"Tony was not born optimistic. He practiced it. He put in the effort.
You can do the same."
The phrase "You can do the same" already shows that this person has never dealt with real psychological problems. I wish these self-help gurus would just say "Here is something that works for some people. Try it. Maybe it works and if it doesn't work it's not your fault". Instead you have to defend yourself if the well-meant advice from people doesn't work.
Yes, it’s ironic that the people closest to AI, who should be able to see that the brain is a physical organ like all others, often have the hardest time recognizing that cognitive deficits are as real as physical deficits. Some people can’t “make themselves feel X” any easier than a quadriplegic can dunk a basketball.
Saying "You can do the same" is extremely condescending and frustrating for people who have repeatedly tried to solve a problem and failed. It's like some people tell depressed people "Just go out there and have fun". It's not helpful.
I would argue that "You can do the same" means the author is in sales, or at least practicing sales techniques. Now, the author might be doing this for the usual reasons, to sell their program, or the author might be doing this because some people feel that sales techniques are 'inspirational' - a lot of people like to be told on no uncertain terms that they will succeed.
I mean, i'm not personally one of those people who likes 'inspirational' sales programs. Personally, when it comes time for me to do something really difficult, I find it works best if I acknowledge it as really difficult as I'm doing it. I mean, I'm trying to lose weight right now, and it is a very difficult thing - not just for people with serious psychological issues, but for almost everyone.[1] Yes, yes, just eat less and work out more. It is simple but just because something is simple does not make it easy, especially when you are trying to run counter to a drive as strong as the drive to eat more calories than you burn. Really, I think that studying people who competitively hold their breath is... relevant here. Most people simply can't make themselves hold their breath as long as their body could physiologically take it. Now, eating less is... less intense than depriving yourself of oxygen, but as evidenced by the failure rates, it's still going against a very basic drive.
And for me, knowing that I will almost certainly never get a "beach body" and that I'll have to count calories and struggle for the rest of my life just to not continue ballooning outward, I think, is a much better long term solution than thinking that I somehow have some secret knowledge that the 99% doesn't have, or that I'm otherwise sure to succeed. I mean, the biggest danger I see is giving up after having a short-term failure of willpower. Binging one day without tracking and then just throwing up my arms and giving up. If instead of shooting for the beach body, I am simply struggling to not be a blob, and every bit less blob-like I am is progress? That's a better, more realistic long-term goal for me.
But... I might be unusual in that regard. Most people seem to think that having some special knowledge, or believing that they have .01% levels of willpower helps them actually achieve more. "The power of positive thinking" and all that. And maybe it does, for them. And I guess I think that's okay, even though I personally find it super irritating and unhelpful.
Try giving up eating all animal products. Good luck not losing weight then. Big weight loss has been an unintended side effect for everyone I know who's gone whole food plant based.
So, uh, I haven't actually read 'Moby Dick' in paper. I read almost everything on the kindle, so I'm not always as conscious of the 'heft' of a book as I might be. It's a wonderful book, and really grabbed me to the point where I couldn't put it down, and I finished it rather quickly and with little effort because of that.
Anyhow, I remember the first time I mentioned that it was a reasonably fast, light read to someone else, and they reacted like I had asked them to read "Atlas Shrugged" or something. Like, apparently, reading anything longer than a medium post is a whole lot of effort for most people, even if it's actually good.
I think about this every time a thin person tells me how easy it is to lose weight just by avoiding certain foods and, you know, eating a reasonable amount of said foods, or "just being more mindful." "It's easy" - I mean, I'm sure it is easy for you, and that's great! But some of us need to monitor our intake. I mean, I'll sit there and scarf a pound of pecans in a sitting, if I don't expend significant will to stop myself, and at what, 200 calories an ounce, I don't have to do that often to remain fat. And fruit juice? I think a significant portion of my gut is composed of that delicious fresh orange juice that the local taquaria will squeeze for you (and serve in those giant cups)
Of course, I don't yet know if monitoring my calories in and out will be enough to actually get myself to a reasonable size or not. I've only been doing it for two weeks or so. But I have been a vegitarian, and in and of itself, that doesn't solve the problem.
Massive difference between vegetarian and whole food plant based.
I hear what you're saying, but I didn't mention the word easy, just that everyone I know who has switched to a whole food plant based diet has lost weight, whether they intended to or not.
So eating a pound of pecans would be no problem. The orange juice on the other hand isn't WFPB
They're discussing Cognitive Based Therapy - a technique used (sometimes in concert with medication) for the treatment of real psychological problems.
Caveat Emptor and all that, but if we assume the best intentions of the article's author: they're just giving people tools, and attempting to show that those tools can work. Convincing people that the tools work will require some marketing language and idioms.
Useful framework but the 180 seconds part is false in general. For a typical person with lots of negative thoughts it will take much longer to do the countering exercise at any given time. Once you become good at it though, then it takes no time at all —you counter instinctually and st some you just think positively from the get go. So the 180 seconds part is just the usual title clickbaiting.
Again, useful framework but main problem I have with it is for when the negative thoughts are very real and very deserved. From something small (like you left your dirty dishes in the sink for your partner to deal with) to something large (like you ran somebody and killed them while drunk driving), you screwed up and the thoughts of shame and embarrassment are appropriate. For things you can’t truly rectify (to make an extreme example, like bringing someone back to life that you killed), there is often no amount of positive countering that will overcome it. Similar for things like not liking something about your appearance that can’t be easily changed like your height. No amount of positive countering can undo the fact. It ends up looking a lot like denial, self deception, and minimization to use this framework in these cases.
Respectfully, I disagree. Take your example about drunk driving and killing someone. The pain and suffering that person will experience in the aftermath will be enormous. But you know what? Everything we experience in life is in contrast to our past experiences. It would be likely that person had never experienced such pain, shame, sorrow, and suffering before this experience.
Therefore, every experience of joy they have thereafter will be in contrast to this deep despair. As messed up as it sounds, many times extreme tragedy can lead to more joy and happiness than would be possible otherwise. Simply because they have more awareness and appreciation than they did in the past.
Your examples don't fit the use-case of the framework, which is for chronic negative thinking, for when you wake up and everything is wrong, or if you're easily triggered by one negative thought which sends you into a tunnel of negative thinking. Most people don't think of negative examples separately-- for example, losing your job is not usually related to how short you are, but most people will vaguely correlate the two, if they're in a bad state, and conclude there might be something inherently wrong with who they are.
When something has gone wrong, one can still think positively about the situation, but the framework to use in that case is to simply ask 'why' over and over again until you've found the true root of the problem. The positive aspect is that you've just been taught a lesson, and you can move on once you've learned that lesson. In the case of drunk driving and killing someone-- obviously you fucked up because you drove while drunk, but why didn't you stop yourself from driving drunk? Why were you drunk in the first place? etc.
For negative thoughts about things that can't be changed, that is simply a matter of perspective. You can put a positive (or non-negative) spin to anything.
I think they do though. The drunk-driving-death example could easily lead to chronic negative thoughts about it. How foolish you were to drive drunk. How foolish you are to be an alcoholic. How weak you are to be an alcoholic. How messed up your life will be now for a long time, if not forever. Etc.
So yes, you can spin that or change your perspective like you say, but that gets to my point: it just verges on self-delusion, minimization, and such. How do you know you aren’t lying to yourself for selfish relief? Knowing yourself enough to know when you are doing that is where the real skill is. This simple framework doesn’t help with that.
The framework in the article isn't about knowing yourself. You have to know yourself to create positive thoughts, and you have to create positive thoughts in the process of knowing yourself.
The article begins with a rather dubious "citation":
> According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts.
There is no link to the alleged NSF work (as a funding organization, it is unlikely they'd be doing this sort of research), and despite the claim being repeated around the web, there is apparently no legitimate source for it: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2012/05/09/th... .
86400 - 28800 = 57600 ≈ 60000. This looks fairly realistic if you ask yourself about just how much time a day do you maintain perfect inner silence and equilibrium. I really doubt it's more than about the 400 seconds for the majority of the people who don't practice meditation (and even these 400 seconds are usually just the unconscious moments). Also ask yourself about how long do you usually maintain concentration at one single atomic thought contiguously without switching to random related and unrelated thoughts for even a moment.
It is tempting to say that I spend many time in conscious-inactive mode, but then it heavily doesn’t add up with what you say. What is a distinct thought exactly? Do people experience a constant caleidoscope of inner images/sounds/etc? For me thinking is retrieving conceptions from subconscious and lining them up on ‘internal board’ to produce results. Another notable mode is simply recalling events (including feelings) and turning them into speech. This usually takes many seconds. Can fragmentary distractions in these processes count as thoughts? If yes, then I should agree, but I’m not sure if it’s a fair definition. That’s interesting.
I never meditated, but I can easily stare at wall clock or cursor blinking for few minutes, not experiencing inner visual or acoustic ‘things’.
Edit: btw, I began to do that after reading Colin Wilson’s “Spider World” in ‘00s, where mind control was described in a scifi series. Didn’t know it, but now looks like consciousness problems are his main interest.
You're cool, dude! Definitely not an average person. What you describe is a meditation of a kind (there are many) actually. Have you tried the next level? Given you can silence your inner dialogue/monologue/etc while maintaining awake conscious mind and concentrated attention, "turn around" (your attention) and try staring at the still space that is the background to where endogenous mental stimuli (verbal/conceptual thoughts, images, feelings etc) normally appear, try to find where the point of "you" hides from which you look at all the images thoughts, stare in this direction rather than on a physical object or a thought. It sounds crazy like a camera filming itself without a mirror but it's possible in this realm and feels awesome once you succeed.
Well, thanks! No, I never "turned around", nor do I think that what I described is particularly cool, since it puts some ~ consequences on the way I communicate, like e.g. I'm falling off conversation for few seconds before an answer emerges. But is this next thing safe and pragmatic? Any good read on that? Asking out of curiosity and because I'm not really into that... 'spiritual' thing that accompanies many mind-related areas.
> Step 1: Take out a piece of paper or open a writing software on your computer or mobile
Instructions unclear, ended up spending the day wallowing in a feedback loop of negative thoughts that has now only been amplified by noticing I'm so useless that I can't even open up vim to write about it.
There are lots of ways to potentially "stop negative thoughts", sometimes taking a caffeine pill can be enough (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28455046) and sometimes forcing your brain to slow down by writing things works. It's the very first step though, taking any action that has any chance to move you out of the loop, that seems the most insurmountable when you're inside the loop. I'm not sure anyone's figured out a way to make that easier, just ways to avoid falling right back in (ideally indefinitely, such as reliably noticing (easier said than done) you're falling early enough you can take action to right yourself before it seems an insurmountable effort, which is where this/meditation/periodic medication/etc. come in).
Meditating isn't magic, and it's not hard. It's just practicing exercises that can have an effect on your mental state, when you do them often enough you can end up training yourself to have more control over your mental state. You don't have to "get meditation right" to be able to be doing it. When you meditate your mind will wander, that's normal, when you meditate you may not become relaxed, that's normal, when you meditate you may not be able to let go of anxious or panic inducing thoughts, that's normal. The trick to meditation is doing it anyway and not having expectations about it, which, ironically, is how you get better at it and you get better at letting go of unwanted thoughts and at settling your mind into calmness, etc.
This article is nothing but a description of one way to meditate. If you are turned off of the idea of meditation because of some preconceived notion of what it is or how it works I would highly suggest you re-evaluate and look into it again, it's one of the most helpful life tools that anyone can have, and absolutely anyone can do it.
I have been meditating for 6 months now and the actual breakthrough came with the realization that meditation was not about "doing" rather "letting it be". So, no more struggling with trying to calm my mind and rather letting things be as they are. Now while I have gotten better, there are days when I struggle but now there is no more frustration about things not working.
Some of my friends and colleagues ask me what is meditation and how to start? And I always say it is about focus and being present. A good example is listening to music - when you are listening and focusing on the beats and thinking about nothing else, you are in a meditative state. Or even eating food. A good one is Raisin meditation -
I suspect a problem lies in the terminology, people often think meditation means solely "transcendental meditation" wherein the object is to completely empty the mind. But meditation covers several distinct mental disciplines.
When the Bible says "meditate on the Law" it's definitely not intending one to empty or still one's mind: there are 2 types of meditation in the OT at least 1) involving repetition to oneself, or muttering; 2) involving prayerful consideration. Two different OT Hebrew words, at least, being translated as "meditate". NB I've not studied these in depth.
So even in this very limited field one sees this term is, perhaps unhelpfully, overloaded.
Headspace is a nice app that does some timed guided meditation - you can start by aiming to do five minutes each night. It's free for some level of use, I don't remember the restrictions but the free version is definitely enough to begin a decent meditation habit.
I'm not sure what I'm going to say will be helpful, but this is my experience: knowing myself, there is absolutely no way I could've done it alone. I went to some sort of camp for couple of days, where there is nothing to do but meditate. At the beginning not only I thought that it's too hard for me to do, but that it's simply impossible. After the first 2 days it went better.
It's not magic, but it does have a very positive effect on my life. The way I see it it's like any other sport: it's very hard to get yourself to start, but it's amazing how fast you're getting better
He used to be a member of the Giantbomb team and discussed his experience with meditation on their podcast. He wrote the post after they received an influx of email about the aforementioned discussion. It was nice to see meditation described by an amateur practitioner; I found the advice useful, and it spurred additional interest.
Insight timer is a good free app. I had some free time recently and need to get away so I did a 1 week mindfulness retreat which I found very helpful. I was finding it hard to stick with it since returning but the app gives me a little structure to work with and I'm enjoying it so far.
“Wanting has to go. Wanting to be free from something that is not there is what you call "sorrow.” Wanting to be free from sorrow is sorrow. There is no other sorrow. You don't want to be free from sorrow. You just think about sorrow, without acting. Your thinking endlessly about being free from sorrow is only more material for sorrow. Thinking does not put an end to sorrow. Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against "sorrow" is sorrow. Since you can't stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, Mind Is a Myth
I believe that it's not too bad to let negative thoughts pass through our stream of consciousness everyday. I mean, it's part of being human to have different kinds of emotion, right? The intervention is necessary ONLY IF one feels like negative thoughts are occupying too much of his/her mind space and is debilitating his/her day-to-day functions.
Other than that, we may sometimes be happy, be sad, be angry, be disgusted, be afraid and so on. Just don't linger on one for too long (know that time will help us forget) and that's a good enough approach to manage the emotional flux.
>According to the National Science Foundation, an average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive thoughts.
Here's one trick to get out of a "suffering state" and get to a "beautiful state":
Silently in your head, send blessings (joy, happiness, love, inner peace, etc.) to people that you encounter in life and people that are playing a part in your thoughts. Do this whenever you feel the oncoming of an unnecessary negative emotion.
After 30 to 90 days, a new habit will be formed. And, probably, a new default peaceful internal state.
For more of the science behind approaches like this check out the first four chapters of 'Hardwiring Happiness' [0] and try the exercises listed in the book. It sounded like fluff when I first came across it but so far it's helped me relate to perhaps unsavoury mind states in more healthy ways.
You can do the same."
The phrase "You can do the same" already shows that this person has never dealt with real psychological problems. I wish these self-help gurus would just say "Here is something that works for some people. Try it. Maybe it works and if it doesn't work it's not your fault". Instead you have to defend yourself if the well-meant advice from people doesn't work.