Changing language to change thoughts
Three verbal hacks that sound almost trivial, but which I’ve found to have a considerable impact on my thought:
1. Replace the word ‘should’ with either ‘I want’, or a good consequence of doing the thing.
Examples:
- “I should answer that e-mail soon.” -> “If I answered that e-mail, it would make the other person happy and free me from having to stress it.”
- “I should have left that party sooner.” -> “If I had left that party before midnight, I’d feel more rested now.”
- “I should work on my story more at some point.” -> “I want to work on my story more at some point.”
Motivation: the more we think in terms of external obligations, the more we feel a lack of our own agency. Each thing that we “should” do is actually either something that we’d want to do because it would have some good consequences (avoiding bad consequences also counts as a good consequence), something that we have a reason for wanting to do differently the next time around, or something that we don’t actually have a good reason to do but just act out of a general feeling of obligation. If we only say “I should”, we will not only fail to distinguish between these cases, we will also be less motivated to do the things in cases where there is actually a good reason. The good reason will be less prominent in our thoughts, or possibly even entirely hidden behind the “should”.
If you do try to rephrase “I should” as “I want”, you may either realize that you really do want it (instead of just being obligated to do it), or that you actually don’t want it and can’t come up with any good reason for doing it, in which case you might as well drop it.
Special note: there are some legitimate uses for “should”. In particular, it is the socially accepted way of acknowledging the other person when they give us an unhelpful suggestion. “You should get some more exercise.” “Yeah I should.” (Translation: of course I know that, it’s not like you’re giving me any new information and repeating things that I know isn’t going to magically change my behavior. But I figure that you’re just trying to be helpful, so let me acknowledge that and then we can talk about something else.)
However, I suspect that because we’re used to treating “I should” as a reason to acknowledge the other person without needing to take actual action, the word also becomes more poisonous to motivation when we use it in self-talk, or when discussing matters with someone we want to actually be honest with.
“Should” also tends to get used for guilt-tripping, so expressions like “I should have left that party sooner” might make us feel bad rather than focusing on our attention on the benefits of having left earlier. The next time we’re at a party, the former phrasing incentivizes us to come up with excuses for why it’s okay to stay this time around. The latter encourages us to actually consider the benefits and costs of the leaving earlier versus staying, and then choosing the option that’s the most appropriate.
2. Replace expressions like “I’m bad at X” with “I’m currently bad at X” or “I’m not yet good at X”.
Examples:
- “I can’t draw.” -> “I can’t draw yet.”
- “I’m not a people person.” -> “I’m currently not a people person.”
- “I’m afraid of doing anything like that.” -> “So far I’m afraid of doing anything like that.”
Motivation: the rephrased expression draws attention to the possibility that we could become better, and naturally leads us to think about ways in which we could improve ourselves. It again emphasizes our own agency and the fact that for a lot of things, being good or bad at them is just a question of practice.
Even better, if you can trace the reason of your bad-ness, is to
3. Eliminate vague labels entirely and instead talk about specific missing subskills, or weaknesses that you currently have.
Examples:
- “I can’t draw.” -> “Right now I don’t know how to move beyond stick figures.”
- “I’m not a people person.” -> “I currently lock up if I try to have a conversation with someone.”
Motivation: figuring out the specific problem makes it easier to figure out what we would need to do if we wanted to address it, and might gives us a self-image that’s both kinder and both realistic, in making the lack of skill a specific fixable problem rather than a personal flaw.
Rational approaches to emotions
There are a number of schools of thought that teach what might be called a “rationalist” approach to emotions, i.e. seeing that your emotions are a map that’s good to distinguish from the territory, and giving you tools for both seeing the distinction and for evaluating the map-territory correspondence better.
1) In cognitive behavioral therapy, there is the “ABC model“: Activating Event, Belief, Consequence. Idea being that when you experience something happening, you will always interpret that experience through some (subconscious) belief, leading to an emotional consequence. E.g. if someone smiles at me, I might either believe that they like me, or that they are secretly mocking me; two interpretations that would lead to very different emotional responses. Once you know this, you can start asking yourself the question of “okay, what belief is causing me to have this emotional reaction in response to this observation, and does that belief seem accurate?”.
2) In addition to seeing your emotional reactions as something that tell you about your beliefs, you can also see them as something that tells you about your needs. This is the approach taken in Non-Violent Communication, which has the four-step process of Observation, Feeling, Need, Request. The four-step process is most typically discussed as something that’s a tool for dealing with interpersonal conflict, as in “when I see you eating the foods I put in the fridge, I feel anxious, because I need the safety of being able to know whether I have food in stock or not; could you please ask before eating my food in the future?”. However, it’s also useful for dealing with personal emotional turmoil and figuring out what exactly is upsetting you in general, or for dealing with internal conflict.
3) In both CBT and NVC, an important core idea is that they teach you to distinguish between an observation and interpretation, and that it’s the interpretations are what cause your emotional reactions. (For anyone curious, the more academic version of this is appraisal theory; the paper “When are emotions rational?” is relevant.) However, the NVC book, while being an excellent practical manual, does not do a very good job of explaining the theoretical reasons for why it works, which sometimes causes people to arrive at interpretations of NVC which cause them to behave in socially maladapted ways. For this reason, it might be a good idea to first read Crucial Conversations, which covers a lot of similar ground but goes into more theory about the “separating observations and interpretations” thing. Then you can read NVC after you’ve gotten the theory from CC. (CC doesn’t talk as much about needs, however, so I do still recommend reading both.)
4) It’s fine to say that “okay, if you’re having an emotional reaction you’re having difficulties dealing with, try to figure out the beliefs and needs behind it and see what they’re telling you and whether you’re having any incorrect beliefs”! But it’s a lot harder to actually be able to apply that if you’re in an emotionally charged situation. That’s where the various courses teaching mindfulness come in – mindfulness is basically the ability to step a little back from your emotions and thoughts, observe them as they are without getting swept up in them, and then being able to evaluate them critically if needed. You’ll probably need a lot of practice in various mindfulness exercises in order to get the techniques from CBT, NVC, and CC to live up to their full potential.
5-6) An important idea that’s been implied in the previous points, but not entirely spelled out, is that your emotions are your friends. They communicate to you information about your subconscious assessments of the world, as well as of your various needs. A lot of people tend to have somewhat of a hostile approach to their emotions, trying to at least control and get rid of their negative emotions. But this is bound to lead to internal conflict; and various studies indicate that a willingness to accept negative emotions and pain will actually make them much less serious.
In my personal experience, once you take to the habit of asking your emotions what they’re telling you and then processing that information in an even-handed way, then those negative emotions will often tend to go away after you’ve processed the thing they were trying to tell you. By “even-handed” I mean that if you’re feeling anxious because you’re worried of some unpleasant thing X being true, then you actually look at the information suggesting that X might be true and consider whether it’s the case, rather than trying to rationalize a conclusion for why X wouldn’t be true. Your subconscious will know, and keep pestering you.
Some of CFAR’s material, such as aversion factoring points this way; also Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as elaborated on in Get out of your mind and into your life seems to be largely about this, though I’ve only read about the first 30% so far.
Some of my earlier posts on these themes: suffering as attention-allocational conflict, avoid misinterpreting your emotions.
(I have been intending to write a much more in-depth post on this topic for a while, but it’s such a large post that I haven’t gotten around that; so I figured I’d just write something quickly in the hopes of it also being of value.)
Two conversationalist tips for introverts
Two of the biggest mistakes that I used to make that made me a poor conversationalist:
1. Thinking too much about what I was going to say next. If another person is speaking, don’t think about anything else, where “anything else” includes your next words. Instead, just focus on what they’re saying, and the next thing to say will come to mind naturally. If it doesn’t, a brief silence before you say something is not the end of the world. Let your mind wander until it comes up with something.
2. Asking myself questions like “is X interesting / relevant / intelligent-sounding enough to say here”, and trying to figure out whether the thing on my mind was relevant to the purpose of the conversation. Some conversations have an explicit purpose, but most don’t. They’re just the participants saying whatever random thing comes to their mind as a result of what the other person last said. Obviously you’ll want to put a bit of effort to screening off any potentially offensive or inappropriate comments, but for the most part you’re better off just saying whatever random thing comes to your mind.
Relatedly, I suspect that these kinds of tendencies are what make introverts experience social fatigue. Social fatigue seems [in some people’s anecdotal experience; don’t have any studies to back me up here] to be associated with mental inhibition: the more you have to spend mental resources on holding yourself back, the more exhausted you will be afterwards. My experience suggests that if you can reduce the amount of filters on what you say, then this reduces mental inhibition, and correspondingly reduces the extent to which socializing causes you fatigue.
Peter McCluskey reports of a similar experience; other people mention varying degrees of agreement or disagreement.
Change blindness
Antidepressants are awesome. (At least they were for me.)
It’s now been about a year since I started on SSRIs. Since my prescription is about to run out, I scheduled a meeting with a psychiatrist to discuss whether to stay on them. Since my health care provider has changed, I went to my previous one and got a copy of my patient records to bring to the new one.
And wow. It’s kinda shocking to read them: my previous psychiatrist has written down things like: “Patient reports moments of despair and anguish of whether anything is going to lead to anything useful, and is worried for how long this will last. Recently there have been good days as well, but isn’t sure whether those will keep up.”
And the psychologist I spoke with has written down: “At times has very negative views of the future, afraid that will never reach his goals.”
And the thing is, reading that, I remember saying those things. I remember having those feelings of despair, of nothing ever working out. But I only remember them now, when I read through the records. I had mostly forgotten that I even did have those feelings.
When I dig my memory, I can find other such things. A friend commenting to me that, based on her observations, I seem to be roughly functional maybe about half the time. Me posting on social media that I have a constant anxiety, a need to escape, being unable to really even enjoy any free time I have. A feeling that taking even a major risk for the sake of feeling better would be okay, because I didn’t really have all that much to lose. Having regular Skype sessions with another friend, and feeling bad because he seemed to be getting a lot of things done, and my days just seemed to pass by without me managing to make much progress on anything.
All of that had developed so gradually and over the years that it had never really even occurred to me that it wasn’t normal. And then, after I got the antidepressants, those helped me get back on my feet, and then things gradually improved until I no longer even remembered the depths of what I had thought was normal, a year back.
Change blindness. It’s a thing.
For a less anecdotal summary on the effects of SSRIs, see Scott Alexander’s SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted to Know for a comprehensive look at the current studies.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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