Here’s a video of me. It might be helpful to read the text below before watching the video. Actually, on second thought, this post was adapted from an email to a friend who said “I am grinning ear to ear from watching the video on your wall. I’d love to hear more about it!” so maybe watch it first. Your call.
So, in late January I was at a 4 day Applied Rationality workshop, which was absolutely amazing. The first 3 days were classes, and the 4th was to practise what we’d learned already. That’s when this video happened. The relevant class is called Againstness, and the practice session is fondly referred to as “Torture Court.” The againstness class is about the two halves of the Autonomic Nervous System (the part of your brain you don’t consciously control directly) which are the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Nervous Systems.
The idea is that while againstness (or SNS dominance) was effective back when stress = wild animal or armed opponent, it isn’t when stress = fight-with-your-partner or performance anxiety. As mentioned, you don’t have a sense of empathy when you’re in that state, so it’s basically impossible to consider that the other person might be right, or to even think of how the situation might be resolved peacefully. We were taught several techniques to release from againstness and shift to PNS dominance… basically:
Then. We come to the question of how exactly I came to be standing up there freaking out about astrology. I’ve historically not really liked astrology, but I was mostly indifferent. Sometime (I’m not sure where) in the past few years I developed a deep frustration with it. It really hit a peak this past summer when I had a very heated argument about it with my partner at the time. This had come up with past partners as well, although not so intense. Anyway, in another class at the workshop, called Winning at Arguments, we were asked to think of a heated argument, so I thought of that one. We looked into the word “winning” and how it can mean a variety of things, but that the most useful definition is that both (all) people involved achieve their goals. The next step there was to pause and think “what is my goal? what is their goal?” and I realized that ultimately she was trying to understand me and I was trying to be understood. Pretty compatible, eh? And yet it was one of the most intense arguments I’ve ever had.
However, despite having that understanding on Sunday, there was still a lot of pent-up negativity surrounding the subject of astrology. Very silly. Like, no matter how much I ultimately dislike it, there is nothing to be gained by being angry or stressed about it. Hence, the torture court exercise. I was one of the last people to go from our group, and a lot of the other people had been doing pretty tame things like singing I’m a Little Teapot—the main source of stress there was uncertainty surrounding the lyrics, not fear of performing. Another participant had to sidestep a punch from Val (the male instructor you can hear) but do so without flinching—just moving relaxedly. A lot of this is actually related to Aikido, but that’s another topic.
The other instructor running the Torture Court was Cat, who was also the one who did the arguments class, so when I finally went up I had this anticipation (a scary but hopeful one) that it would be astrology-related. If it had come up as something else that was boring, actually, I would have suggested it be revised as such. Anyway, I had given my phone to a friend to film me, and so then Cat proposed what she did and man it was overwhelming! One of the profound realizations I had was that I use laughter as a stress response. Like, I sort of knew this, but I didn’t realize how obvious and dramatic it was. Where others became frozen or defensive, I became, well, as you see in the video.
Immediately following the session I was walking around in a very intense physical, emotional, and mental state. My body felt… kind of tingly. I was feeling totally drained but simultaneously full of life. It was kind of like being dizzy but I wasn’t off-balance. This lasted maybe 10-15 minutes. It has, however, substantially reduced my aversion to astrology. Again, I still don’t care for it, but it doesn’t get me worked up anymore. At least, it hasn’t yet.
Malcolm, the Aries
This is it. This moment will decide the future.
There’s a Cadbury Creme egg sitting on my desk. It looks positively delicious.
I had told myself when I bought it that I wouldn’t eat it until I did something substantial. I’m being rather loose with substantial: essentially, I just need to have done something for I can say “I did that.” This is my latest strategy for keeping myself a) focused and b) from eating all chocolate within my grasp.
And yet I sit here, staring at this egg.
Oddly, the intense sensation I’m feeling—the experience of my urges waging war against my self-control—is not in my brain, where the actual cognition is taking place. It’s actually located somewhere in my chest.
I find myself surprised that it’s such a tantalizingly rich experience. I’m not acting, to accomplish something substantial or to eat the egg, but just sitting. Being present to my conflicted intentions. I find myself taken in by the sensation in my chest. Enduring. Like a cold shower.
Delicious.
I wonder: how long I would have to sit with this urge before it would lose the battle? Could I break the urge by refusing it for long enough? I feel like I can.
Time to experiment.
I want to talk about time, and how it’s spent. Almost every time I read about or listen to anyone talk about time management and personal development, they eventually get to TV. They say things like “Want to spend an hour a day learning a new skill? Just drop an hour of television.” or “Watch less television to improve your ability to pay attention.” While I wholeheartedly agree with this advice, I’m unable to apply it because I don’t watch TV.
Tonight, though, while mindlessly surfing the internet, I came across a wonderfully-titled article by Corbett Barr on Expert Enough: The Lost Art of Becoming Good at Things. I wholeheartedly agreed with the content of this article as well, but one sentence jumped out and stabbed me in the self-identity. In discussing how people make excuses for not learning and achieving things by saying they’re too busy, Corbett makes the typical comment “Really? How many hours of TV did you watch this week?” but then he asks:
“Oh.” I said.
I believe that I’ve been excusing myself from learning and achieving things by saying, “Not only am I busy, but I already don’t watch TV!” …and yet… I definitely spend more time wandering the dregs of the internet than I would like.
Because good advice is a waste of your time if it doesn’t change your behaviour, I decided I would change my behaviour. I started using StayFocusd for Chrome several months ago, and it drastically cut the time I spend on sites like Facebook and YouTube. There are, however, more than 360 million sites on the internet, so I can’t block all of the time-wasting sites. Also, exploring is a good thing, so I don’t just want to have a whitelist (besides, I can waste plenty of time on very otherwise-productive sites).
My solution, instead, is just to be more mindful of my time. I’ve set up a script on my computer using Windows’ Scheduled Tasks feature that will bring up the following image fullscreen every hour:
EDIT: I no longer endorse the content of this article, nor the veracity of any of Dispenza’s claims. His models, and those presented below, seem grossly oversimplified. I appreciate all of the commenters who have brought this to my attention, although my first warning sign was the ridiculous stuff he cites in another book I won’t even link to.
One of the popular pseudo-scientific questions people like to ask is “Are you left-brained or right-brained?” or if they have a slightly better understanding of nuance, then maybe “Do you favour the left or right side of brain?”.
The difference is really not this vast.
Instead of thinking about left-vs-right, a more pertinent question that we should ask of ourselves on a regular basis, is “Am I thinking more with my frontal lobe or midbrain?”. I’ve been working my way through a book called Evolve your Brain by Joe Dispenza and some of the later chapters are so cool I just had to talk about them.
This book will blow your mind.
Chapters 10 and 11 talk about the frontal lobe and how to use it to take control of our lives and become who we want to be. Essentially, the frontal lobe is the seat of our consciousness. When we live life habitually, going through the same motions, we are not taking full advantage of our frontal lobe and instead are being controlled by the midbrain and the other more primitive parts of our mind. Evolve your Brain proposes that in order to achieve our goals we must focus on using our frontal cortex. How do we do this? By focusing. Just as athletes or musicians can improve their performance by mentally rehearsing exactly what they want to do and how to respond to certain stimuli, we can do that with our day-to-day activities and interactions as well.
I’m going to work on practising the techniques outlined in the book over the next few months, and I’ll report back with my progress and suggestions on how to use it in your own life. My primary focus is actually going to be focus itself. I’m going to mentally rehearse being focused on the work I do and single-tasking, and my hope is that while the rehearsing may take time, my increased level of discipline will give me more time. It seems like a worthy investment. A very introspective friend of mine once said “Discipline is actually the path to freedom. Otherwise, you’re a slave to your urges and impulses.” He spoke the first part of that, and I paused, internalized it, and figured out the second part. Nobody wants to be a slave, hence the argument for discipline. It’s really empowering, ultimately, to put it like that, because it separates the person from the urges. It is easy to justify acting out the impulses by saying “they’re part of me that I have to honour.” While the first half is true, the second is most certainly not. For more on intercepting urges, see this post on The Pause at ZenHabits.
The unfortunate victims of frontal lobotomies (destruction/removal of the frontal lobe) in mid-20th-century became lazy and obsessively driven to experience sameness constantly. To a lesser degree, this is what anyone can experience when we constantly reenact the same behaviours. Since the brain is plastic, neural networks that are unused will gradually wither and die, replaced by the features that are active. I’m going to make a point of asking myself on a day to day basis:
