Written: 2017 Published without edits: September 25, 2024 *True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.* - David Foster Wallace *Sit down. Be humble.* - Kendrick Lamar Here's an interesting model I've come up with for thinking about ups and downs. There are two competing systems: **physical causes** and **emotional triggers**. I'll just call them **causes** and **triggers** from now on, but let me define them to decrease confusion. **A Cause is something (usually a boring thing) that can somehow be tied directly to a physical state.** The cause is like static or background noise: it's quiet and you may not even notice it consciously. The important thing I'll reiterate here is that it affects state. The scale of the most pernicious cause is days, but that's a guideline more than a rule. We are phenomenally bad at assessing this. For example, how are you feeling relative to a couple days ago? How about any randomly selected day (where nothing memorable happened) from the last month? Even if you can remember the best day from last month, you can't feel the the things you felt on command. You can empathize with yourself and that's powerful, but you can't just completely reproduce the feeling. Likewise, you can predict a lot about a situation, but not how you are going to feel. Many, many things serve as examples of causes; imagine any one thing that can affect your physiology. (Get creative, it's a long list). For me, sleep is number one on my list of regulated activities, because I am very sensitive to bad sleep. I got bad sleep for a few days and as a result, I felt a general sense of malaise and lethargy. When state is affected, all of your thinking happens in that box. Cause affects state. I'm sure you get the picture, but just for practice, imagine a harbor, filled with boats. The tide comes in and goes out so slowly that you don't notice it has changed until hours later. Even then, you need landmarks: fixed objects like piers or how small the beach has become. In other words, you need an original state to compare against the current state to see how high the tide is. We can't show up at a new beach and intuitively know whether the tide is high or low. We need indicators and deltas. That's cause, what about triggers? You have may have guessed what triggers are, but to be really explicit I'll define them too. **A Trigger is any short term stimulus that affect us emotionally**. They can be totally valid or total bullshit, your mind doesn't care. You'll have to give me some wiggle room with this term, because I don't mean triggers in the way ptsd patients use it. I am abusing the word in that using it more generally. A trigger could be a bad day. **The key is that it is going to be emotionally relevant input that operates on you on an hourly scale.** Picture the harbor again. Now imagine being on a medium sized boat while the tide is going out. If you were outside on the deck of the boat, you could see around you a 360 degree view, with a beautiful sunset to the West, a fantastic mountain range on the shore to the East, a thriving city to the North and a floating garbage barge to the South. But you are inside the hull of the boat, looking out a window. From inside the boat, you only have a narrow view from your little window. When the tide goes out, it pulls the boat against its anchor forcing the bow (front) of the boat to turn towards the shore. You happen to be looking out of a window on the side of the boat, that is unfortunately facing the garbage barge. There is a homeless man defecating in a detached toilet on the barge. He waves. That barge is a trigger. This is exactly how cause and triggers interact. Cause affects overall state, which affects your number of options for dealing with triggers. If the tide were coming in, the boat would be facing the other direction and you would be looking at a city instead of a pile of garbage with a hobo on top. The garbage would still be there, but it would be easier to ignore because it wouldn't be forced in your field of view. Cause: tide movement affecting the state of the boat. Trigger: what view you can see and how you contextualize the view given the cause. If you have some cause affecting your overall physiology, triggers will be more severe. The really subtle thing is triggers are often real and you can't just ignore them. Just because your emotional climate might generate a more severe reaction, the trigger would be an objective fact even if you felt great. However, remedying the trigger will not remove the cause. There is a fine line to walk and it's easy to get wrong. When I am hungry (cause) I get grumpy (state). Telling me that I am grumpy because I am hungry is not a good idea. If I am hungry, there could be any number of triggers that I dig into. Let's just say that there is a lot of traffic on the way to the restaurant. It's a bullshit reason to get worked up, but a winning combination to guarantee that I will get upset. If traffic dissipates, I might conclude that I feel better and the traffic had affected my mood. The fact is I just need to eat. I mentioned earlier that I was in a pretty low state because of sleep deprivation. That was the cause, but what was the trigger that made it really hard to feel good? I went to church with my family. Weird objective fact that acted as a trigger; in that mindset, it opened a whole box of existential worries. The trigger was absolutely real. The fact that we all die, that there is likely no inherent meaning to the world and that a whole congregation of maybe a thousand people will take one chubby, red-cheeked white guy's summaries as a sufficient answer to the greatest of enigmas. Oof. With that daunting reality ever present, how could anyone ever feel good? There were a lot of ways I could have contextualized the objective fact that I disagreed with the conclusions of a pastor. Most of the time, I find what I can take from a situation and enjoy the parts that I find pleasant. However, since I was in a lower state due to sleep deprivation, I had fewer options when confronted with the trigger. This is where some nifty tools come in. In any system that has potential to offer exponential returns in the future, the best long term strategy is to invest in whatever has the overall greatest return. Buy the car that will depreciate the least. Buy the stock that will be worth 1000x in ten years rather than the stock that will 2x in 2 years. You want the graph with greatest area under the curve, not the one with the highest sloped line. This applies to mental health and well being too. This is how we can beat causes, deal with triggers and maintain state. If we model the two systems in our head, and look for things that can give us exponential returns in the future what can we come up with? In a theoretically perfect world, we would want to maximize causes that put us in a higher state. Things that will make us default to positive interpretations of events rather than letting triggers take over when we are in a funk. It's not a perfect world, but I have a tactic to handle cause and a tactic to handle triggers. The expected long term return is to raise the curve of state overall, but more important is managing triggers since we have the illusion of experiencing the world through whatever is in front of our face at any given moment. This part is a bit meta and a necessarily counterintuitive, since triggers own our intuition. These tools are actually for creating your own tools. What specific thing that works for me will almost assuredly not work for you. They take time to build and require practice to be useful. The idea is that if you build them once, test them and practice, then they become automatic and turn on when you need them. I've taken something that is actually a continuum and put it into steps. These are like the rules of improvisational theater. Once you get a feel for the concrete approach, you can start to develop a sense of the narrative and come up with more optimized solutions. Rather than creating a scene, we are breaking down how your brain and body respond to the world, and getting familiar with that progression. Here is the outline for developing both the tactics in the very general case. Note that this is descriptive, not a prescriptive recipe (The cause and trigger examples will look more like a recipe). You can think of it like describing what a chef does. Sometimes they use recipes, but that doesn't fully capture the position. What makes a chef a chef is the tools they have and the techniques they have learned. Maybe they became a chef initially by following recipes, but eventually the things they've picked up became second nature. This description of how to handle any situation is akin to describing what a chef does. These questions are the most generic form of dealing with mental hurdles. **The general case** 1. What obscured truth exists in the situation? Counterintuitive part: push the pause button on your thoughts and go into detective mode. This is noticing that you're reactive or acting abnormally. If you are acting differently than you want to, you are not in control of whatever is happening in your head. You must be missing something that has changed. It takes a few minutes of thinking to figure it out. 2. What is the nature of this truth? OR Is this truth fundamental or transitory? Meta comparison part: With fundamental vs transitory I am trying to distinguish between things that are really going to affect your life and need serious solutions vs things that don't require massive change, but still affect you. You could think of this as categorizing what you learned and prioritizing it. 3. What executable operations express that truth? Action: the new information is completely useless. You need to convert information into a vector. This means that there needs to be a change in direction, a change in magnitude, or perhaps the solution is to not change a thing. This part is the most dependent on what you already know works for you, and might require experimentation. Let's start with causes that affect state, then deal with triggers. **Causes** **Detecting a specific cause (landmarks and deltas)** If you are looking for a cause, you probably already know that there is a cause. If not, triggers are going to be clues. Mood is going to be a clue. You know you better than any other human on earth. Detecting the existence of a problem is different than detecting the cause of a problem. This is what takes practice. My counter intuitive trick is to ignore the voice in my head and starting to reason about my actions. If you feel bad and immediately start **talking** to yourself about why, you'll pull from the ammunition of reasons around you. If I let myself subvocalize when I am in a low state, I will almost always pour gasoline on the fire. I completely ignore the first few thoughts I have, take a step back and give myself the mental space to see how my thoughts are moving through my head. This means not taking the things that you think seriously. For me, detaching thoughts from their impactful conclusions took the **most** practice. If you have trouble with this, mental imagery can be surprisingly powerful. An example is to imagine that there is a hose labeled "Thoughts" plugged into a part of your brain called "Processor". In your mind's eye unscrew it and pour the thoughts into a big pool. You can look at them from outside of the pool so they don't have the same power over you. Whatever it takes to get the wind out of your internal voice's sails so you can look at your actions. I compare things that I am actually doing to things I was doing when I was in an objectively higher state. If I am so bummed that I think I have always felt this way, I trick my brain by looking for memories of when I "falsely believed I was happy". There should be a lot of differences between whatever you have been doing from the time you started feeling bad and now. Look for the biggest set of differences. The hard part of this detection is that you are trying to think your way out of the box that confines your thoughts. This is actually impossible to accomplish, but our goal here is to misdirect our mind just enough to figure out what our head is doing. **Proving that the cause is real (evidence from the past)** You really need to be in a mindspace that detaches the conclusions of your thoughts from the thoughts themselves for this part. That is what makes this kind of thinking hard at first and then easier with practice. This is important more as a sequence you go through in your head than a thing you understand. Here, you take the differences that you figured out and you check their empirical accuracy. It can go really quickly, or take a long time to figure out. it's best with some examples. I was sitting in church, feeling bad. The thoughts in my head were pretty morose. When I noticed what was going through my head, I immediately remembered that my physiology was off. I had gotten up early after a week of highly irregular sleep. I mentally pushed the pause button and started sifting through the thoughts. I compared the way I was feeling to other times I had been in church. The fact that I had felt fine at other times in my memory ruled out church as a fundamental cause of grief for me. I thought about times I've disagreed with people or what their message was. Tons of occasions in the past when I had disagreed, I left the conversations feeling great. So something other than the stimulus in front of me was affecting my physiology. Again, maybe I suspected that it was sleep deprivation that was the real cause of my head tripping, but it was important to go through the process of eliminating the other possible causes. I think of it like trying to convince the irrational part of me to chill out a little. The point of this is not to immediately feel better, but understanding something is a first step towards mending it. At this point, even if I don't reset my vector, I have short circuited the negative conclusions to a rational conclusion. I've distracted the part of me that wants to sink the ship at least temporarily. **Setting vector to fix the cause (new actions that we need to take. Won't cure the symptoms)** By now there should be a bit of a mental loop that is established that goes something like this: Negative thought starts off towards a negative conclusion, instead of reaching the negative conclusion, it reaches the logical conclusion and fizzles out. Example: Life is meaningless... oh yea, I'm just tired, I'll check out the meaning of life some other time. Now what? Now it's a matter of just finishing the logical train of thought. I can't just lie down on the floor in the middle of church and take a nap, so I mentally decide that I'll be going to bed earlier that night. To make it easier, as soon as I got home I set up the environment for going to bed earlier. I turned off my computer so that it would be a hassle to turn back on late at night, I set books on my bedside table, and I set an alarm reminding me to meditate around when I wanted to start winding down. None of this made me feel immediately better, but the loop made me stop actively feeling bad. the preparations and plans made me reassured that I would feel better, which ended up coming true the next day. **Triggers** This is going to look really familiar to the above, but more immediate. The difference in thinking is time scale, and the solutions are not vector setting, but either acceptance or directly changing behavior. The goal is to dampen your reaction, address the real problem and internally resolve it so you can then have the presence of mind to externally resolve it. **Identifying triggers** Since about half of the time, it will be blindly obvious if there is something generating an irrational reaction in you, here I am going to focus on the long term techniques you can hone for the non-obvious cases. A reminder that these are things that require practice and will get easier as you do them. This seems like it should be easy, but when you're reacting to something, you may not always want to stop and get philosophical about what's happening. The practice is to learn to inject some automatic self reflection between the stimulus and your response. Here's the trick: You need to practice this kind of self reflection **while** calm and collected. Whenever and as soon as you think about it, reflect on how you are behaving relative to your environment. If you are interacting with other people, just watch how you take what they say and how they respond to what you say. Don't over analyze it, just let it be as it is. If you're watching a show, watch how you think about the characters. Note how your emotions are affected by the events that occur normally. You don't need to do anything with this, you're training your intuition to notice things that you normally ignore. I want to clarify that I am not advocating getting all up in your head and obsessing about the tiny details of your idiosyncrasies. That is the opposite of productive. Instead, I am telling you to passively observe your own life. If you do this training, you automatically catch yourself when you start to slip. Since you familiarized yourself with how you operate in different environments, when things start to go haywire, the coincidence detector in your head will let you know. If you play the long game, this is much easier than it sounds and can be pretty fun way to understand yourself better. What about before you've built the mental muscle? Let's assume your rational mind has already left the building. The challenge of trying to be calm and collected is much harder. This requires more mental effort, but it's doable. The key is similar to figuring out what a cause is. If someone is reacting to what you are saying, or if something is having a very negative effect on you, hit the mental pause button. If you can, actually stop whatever process it is that you are doing. If you are in the middle of a conversation that's turning into a fight and you are getting mad, as soon as you feel bad, just say "Give me a second I need to think about this," or something along those lines. It is much harder to hit the pause button when you are already reacting, so I would advocate playing the long game. If you are very reactive, you have the most opportunity for growth and practice. You can make big wins pretty quickly with daily passive self-observation. **Determining the level of reality that the trigger bares** Let's remember that triggers can be very real or they can be total bullshit. Once you've done the hard work of detecting when you are reacting irrationally to something, now you need to process whether or not there is a valid concern that needs your attention. This is validating that there is something that got you to react, not writing it off or blowing it up. Somewhere in your reaction is the real thing that has gotten you bothered, now we get the chance to figure it out. There is a cool secondary compounding effect here too. The more times you figure the root of a trigger, the faster you can do it in the future. This process involves laying out what just happened and comparing it against how it could have happened and how similar situations played out in the past. Then, comparing the level of reaction against the magnitude of the problem. **Replacing the trigger with something else and reframing** Now you've identified the trigger and have validated where it's come from, it's time to redirect your reaction towards the solution. The quickest way to get to resolution is to own the reality of the situation, accept it for what it is, then let it go. Another feat easier said than done. This can be accomplished with a simple visualization as well. I picture myself in waste-high water. The trigger is a basketball. Holding on to whatever set me off is like trying to hold the basketball under water. Ignoring the problem and overreacting seem like two different responses, but they are two sides of the same coin. Both of them take more effort than dealing with the problem, and neither are trending towards solving the problem. Once you have gone through the reflective process, what the rational and right thing to do should be apparent. if it's not, keep digging. The trick at this point is just to do the right thing or not do the wrong thing. Even if you believe you have been wronged and that is true, there is a measured way to get to resolution without a big reaction. Letting go in either case might feel counter-intuitive, but it will give you the freedom to act on the situation with mental clarity. **Conclusion** That's the model and some applications in a nutshell. If you get good at this kind of analysis, the methods you use specifically will look less like the examples above, and will serve you better. The hardest part in all of this is to remember that there are things that affect your thinking outside of your control. When your thinking is affected, you can't count on the normal processes you use day-today. This whole model exists simply to trick your brain, deal with the parts that are within your field of control, and compensate for the frustrating parts of your mind. It's not about being happy all the time. Rather, this kind of practice will trend your overall state towards contentment and tranquility.