Become Very Alert and Calm

What do you get out of it?

• The good.

  • You are able to do activities which require strong focus, but do not come with external structure that would keep you engaged and motivated.

  • Your ability to discern mental states is improved.

    • This means you can more realistically plan at which activities you'll be effective, depending on the situation.

• The bad.

  • Intense focus necessarily comes with negative health effects.

    • This is a consequence of every kind of stress that you put on your body.

    • By being more aware of your mind and body, you should be able to get better results with less overall stress.

    • But just as easily you could use the skill to abuse your body, and suffer the consequences later.

How to tell if you have it?

Note: this skill is uncommon, except among serious meditation practitioners. It's not very difficult to learn, but requires your emotional life to already be in reasonably good shape.

• You are able to enter intensely focused states at will.

  • This automatically happens under external pressure (such as from other people, strict deadlines, or doing very engaging activities). The difficult part is doing it with your own strength.

• You can easily tell what mental state you are in.

  • One axis is feeling calm/relaxed or anxious/under pressure (often described as having more or less mental "space"). Moving on this axis is described in Pause Your Feedback Loops.

  • Another axis is feeling sleepy or alert (this corresponds to how much you are able to focus, and how physically energetic you feel).

  • All four combinations are possible.

How does it work?

• The usual mechanism that regulates your mind and your body works by responding to the environment, but only when necessary.

  • If you think some event or activity requires your attention, it activates some degree of stress response in your body.

  • This is not negative unless the stress levels are abnormally or persistently high. In fact, without any stress you wouldn't be able to do much at all (you'd probably have trouble standing up).

  • The stress response has many effects on your body, including increased heart rate and muscle tension.

• The stress response also comes with psychological pressure that keeps you focused on the stressful event or activity.

  • This means that while your total ability to focus goes up, your ability to focus on other things goes down.

  • When the reason to be stressed disappers, your body will quickly revert to its default mode, which is a sort of a lazy slumber.

• However, some activities are valuable but not inherently stressful.

  • Meditation is a very clear example, and that's why all serious meditators have practiced this skill to perfection.

  • Another example is reflecting on and thinking strategically about life goals.

  • By learning to change your mind state, you unlock all the activities that don't already come packaged with powerful feedback loops.

How to learn it?

• Step 1.

  • Achieve a deliberately calm mind state, as described in Pause Your Feedback Loops.

  • From here, the goal will be to ramp up alertness without relying on any external pressure, so that you can avoid being pulled back into the loops.

  • Rather than executing this step separately, try to do it together with the rest of the procedure, while keeping balance.

    • If you become too calm without working on alertness, you'll just end up resting a lot.

    • If you become very alert but keep engaging with feedback loops, you'll just end up with a period of anxiety or manic work.

• Step 2.

  • Prepare a list of all the things that tend to make you more awake.

    • Locations: e.g. far from your bed, around nature, in direct sunlight.

    • Positions: e.g. sitting, standing, anything slightly uncomfortable.

    • Activities: e.g. running, walking outside, yoga.

    • Food and drink: e.g. coffee, lighter meals.

    • Physiology: e.g. naps, faster or deeper breath.

  • However, beware of things that come with their own feedback loops!

    • People, messages, notifications, social media.

    • Movies, books, games, anything with a plot or narrative.

    • Quickly changing images, sounds or other sensations.

    • Anything that puts you in flow state, or is hard to stop.

• Step 3.

  • Keep stacking all the available methods on top of each other.

    • Ultimately, it's simply a matter of testing many approaches, and applying them with enough intensity and persistence.

    • If something seems to work, do more of it!

  • The results tend to compound with time.

    • Quite extreme levels can be achieved after spending several days in isolation.

Further progress

• As you become better at the skill, you might find yourself relying less on external pressure to get things done in general (even in case of activities that already come bundled with such pressure).

  • This makes it easier to be mindful of what you spend your time and energy on, and do difficult things more consistently.