has most likely come to pass?
Now that’s a reasonable argument: benevolent, resource rich societies are more likely to thaw people. Thanks.
And yes, that’s true, science fiction does often look at what could go really wrong.
I have a cognitive problem and I figured someone might be able to help with it.
I think I might have trouble filtering stimuli, or something similar. A dog barking, an ear ache, loud people, or a really long day can break me down. I start to have difficulty focusing. I can’t hold complex concepts in my head. I’ll often start a task, and quit in the middle because it feels too difficult and try to switch to something else, ultimately getting nothing done. I’ll have difficulty deciding what to work on. I’ll start to panic or get intimidated. It’s really an issue.
I’ve found two things that help:
Music is good at filtering out noise and helping me focus. However, sometimes i can’t listen to it or it is not enough.
The other thing is to make a extremely granular tasklist and then follow it without question. The tasks have to be really small and seem manageable.
Anyone have any suggestions? I’m not neurotypical in the broader sense, but I don’t believe I fall on the autism spectrum.
Thanks for the advice. The only other symptom I have is some problems with my social coprocessor, but it doesn’t feel like it fits an ASD.
I’m curious how you all would feel about introducing gambling, in some sense, with children. Like a large fishbowl filled with slips of paper. Whenever they do something good, you let them go get a slip and receive whatever reward is written on it. Obviously you’d have to deal with cheating.
Although I’m weary about punish or rewarding doing chores as opposed to good effort. I feel like chores should just be expected of the child. Instead of it seeming like a job. But I suppose the randomness is supposed to help with that.
That’s true. Arbitrary responses can lead to learned helplessness, although that’s for negative responses. I can imagine there is are more relevant psychological concepts.
I suspect you underestimate how well developed these guessing skills become in high school. From my experience, students become very good at turning a sentence of content into a paragraph of gibberish.
No, that doesn’t sound right at all. You make it sound like there is linear growth and that all moves are sort of the same. When I hear small advantages escalate, I imagine something more like exponential growth. Small moves, early on, compound throughout chess and can lead to bigger and bigger advantages. From what I understand of go, this is not the same. Small mistakes early on are unlikely to be crippling.
That makes sense to me. Upvoted.
Can anyone suggest any blogs giving advice for serious romantic relationships? I think a lot of my problems come from a poor theory of mind for my partner, so stuff like 5 love languages and stuff on attachment styles has been useful.
Thanks.
Yes. You are assuming ze has a high level of introspection which would facilitate communication. This isn’t always the case.
Thank you. I believe I may fall in this category. I am highly quantitative and analytical, often to my detriment.
Hi, I’m new.
This is probably more of a talent than a skill, but I think I’m abnormally good at producing analogies on the fly. It’s really useful for trying to get a concept across to a person.