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Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

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Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#71

Post by FollowingTheDao »

gregwebs wrote: post #70
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, Huberman is a showman who takes real science and distorts it to trick simplistic people into buting his supplemets. There is ZERO evidence that "the AMC structure in the brain gets bigger when we do things we don't want to do" Also the AMC has many more functions than Huberman lets on. So his "one neat trick" will do nothing to change ACC volume.

I’m happy to have this idea refuted but character attacks and platitudes aren’t the best way to go about it. What Huberman says, even if it is an mis representation is based on scientific studies. There are some links in the notes here to some of the studies: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/how-to-increase-your-wil...

First, the OP paper is called : "Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort".

Huberman does that all the time, posting "footnotes" so people can think his CONCLUSIONS are scientific.

Some of those "studies" are only articles. ("Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?")

And NONE of them show evidence that the AMC shrinks or grows based on "doing difficult things" but he just goes out and says this because it makes people freak out to think the brain can shrink or grow.

It is a character attack because researchers have already been all over this guy and said the same thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thkoCYhJnc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zxLok2XrhM

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#72

Post by vonnik »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #55
vonnik wrote: post #24

This is also known as hormesis, a biological phenomenon where exposure to a low dose of a potentially harmful stressor (toxin, radiation, or environmental factor) leads to a beneficial adaptive response in an organism. Examples include exercise, vaccination, caloric restriction. Many would argue that exposure to germs, stimulating the immune system, works the same way. Cognitively, examples would be desirable difficu…

Yes, but this is not something we can do psychologically. hormesis created by the mind is not the same as involuntary hormesis. Plus, how much toxin, radiation is enough? Even how much exercise is enough, and for who? I will argue it is not about seeking discomfort, but what you do when you are faced with discomfort.

We can alter our environment and make behavioral choices that engage us with discomfort. Choosing to learn is one example. Exposure therapy is another.

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#73

Post by kelseyfrog »

lukan wrote: post #41
kelseyfrog wrote: post #16

My path toward personal growth aims toward discomfort. I'm confused; do other people not do this? If I shied away from discomfort, I would be an angry, lonely, sheltered person and exactly the opposite of who I want to become.

The question is, do you seek discomfort? Or do you want to avoid the greater discomfort of becoming a "angry, lonely, sheltered person "? I never seek discomfort. I seek the pleasure of overcoming uncomfortable obstacles.

I specifically work (along with a therapist) on increasing my distress tolerance and tolerance with being uncomfortable. The idea is that this is a transferable capability - that the ability to endure distress and discomfort in certain areas of my life are generally applicable to other areas as well.

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#74

Post by roenxi »

lukan wrote: post #66
roenxi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any particular correlation between pessimism and depression? I'm sure there would be something on the extreme edge but I don't see why there would be anything particularly powerful there in the median case. Pessimism is more of an understanding that things will go wrong (which is often just factual correctness; any vague understanding of risk makes most people sound like pessimists). Depression is more of an…

"Depression is more of an "it is hopeless" take which is not logically sound - even if life is meaningless the sensible thing to do is leave a peaceful & cheerful existence as best can be managed." It is usually more concrete in the sense of "it is hopeless, that I get into a state of happiness again". Which might or might not be correct. So calling depression not logical .. is a potential tough thing to say.

Life is tough, unspeakably horrible things happen daily. Never feeling happiness would be on the bad end of even that spectrum.

But nevertheless, as someone who is acutely aware that unspeakable horrors surround us, an accurate prediction of never feeling happiness again doesn't logically lead to feeling a sense of hopeless, so it doesn't follow that depressed people are more likely to be working from an accurate world model.

The logical thing to do is to either look for ways to feel happiness or ignore it and salvage some meaning from whatever is left besides happiness. Easier said than done I know, particularly for someone who is depressed. But logic is what it is.

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#75

Post by gregwebs »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #71
gregwebs wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m happy to have this idea refuted but character attacks and platitudes aren’t the best way to go about it. What Huberman says, even if it is an mis representation is based on scientific studies. There are some links in the notes here to some of the studies: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/how-to-increase-your-wil...

First, the OP paper is called : "Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort". Huberman does that all the time, posting "footnotes" so people can think his CONCLUSIONS are scientific. Some of those "studies" are only articles. ("Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?") And NONE of them show evidence that the AMC shrinks or grows based on "doing difficult things" but he just goes out and says this…

One of the links he provides is to this review article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...

It concludes with something not far off from what Huberman stated. Not saying it proves he’s right but makes it easy to give him the benefit of the doubt and try to track down the actual new research he is referencing.

> One intriguing possibility is that the structure and function of aMCC could be altered with sufficient behavioral training. Indeed, as a flexible hub, the MCC may be better equipped than other brain regions to reshape its connectivity in response to learning. It has been proposed that protein receptors important for plasticity (such as CaMKII, NR2B, NMDA) are highly expressed in limbic circuits including aMCC (Wei et al., 1999; Palomero-Gallagher et al., 2008; Garcia-Cabezas et al., 2017; Burt et al., 2018; Palomero-Gallagher and Zilles, 2019). Interestingly, Garcia-Cabezas et al. (2017) recently showed that in adult monkeys, markers of synaptic plasticity are high in MCC (and other limbic regions) while markers of stability (as expressed by cellular factors that inhibit synaptic plasticity) are low. These findings suggest that training related improvement in behaviors requiring tenacity may be mediated through the aMCC. We have seen evidence that aMCC can be ‘trained up” in the domain of exercise (Colcombe et al., 2006).

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#76

Post by UltraSane »

I can attest that my greatest periods of personal growth came during times of greatest discomfort. My first job out of college was at a small IT consulting company where I managed the data center. This gave me complete access to the VMware cluster, the SAN storage array, every Cisco switch, router, and firewall, and root access to every VM running. I could create a LUN on the storage array, a VLAN on the switches, a subinterface on the router or firewall, a VM portgroup on VCenter, and a VM using all of them. It was incredibly stressful at first but I learned a ridiculous amount.

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#77

Post by ImaCake »

devops99 wrote: post #38
ImaCake wrote: post #22

>learning about gun violence. Maybe this is helpful in the USA, but I hardly see how knowing anything about this counts as "personal growth"? There are plenty of things you can know that actively make you a worse person by making you depressed and thus less engaged with things you can actively act upon.

[flagged]

Yeah you do. Australia has roughly 25 million people and yet we have had no mass shootings in 2024. America has had 200+ mass shootings this year but only 10x the population of Australia. The relative risk between Australians and US citizens risk of dying by mass shooting is a divide by zero error. The public discourse means that while the risk of dying by mass shooting in the US is tiny, the actual effect on mental health is massive.

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#78

Post by lukan »

roenxi wrote: post #74
lukan wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Depression is more of an "it is hopeless" take which is not logically sound - even if life is meaningless the sensible thing to do is leave a peaceful & cheerful existence as best can be managed." It is usually more concrete in the sense of "it is hopeless, that I get into a state of happiness again". Which might or might not be correct. So calling depression not logical .. is a potential tough thing to say.

Life is tough, unspeakably horrible things happen daily. Never feeling happiness would be on the bad end of even that spectrum. But nevertheless, as someone who is acutely aware that unspeakable horrors surround us, an accurate prediction of never feeling happiness again doesn't logically lead to feeling a sense of hopeless, so it doesn't follow that depressed people are more likely to be working from an accurate wor…

"But logic is what it is."

Indeed. It is a abstract tool that is helpful, if the abstractions of reality are meaningful in the given context.

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#79

Post by devops99 »

ImaCake wrote: post #77
devops99 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yeah you do. Australia has roughly 25 million people and yet we have had no mass shootings in 2024. America has had 200+ mass shootings this year but only 10x the population of Australia. The relative risk between Australians and US citizens risk of dying by mass shooting is a divide by zero error. The public discourse means that while the risk of dying by mass shooting in the US is tiny, the actual effect on mental…

If you bothered to look at the actual data behind "mass shootings", you'd already know they're mostly gang related, and avoid making such an abhorrent post.

Australia had literal internment camps during COVID, and Australians had to video chat to "check in" with police to prove they really were where they were. Fuck that. I'd rather have the 2nd Amendment.

  http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/343/937/42e.jpg

Re: Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort (2022)

#80

Post by devops99 »

JackMorgan wrote: post #56
eastbound wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he shouldn’t do it, he perfectly adapted the language to the customs imposed upon us. See, customs and rules don’t change the truth. The really hateful act is to hide the causes of violence so that we naively walk into it. That causes thousands of death per hear.

Veiled bigotry isn't brave, noble, or a search for truth.

[flagged]
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