Pure pretension.
Absolutely. One of the footnotes even uses the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field" as if that actually means something. Barf.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
201–210 of 238 posts
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#202I don't know about this. Paying attention to how your anxiety feels is a powerful way of noticing that it is just an experience like all other experience and there is a great freedom in realizing that you are not the anxiety, you are merely experiencing anxiety. I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.
It's an interesting point, I experience it the same way. Disconnecting the anxiety from the topic you are relating it to is a very powerful tool. If I am feeling anxious, it is not necessarily because of the thing I was thinking about.
Sometimes I started feeling anxious first and then retroactively assigned the topic to it.
In the case that I am ruminating over something that does actually worry me, I can get into a spiral of reinforcing thoughts that increase my anxiety.
Paying attention to the feeling, not the thoughts, lets me break the spiral and attempt to free my thoughts. The feeling can linger for some time though, given its a chemical process to flush it all out from the body. During that period it's more likely I might end up thinking about the topic again so it's precarious still.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#203It's sort of an interesting but the use of the term attention seems "over determined" (used to mean several not identical things) and "looping" is fuzzily defined (the main clue of seems analogy with "good sex", sex where you're engaging your entire body and being - a subject that apparently gets people's interest, yeah). I think there's a standard and clearer explanation of what the author describes. A rich, satisfy…
The article doesn't attempt to define any terms or reference the actual literature, just throws random "good sounding" crap together as if it's valid. I mean they unironically use the phrase "deeply cohere their attentional field." Seriously? Lmao.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#204... "and bloom" is a key missing part of the title. I find that 90% of the time the more you pay attention to something, the more interesting it gets.
No, you get bored with it. Tetris is fun for an hour, but then you get bored, it didn't get more fun after an hour, and people get even more bored after 10 hours. A very small subset of people continue after that and get ever more obsessed with it, that is not normal.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
My symptoms didn’t improve that much when I was an endurance athlete. Most of the improvements could be adequately explained by the hedonic treadmill. I could suffer longer.
But you did not suffer from a reduction to your genetic baseline. You went up from your baseline. > Most of the improvements could be adequately explained by the hedonic treadmill. I could suffer longer. That's chemistry in body and brain. There were changes.
I’m talking about pain/annoyance threshold, not general neurochemistry.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#206How can you do this in the spirit of what the author is talking about if you have some kind of chronic pain?
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish you the best with that, but by the metric of 'if I can do it for 5 minutes I can probably keep going because I wanted to do it' would mean that I don't want to do, very literally, anything. To be fair, I only just recently (past month) talked to my doctor and started treating it properly so I'm still in the tweaking the dosage phase.
Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example? Suggest thinking as if you already accomplished the thing and then work backwards from there. Start with a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction, because it’s already done. Now, you just need to do it. Or whatever approach works for you. Everyone is different.
> Could it be that something other than ability to focus is blocking you? Fear of failure, for example?
Looking for other reasons behind procrastination is very important, indeed.
There can be many, many core beliefs that hold you down.
This will sound cliche and 70's pop-psy self-help, but people think about themselves as an adult of age XX and don't realize many core ideas about themselves are not those of an adult, but those of themselves at age 7.
My example is that since my daughter was born I was using on her a blessing my grandma was always using on me, and I did not realize I was miss gendering her -- I was using the masculine form and my daughter eventually asked me about it -- why was I using the masculine form on her -- it then struck me I heard the blessing from my grandma when I was very young and it just became a core part of me.
That's cute, until you realize you internalize A LOT of stuff by the time you're 7 and unfortunatelly it's not always positive stuff.
My father did a lot of good things for me, but he was very competitive, he almost NEVER let me win at anything to the point he became visibly distraught when I was about to win against him, so I struggle to capitalize on my insights, especially when I have strong "about to win" feelings which turned into a life long self-inflicted "Cassandra curse".
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#208This is the same mechanism behind addiction (IMO, not a psychiatrist). The sustained attention becomes a feedback loop death spiral. Certainly the case for "light" addictions like caffeine, smoking, gambling, etc.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#209I don't know about this. Paying attention to how your anxiety feels is a powerful way of noticing that it is just an experience like all other experience and there is a great freedom in realizing that you are not the anxiety, you are merely experiencing anxiety. I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.
It's an interesting point, I experience it the same way. Disconnecting the anxiety from the topic you are relating it to is a very powerful tool. If I am feeling anxious, it is not necessarily because of the thing I was thinking about. Sometimes I started feeling anxious first and then retroactively assigned the topic to it. In the case that I am ruminating over something that does actually worry me, I can get into a…
Yeah now I read this I think the author doesn't mean paying attention to the anxiety as much as he means reinforcing the anxiety by identifying with whatever thoughts it brings up.
Which definitely doesn't help the anxiety.
Re: Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself
#210completely relate to how panic attacks are often caused by simply overthinking about having one, which causes more symptoms to arise, which leads to more panic...feedback loop. Interesting read.