As a person with long experiences in trauma responses, I see this sort of behavior pattern everywhere. There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats. We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.
I think a big part of maturing professionally is how I’ve gotten a better handle on not trusting my gut.
He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.
> He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
I think this is where it’s important to know yourself.
If you’re having a constant stream of anxiety inducing thoughts and light paranoia, learning how to silence those and introduce a more objective view is helpful.
It can be taken too far, though. I had a friend whose company was showing all of the warning signs of financial problems, yet he was on a positivity kick and chose to substitute an “everything works out eventually” mentality. Instead, he rode the company right into their inevitable shutdown and missed some good opportunities to take other jobs along the way because he thought ignoring his gut was the right thing to do.
>He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right.
In one situation for me, this was exactly the case. It became more clear as each week went by. It was a "bro" situation between the C-level and the new hire, and the C-level was a "30 under 30" so there was a high school mentality about it.
I've lost count of the amount of times I've been driving to work thinking "oh shit I suck at my job I'm defo getting fired" to then be told " You're doing a good job keep it up"
Other time I think I'm doing a good job when everyone is actually very pissed off at me
I’ve also never worked at a company that had enough long term thinking to train up replacements. Several would only cut entire departments and/or only do layoffs.
So there isn’t really any point about worrying about being replaced (:>
But you also get disasters when people ignore their gut/"vibes" and try to do the "rational" thing based on more easily nameable evidence. The gut is not reliable, but it is a model that's trained on a lot of data and shouldn't be ignored. As usual there are no easy answers.
Frankly being able to point to specific behaviors that trigger vibes is something that comes easily to me as someone who, again, had to work through identifying trauma responses and reacting accordingly. It’s just a skill I think more people would benefit from picking up. I respond really poorly when I don’t feel understood, but I also have a tendency to be vague on details so it is normal for me to get misunderstood. Recognizing this is useful because I can use my gut frustration as an indicator, not that whoever I’m talking to is a moron or are intentionally bad faith misinterpreting me, but that I may be lacking clarity.
The problem with "trust your gut" is that intuition is a skill which needs to be honed. Everyone has different levels of blockage to being genuinely in touch with their "gut". I think some people are more naturally synthetic thinkers and already live in a more body-guided way. For the walking heads like most of us here on HN we would need to spend time re-learning how to calibrate the body to give precise readings. So the advice needs some caveats.
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats
This actually happened to me professionally.
A while back I was in a spot where for lots of good reasons, I decided I needed a 'reboot' of things; I had spent a lot of time listening to 'bad advice' and getting screwed over by bad people, and tried to have a bit of a clean slate.
I wound up finding a new job and a new girlfriend. Both felt weirdly stressful but I foolishly assumed it was just because they were both new things to me and I was 'out of my comfort zone'.
What I later discovered, was the 'boss' at my new job had actually tried to boast to certain people that he was trying to get me to quit, because he never wanted me on the team (He was sick for my first interview, and the person above him told him to hire me.)
He'd pull stunts like 'Oh I'm just gonna pull you into this meeting about our Crystal reports' (I was still new there and only knew that 'they existed in our legacy system') and then at the start of the meeting just a couple hours later, tried to claim that I was the subject matter expert on our Crystal reports! (Thankfully, I did use what little down-time I had, to do some basic digging and was able to at least speak to a potential solution to the problem they wanted to solve...)
Any time I wanted to get moved off the 'Support team' I would be given some seemingly impossible task to 'prove myself'; at one point I created a modular UI Frontend where different modules as ASP.NET MVC sites had backend logic to 'register' themselves with the main presentation service; thus delivering the ask, but he never even looked at a line of code.
And yeah they were a 'charmer'. He hoodwinked the whole board with empty promises and when he was finally found out (toxic behavior and all, the whole dev team had a 'group therapy' session or two b/c most folks were mistreated by him on some level) none of the code he produced ever really saw the light of day...
Couple that with partner that wasn't real, just using me to not feel lonely while her actual partner was busy in premed...
I suppose the irony being, that 'fake' partner is now a technical writer, working at the same company where the director who got me hired at the job with the shitty boss... (No that 'partner' didn't work at the place I worked at, but it's still just crazy as far as coincidences...)
I had opposite issue, again and again. "My gut" was actually correct again and again. I ignored it because if trying to be rational and objective. The gut was a lot more correct at identifying interpersonal threats and bad actors.
> We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming
In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.
When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.
Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.
There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.
I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.
In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.
Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.
It's nothing big: especially in a startup environment there will be situations where the product manager or another engineer will ask for changes, and I expect people to adapt, or at least to argue the merits of the change. Make no mistake, a lot of those people WERE able to adapt code-wise, and I was even praising them, but they did the changes while voicing concerns and complaining that my task "was badly defined, since I didn't tell them about possible future changes". One got very annoyed verbally at a small requisite change, even though we still had only used half the scheduled time, but we were almost finished with everything.
And this HAS paid off! This happened rarely, but more than half of those people got incredibly triggered by their rejections, and a couple even demanded talking directly with the team. In one case, we had someone coming to the company. It wasn't a lot, I must have interviewed over 200-300 people there, but it was significant.
I actually never prescribed a specific solution on how to accomplish the education at all. This is kinda what I mean when I say folks don’t really process their feelings they act like what they feel is happening is true.
The problem is identifying what is your gut vs what your brain was wired for over years and decades. It echoes, and this is an abstraction, consumption and how consumption made those crowds and individuals feel, that appeared as having the most fun.
a) you don't see the doses of amphetamines and other drugs these people have consumed or are consuming regularly
but more importantly:
b) your gut is disturbed by what you eat and your brain by what you perceive, which is filtered by your personality and current/past state of mind. just a little of x and it's hard to trust a feeling that comes from a place of mixed feelings, some of which are more obviously bad than others, some of the time.
c) your peripheral gets your subconscious goat all the time.
people are bad at trusting their gut. highly intelligent and or educated people have especially grand issues with that because intuitive heuristics and intuitive cognitive logic get such a bad reputation while nobody ever (I'm exaggerating) speaks or writes about exceptions to common fallacies and bias, which are usually only presented to justify gears of economic rationales that tend to completely ignore side-effects (because "long-termisms", even before the term was coined), often enough due to irrationally high thresholds of relativity aka p-values.
And you start of with
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong
and end on
> This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.
on purpose. Please, at least try to sound non-manipulative.
Here is a yardstick that I've found works really well when trusting your gut: if and only if your general mood is peaceful and calm can you trust your gut.
Otherwise it doesn't work, that knowledge is blocked off by anxiety, fear, anger etc.
I agree, but this does not work for people who are unable to get into a peaceful and calm mood ever, and they aren't even "trusting" their gut, their view of the world is completely distorted by it.
Again, not disagreeing. But if you're suffering from (C)PTSD, that advice might backfire by packing on even more feelings of shame onto your shoulders.
That's the in media res start to this reply. Let me go back to the beginning: our major societal vices seem to replicate in ways that we feel are benign, but that may feed the mindsets that allow major Bad Things to happen. For example, the polarized racial division that define(d/s) American life echoes in fights over which sports team, which SWE technology, which OS is "better" (or, rather, what is the default from which any deviation is anathema).
Back to Steve. A celebrated visionary who was noted for his "reality distortion field", wherein his perception took precedence over reality. A good thing, because it pushed Apple to innovate in ways most didn't think possible or practical. Right? Well, it should also sound familiar to anyone who has to deal with the headache of "fake news" (both disinformation and the people who proclaim any news they dislike to be so), propaganda, advertising. All of these are forms of putting the gut on a pedestal, and/or are targeted appeals to vibes rather than reason.
It's a bit "Broken Windows", but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. We should be careful about the heuristics and patterns of thought that we allow to become so common that they fall from consciousness.
(The computer ate my original reply, so I had to do it over, and I had to do it quick so it wasn't as good.)
A key part of breaking cycles for me has been noticing when my default mode network (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network) or DMN is being activated, being able to stop, do a series of 4-2-6 breaths to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and focus on what I'm doing in the present. The DMN is the little chatterbox "daemon" always talking in the background. Learning to consistently notice it and handle it is liberating.
This is not easy, but I've found working on this every day is better than any form of traditional meditation or "mindfulness" work. It truly is work, like exercise, and the point is not how long you do it, but noticing more and more when my DMN engages and I can return to breathing and reactivating my parasympathetic nervous system.
I can't stress enough what a change occurs after two months of focusing on this.
Anyone who has a restless dog in the evenings can see DMN create anxiety.
Like many dogs, my dog gets bored and looks for something to bark at. He scans out the window like I scan social media. He’s got extra energy that seems to need to go somewhere, and that somewhere seems to be looking out the window scanning for threats, barking, sounding meaner than he actually is.
It’s like he manufactures anxiety out of nothing else to do.
Great analogy with your dog. I noticed that when I’m doing the washing up, my DMN, for some reason, takes me to ruminate negatively about my relationships, and I constantly have to return my attention to something else. No wonder I’ve come to loathe it and let my dishes pile up.
I find it can be a great tool for creativity, but needs to be directed or at least given some task to chew on; then I can close my eyes in a half nap and all kinds of interesting associations and ideas bubble up.
EDIT: that said, the default mode network should not be unjustly demonized. Its purpose is crucial for reprioritising our goals based on what is important to us at any given time, and the problem with modern living is that we never have enough idle time to ourselves, always distracted by our smartphones, and in the long run it is easy to lose sight over what drives us forward. A simple exercise, harder than it should be for most, is to be idle yet undistracted for 30 minutes. You’ll soon get into a “big picture” view of your life, what is missing, what you wish for yourself; into a kind of goal-oriented view that only kicks in in this mode.
To add to OP: It helps to pay attention to physical symptoms of stress as well. If you find yourself constantly tensing your jaw or your shoulders, take a moment to focus on relaxing your muscles and breathing. Overcoming negative automatic responses just takes consistent practice.
To further add: being able to acknowledge an emotional response to a situation and then divert to objective thinking is a superpower. Sustained anger, sadness, or fear will quickly drain your energy and leave you unable to act with intent.
To add to this further, I've had great success following The Body Keeps Score; seeing it as a repository of past stress and trauma.
As part of this, I've been able to locate and work through stress and trauma activations in my body, where normally they'd cluster around my head and never actually get resolved.
Every time I go to work out, I pay attention to what areas of my body arent responding, are activating oddly; and I'll work to strengthen the foot-to-neck paths. It started with a back injury and has resulted in me finding I needed wide foot shoes and changing my entire stance, posture, complex movements, etc.
Some times I find it odd that I don't have that daemon running around yelling, because hes now activated in my body, and all I have to do is stretch.
> The 4-2-6 breathing technique is a calming exercise. First, inhale slowly for four seconds. Then, hold your breath for two seconds. Finally, exhale slowly and steadily for six seconds. This technique helps by making your exhale longer than your inhale, which is a signal to your body to relax. It's particularly useful when you need to settle your mind before sleep or if you're feeling anxious and need to steady your nerves.
And there's nothing magical about that set of numbers. I learned it as 5-5-5-2, but in the end it's about using a pattern to regulate your breathing, and - I believe - to force your attention to counting breaths, an anxiety-free exercise, allowing it to lower its hyper-vigilant awake state.
In addition, being able to see when dopamine is rising, feel it, label it, engage your parasympathetic nervous system and know that a dopamine spike is temporary, the craving for TV, news, sweets, social media, or other will pass... that is liberation.
We live in a culture where everything is gunning for our attention, trying to engage a dopamine loop and "relieve" us from dealing with often important but difficult emotions just below the surface. We have to train ourselves to deal with this environment.
It's not mindfulness training, it's how to operate our brains in the modern world.
Do you have any resources that helped you come to that realization or helped make habitual the process of noticing your DMN is being activated?
I've had varying success with other "mindfulness" work and meditation like you have mentioned that I employ to help with spinning/stewing/looping thought cycles. The process you are describing seems like it may be more helpful so I'm curious to learn more and try something new.
I read it as just being context dependent. The "Tripoli" vs "Triple E" bit in the article was to me another anecdote on how we resolve ambiguity based on what we have in our mind's stack at the moment:
> A friend once told me of an ingenious class demonstration that helped her begin to understand this process. A professor split the class in two and then spoke to the first half alone, telling them of his love for travel and a recent trip to Libya. Next, he spoke to the second half about shopping and how hard it was to find the right size shoe. Last, he brought the class together and said a single word. He asked the students to write it down. Students in the first group wrote, “Tripoli.” Those in the second wrote, “Triple E.”
The impact of environment on mental spirals is underrated. I see it clearly in two pickup basketball groups I play with: one where people know your name, greet you warmly, and when you make a mistake they tell you how to improve in a way that makes you think "I can do better" not "I suck." The other is critical, lots of punching down and tense.
The key insight: when you're surrounded by people who genuinely create an atmosphere of belonging and want you to succeed, you know their feedback comes from good intentions. This creates a virtuous cycle. You want to take their advice, and once you improve you naturally want to give the same back to others.
Wish I was taught things these in school. Psychology, CBT techniques, etc; I have always had a low EQ and learned a lot from basically messing things up, and from having a wife with super high EQ. Perception is reality for all practical purposes, despite the more mathematical wanting it to be not so, simply because the objective can literally not be perceived: each perceiver is subjective. Fixing this input layer would have saved me a lot of CPU churn, so to speak.
Agreed. I don’t really have an inner monologue, so articles like this do not resonate with me. I occasionally think these sorts of thoughts, like “hmmm- should I have perceived that interaction differently than I did in the moment”.
But unlike my partner, there is no little voice that keeps following that thought. The thought comes, is considered, then moved onto something else.
Honestly, having a negative inner voice sounds miserable. But I agree, by not really considering these sorts of things, I do think I wound up with a low EQ. Working on addressing it, but it takes time and experience
It remains as “Why”. Same for “Why not?”. Maybe it needs at least three words. Though “Why why why“ also isn’t changed. Apologies to anyone who came across my experiments.
I think the shortened title is actually better; the essay doesn't go deep into "why", it's more a set of observations illustrating that we do in fact spiral.
One thing that has “cured” these thoughts for me is having a child.
I don’t have time to ruminate like I did previously and I’ve also come to understand people better. It’s funny to see how often we all act like toddlers.
It’s also made working in corporate easier, as it turns out telling a toddler no it’s surprisingly good practice for the real world.
Yes, this is important. Learning that other people are not objectively rational or perfect in any way, but in fact emotional and many times just as misguided as my own shortsighted, anxiety-inducing thoughts. So many things about people (others _and_ myself) become reasonable when you look at them in this light.
Reminds me of the Buddhist term papañca - mental proliferation, thoughts bouncing off each other, going in different directions and building each other up - it's the opposite of the qualities of calm, collectedness and concentration that are cultivated in meditation.
Readit News
He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.
I think this is where it’s important to know yourself.
If you’re having a constant stream of anxiety inducing thoughts and light paranoia, learning how to silence those and introduce a more objective view is helpful.
It can be taken too far, though. I had a friend whose company was showing all of the warning signs of financial problems, yet he was on a positivity kick and chose to substitute an “everything works out eventually” mentality. Instead, he rode the company right into their inevitable shutdown and missed some good opportunities to take other jobs along the way because he thought ignoring his gut was the right thing to do.
In one situation for me, this was exactly the case. It became more clear as each week went by. It was a "bro" situation between the C-level and the new hire, and the C-level was a "30 under 30" so there was a high school mentality about it.
I've lost count of the amount of times I've been driving to work thinking "oh shit I suck at my job I'm defo getting fired" to then be told " You're doing a good job keep it up"
Other time I think I'm doing a good job when everyone is actually very pissed off at me
I’ve also never worked at a company that had enough long term thinking to train up replacements. Several would only cut entire departments and/or only do layoffs.
So there isn’t really any point about worrying about being replaced (:>
This actually happened to me professionally.
A while back I was in a spot where for lots of good reasons, I decided I needed a 'reboot' of things; I had spent a lot of time listening to 'bad advice' and getting screwed over by bad people, and tried to have a bit of a clean slate.
I wound up finding a new job and a new girlfriend. Both felt weirdly stressful but I foolishly assumed it was just because they were both new things to me and I was 'out of my comfort zone'.
What I later discovered, was the 'boss' at my new job had actually tried to boast to certain people that he was trying to get me to quit, because he never wanted me on the team (He was sick for my first interview, and the person above him told him to hire me.)
He'd pull stunts like 'Oh I'm just gonna pull you into this meeting about our Crystal reports' (I was still new there and only knew that 'they existed in our legacy system') and then at the start of the meeting just a couple hours later, tried to claim that I was the subject matter expert on our Crystal reports! (Thankfully, I did use what little down-time I had, to do some basic digging and was able to at least speak to a potential solution to the problem they wanted to solve...)
Any time I wanted to get moved off the 'Support team' I would be given some seemingly impossible task to 'prove myself'; at one point I created a modular UI Frontend where different modules as ASP.NET MVC sites had backend logic to 'register' themselves with the main presentation service; thus delivering the ask, but he never even looked at a line of code.
And yeah they were a 'charmer'. He hoodwinked the whole board with empty promises and when he was finally found out (toxic behavior and all, the whole dev team had a 'group therapy' session or two b/c most folks were mistreated by him on some level) none of the code he produced ever really saw the light of day...
Couple that with partner that wasn't real, just using me to not feel lonely while her actual partner was busy in premed...
I suppose the irony being, that 'fake' partner is now a technical writer, working at the same company where the director who got me hired at the job with the shitty boss... (No that 'partner' didn't work at the place I worked at, but it's still just crazy as far as coincidences...)
In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.
When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.
Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.
There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.
I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.
In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.
It's nothing big: especially in a startup environment there will be situations where the product manager or another engineer will ask for changes, and I expect people to adapt, or at least to argue the merits of the change. Make no mistake, a lot of those people WERE able to adapt code-wise, and I was even praising them, but they did the changes while voicing concerns and complaining that my task "was badly defined, since I didn't tell them about possible future changes". One got very annoyed verbally at a small requisite change, even though we still had only used half the scheduled time, but we were almost finished with everything.
And this HAS paid off! This happened rarely, but more than half of those people got incredibly triggered by their rejections, and a couple even demanded talking directly with the team. In one case, we had someone coming to the company. It wasn't a lot, I must have interviewed over 200-300 people there, but it was significant.
a) you don't see the doses of amphetamines and other drugs these people have consumed or are consuming regularly
but more importantly:
b) your gut is disturbed by what you eat and your brain by what you perceive, which is filtered by your personality and current/past state of mind. just a little of x and it's hard to trust a feeling that comes from a place of mixed feelings, some of which are more obviously bad than others, some of the time.
c) your peripheral gets your subconscious goat all the time.
people are bad at trusting their gut. highly intelligent and or educated people have especially grand issues with that because intuitive heuristics and intuitive cognitive logic get such a bad reputation while nobody ever (I'm exaggerating) speaks or writes about exceptions to common fallacies and bias, which are usually only presented to justify gears of economic rationales that tend to completely ignore side-effects (because "long-termisms", even before the term was coined), often enough due to irrationally high thresholds of relativity aka p-values.
And you start of with
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong
and end on
> This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming.
on purpose. Please, at least try to sound non-manipulative.
PS: clattering teeth
Deleted Comment
Otherwise it doesn't work, that knowledge is blocked off by anxiety, fear, anger etc.
Never once has this failed me
Again, not disagreeing. But if you're suffering from (C)PTSD, that advice might backfire by packing on even more feelings of shame onto your shoulders.
That's the in media res start to this reply. Let me go back to the beginning: our major societal vices seem to replicate in ways that we feel are benign, but that may feed the mindsets that allow major Bad Things to happen. For example, the polarized racial division that define(d/s) American life echoes in fights over which sports team, which SWE technology, which OS is "better" (or, rather, what is the default from which any deviation is anathema).
Back to Steve. A celebrated visionary who was noted for his "reality distortion field", wherein his perception took precedence over reality. A good thing, because it pushed Apple to innovate in ways most didn't think possible or practical. Right? Well, it should also sound familiar to anyone who has to deal with the headache of "fake news" (both disinformation and the people who proclaim any news they dislike to be so), propaganda, advertising. All of these are forms of putting the gut on a pedestal, and/or are targeted appeals to vibes rather than reason.
It's a bit "Broken Windows", but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. We should be careful about the heuristics and patterns of thought that we allow to become so common that they fall from consciousness.
(The computer ate my original reply, so I had to do it over, and I had to do it quick so it wasn't as good.)
This is not easy, but I've found working on this every day is better than any form of traditional meditation or "mindfulness" work. It truly is work, like exercise, and the point is not how long you do it, but noticing more and more when my DMN engages and I can return to breathing and reactivating my parasympathetic nervous system.
I can't stress enough what a change occurs after two months of focusing on this.
Like many dogs, my dog gets bored and looks for something to bark at. He scans out the window like I scan social media. He’s got extra energy that seems to need to go somewhere, and that somewhere seems to be looking out the window scanning for threats, barking, sounding meaner than he actually is.
It’s like he manufactures anxiety out of nothing else to do.
This is the best analogy I've heard about social media, hope to remember it to use when needed.
I find it can be a great tool for creativity, but needs to be directed or at least given some task to chew on; then I can close my eyes in a half nap and all kinds of interesting associations and ideas bubble up.
EDIT: that said, the default mode network should not be unjustly demonized. Its purpose is crucial for reprioritising our goals based on what is important to us at any given time, and the problem with modern living is that we never have enough idle time to ourselves, always distracted by our smartphones, and in the long run it is easy to lose sight over what drives us forward. A simple exercise, harder than it should be for most, is to be idle yet undistracted for 30 minutes. You’ll soon get into a “big picture” view of your life, what is missing, what you wish for yourself; into a kind of goal-oriented view that only kicks in in this mode.
You’ve just changed my perspective on my life (and my spaniel’s).
Thank you Doug.
To further add: being able to acknowledge an emotional response to a situation and then divert to objective thinking is a superpower. Sustained anger, sadness, or fear will quickly drain your energy and leave you unable to act with intent.
As part of this, I've been able to locate and work through stress and trauma activations in my body, where normally they'd cluster around my head and never actually get resolved.
Every time I go to work out, I pay attention to what areas of my body arent responding, are activating oddly; and I'll work to strengthen the foot-to-neck paths. It started with a back injury and has resulted in me finding I needed wide foot shoes and changing my entire stance, posture, complex movements, etc.
Some times I find it odd that I don't have that daemon running around yelling, because hes now activated in my body, and all I have to do is stretch.
This is mindfulness work, what you just described.
> What is the 4-2-6 breathing technique?
> The 4-2-6 breathing technique is a calming exercise. First, inhale slowly for four seconds. Then, hold your breath for two seconds. Finally, exhale slowly and steadily for six seconds. This technique helps by making your exhale longer than your inhale, which is a signal to your body to relax. It's particularly useful when you need to settle your mind before sleep or if you're feeling anxious and need to steady your nerves.
Source: https://www.calm.com/blog/breathing-exercises-for-anxiety
We live in a culture where everything is gunning for our attention, trying to engage a dopamine loop and "relieve" us from dealing with often important but difficult emotions just below the surface. We have to train ourselves to deal with this environment.
It's not mindfulness training, it's how to operate our brains in the modern world.
I've had varying success with other "mindfulness" work and meditation like you have mentioned that I employ to help with spinning/stewing/looping thought cycles. The process you are describing seems like it may be more helpful so I'm curious to learn more and try something new.
I wonder if some of this could also be related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_attribution_bias where some people simply see ambiguous or benign behavior they don't like and interpret it as hostile.
> A friend once told me of an ingenious class demonstration that helped her begin to understand this process. A professor split the class in two and then spoke to the first half alone, telling them of his love for travel and a recent trip to Libya. Next, he spoke to the second half about shopping and how hard it was to find the right size shoe. Last, he brought the class together and said a single word. He asked the students to write it down. Students in the first group wrote, “Tripoli.” Those in the second wrote, “Triple E.”
The key insight: when you're surrounded by people who genuinely create an atmosphere of belonging and want you to succeed, you know their feedback comes from good intentions. This creates a virtuous cycle. You want to take their advice, and once you improve you naturally want to give the same back to others.
Reminds me of this Simon Brodkin video perfectly capturing startup energy: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q_FmhWARJ7Q
But unlike my partner, there is no little voice that keeps following that thought. The thought comes, is considered, then moved onto something else.
Honestly, having a negative inner voice sounds miserable. But I agree, by not really considering these sorts of things, I do think I wound up with a low EQ. Working on addressing it, but it takes time and experience
Or just don't. What a near guaranteed way to mangle the meaning of a title.
I don’t have time to ruminate like I did previously and I’ve also come to understand people better. It’s funny to see how often we all act like toddlers.
It’s also made working in corporate easier, as it turns out telling a toddler no it’s surprisingly good practice for the real world.