Re: productivity—from personal experience, meditation also seems to help with overthinking. I think that Rationalists in particular have the nasty habit of endless intellectualizing about how to beat akrasia and get myself to do X; it seems that as you meditate, the addiction to this mental movement fades and then it’s not appealing anymore, so you go do X instead.
Hi Milan, thanks for the comment. Yeah, I guess this is similar to the idea of the second arrow https://www.wildmind.org/texts/the-arrow. So often the lion’s share of our discomfort in doing something can come from the thoughts we have about it.
Hi Moses, thanks for the comment. Totally agree with you here. There’s a certain amount of thinking that is useful to consider things and make good decisions but the mind has a tendency to carry on thinking for a long time after that threshold of usefulness has been reached. After that, it can easily turn into over-analysing, doubt, worry and all sorts of other productivity-sapping stuff.
I think it’s more than a matter of the quantity of thinking; I think there’s a qualitative difference in whether the underlying motive for even starting the train of thought is “I intend to do X, so I have to plan the steps that constitute X”, or whether it’s “X scares the fuck out of me and I have to avoid doing X in a way that the System 2 can rationalize to itself, so it’s either (1) go stare in the fridge, (2) masturbate, (3) deep-clean the bathroom, or (4) start a google doc brainstorming all the concerns I should take into account when prioritizing the various sub-tasks of X. Hmm, 4 sounds like something System 2 would eat up, the absolute dumbass.”
Re: productivity—from personal experience, meditation also seems to help with overthinking. I think that Rationalists in particular have the nasty habit of endless intellectualizing about how to beat akrasia and get myself to do X; it seems that as you meditate, the addiction to this mental movement fades and then it’s not appealing anymore, so you go do X instead.
+1
My subjective experience of this has been something like moving from:
“X is super intense & it’s going to take all my collected will to even think about approaching it.”
to:
“Oh X, that’s pretty straightforward. I’ll just do that now.”
Hi Milan, thanks for the comment. Yeah, I guess this is similar to the idea of the second arrow https://www.wildmind.org/texts/the-arrow. So often the lion’s share of our discomfort in doing something can come from the thoughts we have about it.
Hi Moses, thanks for the comment. Totally agree with you here. There’s a certain amount of thinking that is useful to consider things and make good decisions but the mind has a tendency to carry on thinking for a long time after that threshold of usefulness has been reached. After that, it can easily turn into over-analysing, doubt, worry and all sorts of other productivity-sapping stuff.
I think it’s more than a matter of the quantity of thinking; I think there’s a qualitative difference in whether the underlying motive for even starting the train of thought is “I intend to do X, so I have to plan the steps that constitute X”, or whether it’s “X scares the fuck out of me and I have to avoid doing X in a way that the System 2 can rationalize to itself, so it’s either (1) go stare in the fridge, (2) masturbate, (3) deep-clean the bathroom, or (4) start a google doc brainstorming all the concerns I should take into account when prioritizing the various sub-tasks of X. Hmm, 4 sounds like something System 2 would eat up, the absolute dumbass.”