Reminds me of the Buddhist term papañca - mental proliferation, thoughts bouncing off each other, going in different directions and building each other up - it's the opposite of the qualities of calm, collectedness and concentration that are cultivated in meditation.
Why We Spiral
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: Why We Spiral
#32The second half of the article was pretty underwhelming. It felt like "don't be a judgemental jerk and assume the worst in people"—unclear how that would help me "spiral upwards"?
Re: Why We Spiral
#33A key part of breaking cycles for me has been noticing when my default mode network ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network ) or DMN is being activated, being able to stop, do a series of 4-2-6 breaths to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and focus on what I'm doing in the present. The DMN is the little chatterbox "daemon" always talking in the background. Learning to consistently notice it and…
In addition, being able to see when dopamine is rising, feel it, label it, engage your parasympathetic nervous system and know that a dopamine spike is temporary, the craving for TV, news, sweets, social media, or other will pass... that is liberation.
We live in a culture where everything is gunning for our attention, trying to engage a dopamine loop and "relieve" us from dealing with often important but difficult emotions just below the surface. We have to train ourselves to deal with this environment.
It's not mindfulness training, it's how to operate our brains in the modern world.
Re: Why We Spiral
#34A key part of breaking cycles for me has been noticing when my default mode network ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network ) or DMN is being activated, being able to stop, do a series of 4-2-6 breaths to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and focus on what I'm doing in the present. The DMN is the little chatterbox "daemon" always talking in the background. Learning to consistently notice it and…
To add to OP: It helps to pay attention to physical symptoms of stress as well. If you find yourself constantly tensing your jaw or your shoulders, take a moment to focus on relaxing your muscles and breathing. Overcoming negative automatic responses just takes consistent practice.
To further add: being able to acknowledge an emotional response to a situation and then divert to objective thinking is a superpower. Sustained anger, sadness, or fear will quickly drain your energy and leave you unable to act with intent.
Re: Why We Spiral
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The more you do this for other people, the more they will be glad to see you. That's not a given. That's the rational response on their end, but not only is no one perfectly rational, but some people are very, very irrational. It can sometimes[1][2] be the case that the best option is to be among those who don't attract any attention at all. Separately: The spiraling described in this post is worth consideration, b…
Of course it’s not a given as to any particular person, but regardless, it’s the right presumption. And yes, of course there are things outside your control. Is that really “equally worthy” of your consideration and energy?
Yes. Questions like, "Should I work to 'do little things' intended to put a given coworker 'on an upward spiral'?" versus, "Should I insulate myself from or minimize blowback where any action is going to be received poorly because my incompetence is considered a foregone conclusion?" and, "How long should I remain at an organization where such things occur?" are all things that relate to decisions that are in your control—or at least might be, with enough of a forward-looking defense early on (if you fall into the group of those unlucky enough to need to ponder them).
Really, though, my comment was rather more intended to prompt introspective questions like, "Even if I'm personally on safe footing at my company, is it afflicted by this sort of thing in a way that impacts people who aren't me? And what can I do to either neutralize or minimize the negative consequences those people might experience?" (Readers who are paying attention will notice that this is a form of creating spirals of success for others, as the person I responded to recommended, but an emphasis on the fact that the targets of those actions can be people who have a lesser standing, rather that aiming laterally or upwards.)
Re: Why We Spiral
#36I think it's useful to try to always assume the best from others: - If they aren't being friendly this will irritate them in a way they cannot object to too openly. - If they are friendly it will avoid damage and even start an upward spiral. When you're not feeling good enough it's sometimes helpful to remember that even people who create negative impacts often get into positions of power and stay there for one reaso…
In general it seems like you should assume the outcome you want, so you behave in a way that's conducive to that outcome manifesting itself. If you always assume the worst, then you might protect yourself from rejection but you end up pushing people away.
So assuming someone is friendly even if they aren't is a better strategy than assuming everyone dislikes you.
Re: Why We Spiral
#37A key part of breaking cycles for me has been noticing when my default mode network ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network ) or DMN is being activated, being able to stop, do a series of 4-2-6 breaths to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and focus on what I'm doing in the present. The DMN is the little chatterbox "daemon" always talking in the background. Learning to consistently notice it and…
To add to OP: It helps to pay attention to physical symptoms of stress as well. If you find yourself constantly tensing your jaw or your shoulders, take a moment to focus on relaxing your muscles and breathing. Overcoming negative automatic responses just takes consistent practice. To further add: being able to acknowledge an emotional response to a situation and then divert to objective thinking is a superpower. Sus…
To add to this further, I've had great success following The Body Keeps Score; seeing it as a repository of past stress and trauma.
As part of this, I've been able to locate and work through stress and trauma activations in my body, where normally they'd cluster around my head and never actually get resolved.
Every time I go to work out, I pay attention to what areas of my body arent responding, are activating oddly; and I'll work to strengthen the foot-to-neck paths. It started with a back injury and has resulted in me finding I needed wide foot shoes and changing my entire stance, posture, complex movements, etc.
Some times I find it odd that I don't have that daemon running around yelling, because hes now activated in my body, and all I have to do is stretch.
Re: Why We Spiral
#38As a person with long experiences in trauma responses, I see this sort of behavior pattern everywhere. There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats. We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything…
I think a big part of maturing professionally is how I’ve gotten a better handle on not trusting my gut.
He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.
The more likely reality: he’s new here and I’ve been here for a decade. He was hired to basically replicate my success for sibling teams. He’s feeling immense pressure. He’s probably terrified of failing. I probably make him feel threatened. My defensive posture makes this worse. I give him signals all the time that he probably reads as me wanting him to fail or not liking him.
Re: Why We Spiral
#39As a person with long experiences in trauma responses, I see this sort of behavior pattern everywhere. There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats. We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything…
> There’s so much “trust your gut!!” advice when the gut can be deeply wrong especially when it comes to identifying interpersonal threats
This actually happened to me professionally.
A while back I was in a spot where for lots of good reasons, I decided I needed a 'reboot' of things; I had spent a lot of time listening to 'bad advice' and getting screwed over by bad people, and tried to have a bit of a clean slate.
I wound up finding a new job and a new girlfriend. Both felt weirdly stressful but I foolishly assumed it was just because they were both new things to me and I was 'out of my comfort zone'.
What I later discovered, was the 'boss' at my new job had actually tried to boast to certain people that he was trying to get me to quit, because he never wanted me on the team (He was sick for my first interview, and the person above him told him to hire me.)
He'd pull stunts like 'Oh I'm just gonna pull you into this meeting about our Crystal reports' (I was still new there and only knew that 'they existed in our legacy system') and then at the start of the meeting just a couple hours later, tried to claim that I was the subject matter expert on our Crystal reports! (Thankfully, I did use what little down-time I had, to do some basic digging and was able to at least speak to a potential solution to the problem they wanted to solve...)
Any time I wanted to get moved off the 'Support team' I would be given some seemingly impossible task to 'prove myself'; at one point I created a modular UI Frontend where different modules as ASP.NET MVC sites had backend logic to 'register' themselves with the main presentation service; thus delivering the ask, but he never even looked at a line of code.
And yeah they were a 'charmer'. He hoodwinked the whole board with empty promises and when he was finally found out (toxic behavior and all, the whole dev team had a 'group therapy' session or two b/c most folks were mistreated by him on some level) none of the code he produced ever really saw the light of day...
Couple that with partner that wasn't real, just using me to not feel lonely while her actual partner was busy in premed...
I suppose the irony being, that 'fake' partner is now a technical writer, working at the same company where the director who got me hired at the job with the shitty boss... (No that 'partner' didn't work at the place I worked at, but it's still just crazy as far as coincidences...)
Re: Why We Spiral
#40Wish I was taught things these in school. Psychology, CBT techniques, etc; I have always had a low EQ and learned a lot from basically messing things up, and from having a wife with super high EQ. Perception is reality for all practical purposes, despite the more mathematical wanting it to be not so, simply because the objective can literally not be perceived: each perceiver is subjective. Fixing this input layer would have saved me a lot of CPU churn, so to speak.