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August 27 - August 31, 2020
Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance (in natural selection’s somewhat crude sense of the term) determines which thoughts enter consciousness.
find it easier to view my feelings with some measure of detachment than to view my thoughts that way. And I don’t think I’m an aberration. Lots of meditators seem to have an easier time with feelings than with thoughts.
This hypothesis—that feelings are, among other things, the mind’s way of assigning priority labels to thoughts—is consistent with a broad trend in psychology over the past several decades: to quit talking about “affective” and “cognitive” processes as if they were in separate compartments of the mind and recognize how finely intertwined they are. And this trend is yet another case where modern psychology was anticipated by ancient Buddhism. In
In other words stop pretending that your logical thoughts are devoid of Emotion. Emotion drives everything ...
In the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that human reason is “the slave of the passions.”
Certainly the idea that feelings run more of the show than we realize is Buddhist in spirit.
Though weighing the pros and cons of a purchase sounds like a purely rational, even mechanical act, this experiment suggests that the way the brain actually does the weighing is through a contest of conflicting feelings. Even the factor of price—a purely quantitative index, the kind of thing that is easily fed into a computer’s decision-making algorithm—ultimately enters the equation in the form of a feeling, a degree of aversion. And the stronger feeling—attraction or aversion—wins.
reason does play a role in what a person finally does. Still, this experiment suggests that maybe reason can play that role only by influencing the ultimate motivator: feelings. As Hume put it, “Reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.” Buying something ultimately comes down to feeling good about the purchase—or at least feeling better than walking away from the purchase feels.
Good and bad feelings are what natural selection used to goad animals into, respectively, approaching things or avoiding things, acquiring things or rejecting things; good feelings were assigned to things like eating and bad feelings to things like being eaten. Over time, bit by bit, animals got smarter, but the point of smarts, from natural selection’s perspective, isn’t to replace feelings but rather to make them better informed: intelligence helps animals do a more sophisticated job of figuring out what to approach or avoid, acquire or reject—that is, what to feel good about or bad about.
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How to use this insight to enroll coaching clients authentically
Feelings tell us what to think about, and then after all the thinking is done, they tell us what to do. Over the history of our evolutionary lineage, thinking has played a larger and larger role in action, but the thinking has always had both its beginning and its end in feelings.
As our species became more complexly social, getting food and sex came to depend on navigating a social landscape, which included goals like forging alliances and being held in high esteem.
making friends and earning respect
Brain-scan studies have shown that the same parts of the brain that mediate physical pain also mediate the pain of social rejection.
Reason has its effect not by directly pushing back against a feeling but by fortifying the feeling that does do the pushing back.
“Reason alone,” Hume argued, “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.”
“The DLPFC, the seat of abstract reasoning, is deeply interconnected with the dopamine system, which is responsible for placing values on objects and actions. From a neural and evolutionary perspective, our reasoning systems are not independent logic machines. They are outgrowths of more primitive mammalian systems for selecting rewarding behaviors—cognitive prostheses for enterprising mammals.” In other words, as Greene himself notes, Hume seems to have gotten it right.
Luiz Pessoa has written, “ ‘Affective’ brain regions participate in cognition, on the one hand, and ‘cognitive’ brain regions participate in emotion.” In his textbook The Cognitive-Emotional Brain,
“Consulting” may be a way of making sure, in advance, that we’re not going to do something that will antagonize important people in our lives, or a way of getting commitments of support from these people in case our decision antagonizes other people.
Yes this is familiar - I just did this last weekend with g’s parents
You can share the reasons with others, and then their feedback will recalibrate how good or bad the two options feel.
it’s hard to separate the valid reasons from the invalid reasons, because sometimes the least valid reasons feel good—and feelings tend to carry the day.
why is it that early successes at self-discipline lead to more successes, whereas early lapses lead to more lapses? If self-discipline is really good for the organism, you wouldn’t expect natural selection to make it so easy for a few early lapses to destroy self-discipline. Yet there’s no denying that a few injections of heroin can be the end of a productive life. Why?
after the module favoring indulgence wins a few debates, its strength grows to a point where countervailing modules don’t even bother trying to muster counterarguments.
There’s a difference between thinking of the goal as strengthening the self-discipline muscle and thinking of the goal as weakening a module that has grown dominant.
This approach was explained to me by Judson Brewer, who did a study on it at Yale Medical School (and also did one of the main studies showing that meditation quiets the default mode network).
Brewer said the basic idea is to not fight the urge to, say, smoke a cigarette. That doesn’t mean you succumb to the urge and light up a cigarette. It just means you don’t try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you’d apply to other bothersome feelings—anxiety, resentment, melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of
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There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment. Which is a nice note to end on, since...
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somewhere within you, there’s an animal that needs taming.
the modular model of the mind holds that, in a sense, there are a number of animals in your mind—modules that have a certain amount of independence and sometimes struggle with one another for dominance. What’s more, I’ve just suggested that, as with animals, the behavior of modules is shaped by positive reinforcement; if they keep getting rewarded for something, they’ll do it more and more. That, apparently, is what addiction is. A rat learns that if it presses the bar, a food pellet comes out; one of your modules learns that, if it generates the urge to light up a cigarette, it will get some
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Most of our self-control problems aren’t as dramatic and clear-cut as classic addictions like nicotine and cocaine. Some of them are so subtly interwoven into our lives that we don’t think of them as self-control problems at all. For example, when I was a child, I had a short attention span. Actually, I still have it—it’s just that now they don’t call it a short attention span. They call it attention-deficit disorder. What these two terms have in common is a particular way of characterizing the problem. They make it sound like there’s a faculty people have—the faculty we call attention—and
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For example: right now I’m focused on writing this sentence, and writing this sentence feels fine; I like to succeed at things, and so long as this sentence keeps unfolding on my computer screen, I’m succeeding at something! But if I get to a point where I can’t decide what sentence should go next, I’ll start feeling a bit uncomfortable. And if it isn’t just a question of how to word the next sentence—if it’s a larger question about what the next sentence should say, and indeed where this whole stream of writing should head—I feel really uncomfortable. I like fiddling with sentences, but I
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I feel seen and understood!
you can think of the problem of distraction as analogous to the problem of quitting smoking. And if you think of it that way—think of your goal as being to weaken the module that favors leading you away from your work—this might affect how you address the problem.
But if you take the mindful approach, you say: Go ahead, think about smartphones. Close your eyes and imagine how it would feel to search for the latest review of the latest smartphone. Examine the feeling of wanting a cool new smartphone and wanting to search online for one. Then examine it some more. Examine it until it loses its power. Now get back to writing!
Though we don’t generally think of nicotine addiction and a short attention span as having much in common, both really are problems of impulse control. And in both cases, we can, in principle, weaken the impulse by not fighting it, by letting it form and observing it carefully. This deprives the module that generated the impulse of the positive reinforcement that would give it more power next time around.
In principle, you can describe much of mindfulness meditation this way—as depriving modules of the positive reinforcement that has given them power.
Because often when you mindfully observe feelings, you’re keeping the module that generated them from getting some sort of reward. If you observe a feeling of hatred for someone, and just keep observing the feeling, then the feeling won’t do what it might otherwise do—like, say, get you to imagine taking revenge for whatever this person has done to earn your hatred. If you did indulge in this revenge fantasy, it would feel good, right? What is more delightful than imagining a horrible fate befalling a mortal enemy? And the reason this is a good feeling, presumably, is that this is the kind of
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Self-control is a slightly ambiguous term. Some people think of it as referring to control of the self, and some people think of it as referring to control by the self. Either way, it’s an odd term to be using in a book informed by Buddhism—since, according to Buddhism, the self doesn’t exist. And if the self doesn’t exist, how can we talk about self-control?
Don’t get hung up on whether something called a “self” exists. Just use the parts of the not-self doctrine that are useful, in particular the idea that none of your feelings—the urge for cigarettes, the urge to research smartphones, the urge to hate—is intrinsically a part of you. You can observe these feelings for what they are: things that some module is trying to give force to. The more you observe them this way—observe them mindfully—the less force they will have, and the less a part of “you” they will be.
Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, an attempt to give the calm passions more power and give the violent passions less power.
Strengthen Sage/Weaken Saboteur
Helping people with self-control problems is often thought of as a sheerly therapeutic exercise. And certainly helping people quit smoking or get off heroin qualifies as therapy in the common sense of the term. But when you see how seamlessly the discussion of self-control leads to discussion of overcoming hatred—and for that matter of seeing beauty in “the common occurrences of life”—you can see how blurry the line is between therapy and moral edification and between therapy and spiritual uplift.
This isn’t surprising. According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly. What’s more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.
Coaching is great for this!
Perception is an active, not a passive, process, a process of constantly building models of the world. That’s one reason different people see different things in the abstract ink blots used in Rorschach tests: our minds try to turn even the most ambiguous patterns into something that makes sense. We like to have a story about what things are and what they mean.
If we can turn literal noise into music, can’t we turn figurative noise—all kinds of unwelcome perceptions and thoughts and feelings—into figurative music? Or at least take the harshness out of them? And it may be obvious how I’m going to answer that question: Yes, we can (with sufficiently diligent practice).
I had managed to let go of what you might call “the buzz-saw form.” The sound of a buzz-saw is part of a whole structure of connotations—central among them, of course, the idea of a buzz saw. And I think one reason we find buzz-saw sounds grating is because they’re part of that structure—that is, because we know they’re coming from buzz saws.
Buzz saws, with their well-known capacity to sever bones as well as wood, are things many of us don’t welcome contact with. Maybe the connotations of buzz saws—and the negative feelings those connotations evoke—help give us an aversion to the sound.
“The sound is just the sound. It’s me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won’t annoy me. . . . If I don’t go out and bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me.”
wouldn’t take that anecdote too literally; it’s not as if sound bothers you in retaliation for your bothering it. The point is just that a sound by itself is a passive, not an active, thing, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant, you have to go out and, in a sense, do something to it.
This sutra isn’t denying the reality of the buzz-saw sound waves that were hitting my ear, the “qualities” I was observing, but it seems to be saying that the “essence” I normally see beneath the qualities—essence of buzz saw—is a matter of interpretation; it’s something I’m choosing to construct, or not, from the qualities. Essences don’t exist independent of human perception.
This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.
Wow wow wow
when I talk about the “essence” of the buzz saw, I’m talking about something we perceive in a buzz saw that is more than the sum of such qualities, something that carries distinctive connotations and emotional resonance. And if I manage to divorce myself from some of those connotations and that resonance—enough that I can actually enjoy the sounds of a buzz saw—then that essence has started to erode.
It’s Stories All the Way Down
Brene
the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?”
