(NOTE: very WIP draft; written in ~1hr.)
If you relate to any of the following you're likely similar to me and this post may be highly useful:
- I often feel a bit powerless/agency-less, like I have very limited actions available to me.
- I experience huge mood/self-view/attitude swings if I feel agency-less and then do something hard (like going for a run and pushing through when I want to quit), I feel amazing afterwards.
- One of the most important things to me is increasing agency/discipline/self-control.
Important framing: You should take everything here as ideas and run experiments on yourself while being intensely curious about your inner experience and resulting behavior. Figure out the mental motions that work for you, figure out the things you can do to increase discipline/self-control/inner-trust.
Confidence: Tentative, has been working for me recently. Will edit with updates as I go. Still far from David Goggins lol.
Definition: Discipline. How much control your conscious mind has over your actions. It's the feeling that you can decide to drop and do pushups till failure whenever you decide to, the feeling your choices dictate your life, that you're in control of you.
A more helpful framing we'll use a lot here is How much your unconscious mind trusts your unconscious mind trusts your conscious mind (Note: Good post but remember we feel resistance towards pain that's effort and that's damage, and you don't want the damage kind.)
Definition: Resistance. The feeling of, well, resistance to actions when your conscious mind and unconscious mind disagree.
With that preamble done, we can now ask "How does one have their conscious mind to be trusted more by their unconscious?" -- let's investigate.
Firstly, I expect your conscious mind needs to actually be trustworthy. If you're fundamentally misaligned internally between what your conscious and unconscious mind want, I doubt trust will occur. The attitude you want is one of self-loyalty (read this), where your conscious mind is on the same side as your unconscious mind.
Meditate on this for 10 seconds, Is your conscious mind actually trustworthy? Would following it all the time actually get your unconscious what it wants? (Status, safety, sex, etc.), or would it go horribly wrong in some circumstances?
Okay, now let's think about what local, moment to moment experience results in global increases in agency/trust/etc. The present moment is all there ever is after all. :)
Here's an example from me, in detail:
- I feel tired/low agency/powerless
- Subtle, but I believe resistance can be beat if I pick a small enough task to do and feel proud about it. Sometimes you're in a bad place where the hardest task you feel you can do is to get out of bed. Okay, push through that resistance and feel proud about it afterwards. If you keep doing small (but harder) things you'll snowball quickly.
- I decide to do some hard exercise (the kind where I have to push through some resistance, enough to make me proud, not enough to make success unrealistic)
- I start the exercise and feel resistance
- I deploy techniques I've found effective in theory-based experimentation:
- I imagine in detail how I'll feel afterwards, how proud, energized, etc. Imagine how great I feel when I'm disciplined. Maybe imagine compliments on muscular physique. Unconscious likes these things!
- I smile and intend/try to view the pain as pleasurable
- I solidify my decision to continue (in situations where most of the suffering is created by your unconscious trying to get you to quit if you can solidify that you won't quit it becomes much more bearable.)
- If I quit, then I view all the negative emotions around that as "I shouldn't have quit" (Note to self: Try this! Had this idea while writing)
- If I succeed (meaning I pushed through a good amount of resistance) then I naturally feel great and like my action space has opened up a lot since I empirically can push through some decent resistance.
- This also raises the amount of resistance I can try pushing through again. If you don't constantly increase it you won't keep increasing discipline.
Things other than exercise that often have resistance and can be used here:
- Working & staying focused when you don't feel like it.
- Sending messages / emails you feel resistance towards.
- ... (todo get more)
IMPORTANT NOTE: Write about how to avoid the bad effects L had (discomfort challenges that actually sucked and didn't help). It has to actually be good according to your unconscious mind in retrospect to increase trust.
Note: Resistance can warp your thinking, for example: I frequently feel like I "don't have enough time" to do hard exercise, despite it only taking 5-10mins for a good amount of high intensity stuff! And despite increasing discipline/trust probably being the #1 thing I care about! With that context it's an insane excuse, but if I trusted all my thoughts I wouldn't have spotted this. (TODO: Put this somewhere that makes sense in terms of the flow of the post)
Remember to actually be proud of what you did, reinforce that shit as much as you can! Even if what you did was small, the metric that matters is resistance pushed through. In some contexts running a mile involves less resistance than getting out of bed. It depends where your mind is at.
TODO: Talk about mindfulness of interests? And how ignoring curiosity leads you far astray? Useful caveat. We don't want our conscious mind to command/dominate our unconscious, we want them to share information and come to good decisions together. And your feelings can be pretty on point, disregarding them leads to peril.
(Note to self: Writing this so far has been useful to clarify my thinking and synthesize all the content I've consumed. Very useful to continue. Putting it in my own words and seeing how I can actually apply it is :chefskiss:)
Thanks to Ethan Kuntz for contributing many of the core ideas here in a conversation we had, and thanks to ... for reading drafts of this.
Related links that didn't fit with this post but are likely of interest: