This document covers the basic ideas for how to create mental change, to turn your life around or simply to make some things easier, even though all the magical tricks you've heard of simply won't work for you.
So, your life isn't going quite according to plan? Welcome to the club! Don't worry, you don't have to wear a name tag, sit in a circle of strangers and recount your life's story.
What matters is that, as a member of the target audience of this document (based on no market research whatsoever), you know that many, many problems that have a big psychological component are "all in your mind", and in theory that is quite clear to you but it doesn't seem like you can really cash in on that. The implied "... so it must be easy to fix" seems like it works perfectly for some people... but not for you. You're almost inclined to think that maybe these people simply have way smaller problems than you, or are just lying through their teeth about how effective their chosen magic method is. And, really, magic doesn't exist, so how could what they say be true, right?
To name a few things that might qualify as magic methods: meditation, autogenic training, self-hypnosis, positive affirmations, the law of attraction, "It Works", Sedona Method, EFT, NLP, EMDR and a bunch of other acronyms and fancy names. I'm not going to pass judgement on all of them, because as you'll see, I have a rather broad view on everything in this general direction.
Evaluating any of these you'll see a whole bunch of die-hard fans and die-hard critics. How come? If you're kind of equal parts hopeful and sceptical about these types of magic methods, that looks a bit foreboding, doesn't it? Like you're maybe going to have to try them all and see which one will work for you, because none of them work for everyone. I'm going to argue how that is kind of true but not really, with the goal of making it not matter a lot what exactly you end up doing, as long as you go by a few simple rules.
Looking at the popular narrative of each of these magic methods, at least according to their own marketing departments, it typically sounds like your problem is trivial to solve, but at this point that wouldn't be doing your quest justice. You've probably already tried a bunch of things, some of them bordering on esoteric, and yet none of them have really clicked for you. You may even have gone through a few days of almost boundless excitement and enthusiasm, got some (very) temporary astounding results, but in the end you were back where you started. Perhaps you didn't even get that much out of your trials.
So what now? Well, allow me to drill down to the common themes of most magical solutions to problems in your mind, before we can get down to troubleshooting them.
Side note: I'm not going to "fix scepticism" by providing incontrovertible proof that everything I say is undisputable truth. No such proof exists. Instead, I'm going to take your general willingness to accept that these methods can work, and hand you some more or less sound reasoning on how you can use insight gained from them.
Virtually all of the solutions that profess to be super effective and fast are based on focusing on some kind of idea or concept, to suffuse your mind in something that helps shake loose the things that seem to be stuck in your thoughts and feelings, and bring in sunshine and unicorns. Or something like that.
Sometimes you have a stronger element of not focusing on things, but rather learning how to wrench your focus away from some elements of your experience, so there the idea is that you basically "just stop" doing the things you don't want to be doing (though they typically try to make it a little more doable than that).
Few of the magic methods for mental change get to the core of what drives learning; most focus on rituals.
I'm going to focus on what I've found to be the least mysticized form of deliberate change of stuck mental patterns... though if you read up on it, you'll probably get a very different idea. My choice is self-hypnosis.
There's a lot of mumbo-jumbo people associate with the word "hypnosis" but the basic idea is very simple: relax your mind so that it's easier to just take new things on board. Take new things on board. Done!
Now of course that's much easier said than done for many people... so I'm going to step away from that a little and focus less on relaxing and more on ways to take things on board, period. Relaxation is kind of convenient for that because it's nice and comfortable to feel good while changing your mind, so we'll be picking that up along the way.
The general process clearly works for at least some people, and if you've looked into self-hypnosis you've probably seen enthusiastic responses from those who have been super successful with it. You, less so. If you've kept at it a little, perhaps you've managed to feel kind of somewhat more relaxed in your body, or parts of it, and everything else was kind of I-dunno-I-guess-maybe-it's-working-a-little, and it never really went any further than that. And what the heck is mental relaxation supposed to be, anyway?
People tend to think of hypnosis as this extremely unreal state of consciousness in which you act like a zombie and your mind is... "gone". While that's something that's possible to experience, it's not really a definite part of hypnosis, nor of this mysterious "mental relaxation".
In fact, a closely related term, "trance", is just as much not extremely spectacular. One thing that routinely trips up people when trying self-hypnosis is that they expect to experience something unreal or magical, and then that doesn't happen. Failure, right? Well, no... just not what you expected, but maybe still useful.
Anyway. Let's put aside magical states, and anything that reads like one, and focus on what you can actually do.
If you've tried to figure out why it doesn't work for you, there are some ideas you've probably come across:
All of these are missing the point, and to help you get an idea why I'm saying that, I'm going to share my model of mental change that I've been developing for about a decade now. I'll even spare you the boring details of my epic quest thing because I'm a nice guy.
Between the moment you were born and now, you learned an absolutely astounding amalgamation of things. Ever had to learn a foreign language in school? Seemed like there were a lot of things you had to work on, an almost insurmountable task, right? Well, you learned your own language before that, and all without the benefit of a carefully designed teaching method... and it never felt overwhelming, did it?
Looking back on it, can you remember it feeling difficult in any way? No you can't, because your mind is really good at this stuff. In fact, before you're confronted with reasons against learning (such as the classics, "I don't want to" and "you're terrible at this and will never improve"), learning just happens, seemingly all on its own.
What does the mind do? It discovers patterns. It finds ways to group some things together, distinguish other things, and it keeps on finding patterns in patterns until it's got an internal representation of something that is sophisticated enough to be useful in some way.
For instance, if you start learning to play an instrument, at the beginning you may have trouble even just putting your fingers in roughly the right places... but a few months later (provided you do your learning more or less effectively), these things happen completely automatically. Your mind has learned, and you no longer need to trouble yourself with the details.
There are some important factors for this type of learning:
With many, many learnable things, you can use these factors strategically. For example, knowledge- and fact-based learning relies on understanding a lot: you have to "make sense" of information. What this really means is that you find ways to fit this information into all kinds of contexts. Knowing that addition combines two numbers from a scale into another number in a certain way is one thing... using addition in real life is what eventually allows you to do it very quickly, almost without having to think about it if you use it often enough, but you don't get there without understanding the principle first. So, strategic approaches include the following:
All these will almost certainly make learning much, much easier.
Takeaway:
To learn something, pay attention, feel good/excited/interested, find ways to get good and quick feedback, and add some variation.
Eventually, the result of learning is that you can do something without thinking about it. A master of playing the guitar can hold a conversation while playing a not-too-devilishly-tricky piece, for example. The mind has created stable associations between various actions and the instant feedback the guitarist gets from the feeling of the strings and frets on their fingers, the sounds, etc. The piece itself is memorized similarly. All of it needs no conscious input at this stage.
This is great for things you wanted to learn, but not so great for things you didn't want to learn, such as that phobia I mentioned or, for instance, having a hard time achieving goals you set for yourself. As it happens, strong negative mental responses intensify learning just as much as positive responses... which is also why phobias can happen.
This is where it gets interesting. If we go by how learning works, we can quickly conclude that you just have to vary your inputs and get the right feedback and that's it -- your phobia melts like snow in June. Except you know that doesn't work.
Let's try anyway, with a semi-semi-practical example. Suppose you have this problem that you get disproportionately annoyed when someone uses "you're" or "your" incorrectly. When trying to unlearn that, could we create variation? Sure, I could just pick a properly written source and a poorly written one, and switch back and forth. How about feedback? That's difficult. If your text contains an incorrect word, that feedback is inside you're own mind, and the pattern is already established (if you actually suffer from this problem, I just gave you a free example in that sentence). For unlearning the pattern you would have to temporarily switch it off, otherwise you won't get the feedback you want your mind to internalize. Catch-22!
The problem, in short:
When you try to unlearn something, the feedback pattern inside your mind conflicts with the result you want.
So, we have to somehow sidestep this. That's where all the magic methods come in, of course. The basic premise is that they allow you to bypass existing patterns, if only temporarily, to create new ones. Here are some recurring themes from the magic methods I listed above:
I could go into a lot of detail here but this is an ultra-condensed primer, so a few basic ideas will have to be enough for now.
All of the magic methods I listed earlier as examples are based on at least one of these themes. Our goal here is to use as many of them as it takes to get results.
So, we've looked into what the mind does and what its limitations are for changing what's already in there, and basic ideas on how to work around that. Let's get to the practical applications. (In the self-help industry, this is where the sales pitch ends and where you're offered a rich selection of products to either make everything happen for you or give you the closely guarded secrets of underground cults. I just like to share, so let's keep going... though I may follow up with something more in depth at very attractive prices! You know, monetization and all that.)
As I said, I'm going to use the basic structure of self-hypnosis:
As I said, don't get too hung up on the idea of relaxing the mind. It's just one way to make this happen.
We're going to mix in all the basic ideas extracted from the various magic methods. For the heck of it, I'm going to reuse my "your"/"you're" example. Our fictitious goal is to stop feeling so annoyed and just read on.
It's difficult to "stop feeling so annoyed" without something to replace that, by the way. The mind doesn't just do a full stop... and if we don't come up with some general idea of what type of replacement pattern we want, something more or less random will happen. Let's not take the chance. "Just read on" is simple and neutral... but possibly too neutral for it to be able to compete with the existing pattern. "Neutral" is pretty close to "no replacement". You may have to replace the "feeling annoyed" with something more innocuous first, something that is easier to shrug off and let fade away in time.
"Feel all warm and tingly inside" would work, but that might be a bit too much if you often read things on the internet. You might even end up reading more poorly written things to get that warm and tingly feeling. Clearly that's not what we want to achieve here.
There are a number of ways to create sufficiently strong responses that won't get in the way. One of my favourites is a sense of achievement: feel good, but not about the word itself -- instead, feel good about your ability to change. On the surface, the goal state doesn't change; you still want to achieve a good feeling when you notice a wrong word, but when that good feeling comes, you simply decide you're feeling good about your skill at changing things in your mind, not about the word itself.
With that in mind, let's look at specific ideas on how to actually give that kind of change a chance to happen:
The limit on all of these is your creativity. The specifics of what you do can be as silly as they need to be (in my experience, ridiculous things are much easier to come up with when you first get into brainstorming something), as long as you stick with the spirit of the basic ideas.
All of this is not particularly difficult to use for small changes and anything you haven't tried too hard to change so far.
When you've had enough time to really cement in an existing pattern by trying to fight against it in the traditional way (and strongly feeling really bad about the existing pattern which helps drive it in further), it's a different story. The same principles will still work, but generally speaking every approach you've tried in the past will be difficult to get to work now, because your previous experiences will factor into your mental patterns, plus you've had a lot of time to generalize them -- they'll tend to happen more easily in more situations (and if that's not actually happening, you're lucky in a sense, because it will give you more wiggle room for changing things up).
So, if you don't have a lot of practice with the first two approaches (letting go and distracting yourself), they won't help you. (More on how to build up those skills later.)
The other two will still work, but you'll have to be rather more careful/resourceful:
Manipulating the association "honestly" becomes very difficult if there's a lot of emotional baggage attached to it. What do I mean by that? Well, in films you'll sometimes see characters being really scared but trying to act brave: "h-hello? anyone there? I have to w-warn you, I've got a g-gun!" The braveness is not genuine. If you manipulate the assocation into something that isn't genuine, it won't make a real difference. On the other hand, the example I had above -- deliberately overdoing the response -- well, some responses are so powerful that it seems impossible to overdo them.
Changing the context will tend to take some creativity. For example, suppose you want to get over some terrible loss you've experienced. The pattern here is that something reminds you of whatever you've lost and the mental response is all the negative feelings attached to that loss, and probably wanting the past to be different. It's not so easy to come up with a way to shift that into something different in a way that feels genuine, is it?
With any very imposing mental pattern, if you're having to try and fix it on your own, without a neutral person to help you who has a fair bit of practical experience with these strategies, honestly your chances of attacking the issue as I described above aren't too excellent. At that point the next best thing to do is making the change on a symbolical/indirect level. The idea here is that the mind can pick up new patterns from almost anything. I've experienced a few profound changes from reading, well, fiction.
The problem is that as someone who is predisposed to being sceptical, it's difficult to cope with, to put it plainly, nonsense and genuinely accept the idea that it will make a positive difference for you, despite all the evidence that that is, in fact, the way the human mind works. Tricking yourself couldn't possibly work, right? Well, that's precisely what this whole article is about: teaching yourself to trick yourself for fun and profit.
In many analytical fields there's the idea of top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to something. Top-down, a.k.a. "divide and conquer", means you take a big and complicated thing and split it up into smaller things. Each of these smaller things, you can split up again. Rinse and repeat until each part is manageable, and eventually your big thing is covered completely.
This is the way people often try to understand something that eludes understanding. Unfortunately, with some things, including those that happen in your mind, it's not so easy to break them down into parts. If you can't observe enough details about a problem, or there aren't any clear internal boundaries along which you could divide it, top-down will not get you very far. As an "analytical person" you're probably quite good at breaking things down, so chances are you'll be tempted to make up boundaries, even you have no idea whether they are useful. Of course, breaking something down the wrong way means that anything close to your imaginary boundaries is not fully reflected in the model you create.
How do you work around that? Well, unfortunately you'll have to let go of the idea of using a top-down approach here. Fortunately, your brain is extremely good at bottom-up processing. For instance, it manages to build a cohesive image out of signals from hundreds of millions of individual visual receptors, and the result typically makes perfect sense to you and you don't even have to think about it. That's what bottom-up processing does, and your brain does a ton of it without you ever noticing.
That's also the downside of bottom-up processing: you get no insight into how exactly it does what it does. Some people just take everything it comes up with for granted, but I'm guessing you're here because you don't want to go down that road. Well, obviously you can't second-guess every little thing that your comes up in your mind, but let's see if we can't figure out a few guiding principles and a way to influence your mind's bottom-up processing.
TODO bottom-up: related small things, skill-building
TODO using simulation for building blocks
TODO imagination and how it works (what words do we use to conceptualize it: pretend, recall, what if etc.)
Further up, I showed you a number of ways to "attack" mental patterns more directly. If you want to do the same things to bigger patterns, you either need a lot of practice beforehand, or take a detour of sorts: get your mind accustomed to the idea of accepting ideas just because you want to (which, of course, implies that you keep full control over what you accept and what you don't accept!).
The more you get used to that, the easier it becomes to use more symbolic approaches to changing patterns in your mind... and what are all the magical methods and acronyms I listed above if not symbolism?
TODO next up: low-intensity, mid term approach
TODO integrate FPC structure
TODO equanimity, GABA? vipassana approach/exercises
TODO focus more on interrupting patterns ("amygdala")?