Comment by FailMore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FailMore | Hacker News Reader

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What you might not know is that your emotions can do this too (create feelings which feel real but don't match with the reality of a situation, with the purpose of fulfilling an underlying need of the brain - typically protection).

This is at the heart of mental health - the issue being that imagined feeling patterns are formed during infancy. During that period you need to maintain relationships with your caregivers in order to survive (so your feelings organise around achieving good caregiver conditions). However when you are in the wider world as an adolescent/adult things are very different (1. don't need your caregivers to survive and 2. the rest of the world doesn't act the same way that your caregivers do) and that's when things get bad-mental-healthy. Your brain is imagining feelings to satisfy a different environment to the one you are in.

Even more amazingly the brain knows it does this and has a built in correction mechanism - dreams. They don't auto correct, but provide instructions (if we listened). This isn't the Freudian-everything-is-a-penis/vagina vibe, but a much more practical route to using dreams to diagnose false feelings. I wrote a paper on this here: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz

When you have spotted a false feeling it's very easy to get rid of it. You have to catch yourself repeating the pattern and break it. Do that a few times and your brain reconsolidates and no longer feels the inaccurate feeling as it understands that the survival function of it is no longer required.

Interesting read!

My oversimplification of the paper: give yourself real-life exposure to situations you fear in dreams. (You'll probably respond well IRL, and start to break down your anxiety.)

Some key quotes

“… dreaming results in the mental generation of situations where we should behave unanxiously, or without avoidance … the function of dreams is to highlight erroneous fear responses … anxieties are the over generalisation of the fear response, stemming from a real fear memory, resulting in unnecessarily avoidant behaviour. These are what dreams bring attention to.”

“in my own therapy, where I started to use [dreams] to identify which fear I needed to expose myself to next, I found that, as one dampens the highlighted fear in real life, in-dream behaviour becomes increasingly un-avoidant (i.e., in line with what the situation demands). … This process continues until the fear is no longer present, at which point dreams highlighting this anxiety no longer occur.”

“… typically diagnosed symptoms of social anxiety (e.g., avoidance of social situations, low self - esteem) are all sensible anxieties to hold in order to avoid potential conflict situations; avoiding interactions eliminates the risk of upsetting others and having low self-esteem results in a default conflict-avoiding position of appeasing others. … These dreams propose a route out of social anxiety which focuses on becoming comfortable upsetting others for the benefit of the self, rather than disproving seemingly relevant maladaptive beliefs (e.g., people don’t like me).”

Hey - thank you for the great summary :)

The first time I did MDMA that was driven home to me in an undeniable fashion. Nothing about my life situation changed but this cloud of anxiety and fear that I had been living in since I was a child lifted like clouds breaking in a thunderstorm. I felt genuinely happy and safe for the first time in my life and it made me realize how arbitrary my emotional interpretation of the world was most most of the time. I realized I could choose to be happy, choose to be friendly, and people would reciprocate it.

Now, MDMA was bullshit in its own way, of course, but I’ll forever be grateful for the realization it gave me. It changed my life.

> Now, MDMA was bullshit in its own way, of course

I really don't get why you said that (I use the stuff myself). Do you really think that, or is that partly an externally-acquired anti-drugs message, perhaps picked up from school in drug 'education' lessons, or am I being uncharitable?

I DJ'd and promoted raves for close to 10 years. I'm extremely familiar with it's good and bad sides. The happiness that MDMA makes you feel is as illusory as any other emotion is.

> as illusory as any other emotion is.

My emotions are as real as my bones. If you think emotions are an illusion, you should spend a few months with severe clinical depression (I had much more than that). You'll soon change your mind.

> You have to catch yourself repeating the pattern and break it

How do you recommend doing that?

A therapist is very useful. It is difficult to see yourself clearly from the inside out. It's easier for someone from the outside to help you spot patterns, then you will gain some level of awareness of how they arise in your life (because you will be discussing your life with the therapist).

The paper I link to on dreams should help too. Dreams are sort of an internal mini-therapist, but again, it is easier with an outside perspective.

The first step is to consciously notice the pattern - at first it may be difficult and you would notice it only after the fact, but with some introspection and training you can generally also learn to notice and acknowledge it while you're in it. When you do catch it with your "rational brain part" it's generally not that difficult to break it.

That's a big part of what cognitive behavioral therapy does. Also, mindfulness meditation is one way for doing this that helps some people with the "catch yourself doing that pattern" part.

Journaling or therapy can be effective strategies. Both give you the outside perspective needed to spot patterns.

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