Pause Your Feedback Loops

What do you get out of it?

• The good.

  • Your mind and body can finally get some high-quality rest.

    • It's not enough to dedicate time to resting, if you can't also reach the corresponding mind state.

    • Even if you are pursuing maximum productivity, you will ultimately achieve more if you know how to rest well.

  • You get an opportunity to reflect on your life from a distance.

    • Big decisions are hard to make when you are constantly forced to react to all the issues and anxieties that keep coming up.

• The bad.

  • It's possible to end up too far on the other side and become unproductive.

    • Pausing all feedback loops, if done right, will also remove anxiety about resting too much. What matters then is to have some other reason than anxiety to go back to running one's life.

How to tell if you have it?

Note: this skill is in some sense very natural and easy, but tends to be unlearned by those who pursue high productivity. So if your life is in general successful and under control, it's quite likely that you've forgotten how to rest.

• You do some activities that don't have a clear goal.

  • Being goal-oriented is good advice most of the time, but also forces your mind to rely on strong and persistent feedback loops.

  • This is simply because humans have not evolved for sustainable, intensely goal-oriented activities. In order to pursue them, you need to keep your body and mind in a state of constant crisis (to some degree).

  • A popular way to relieve this burden is to have some leisure activity, or "hobby". In particular, a well chosen hobby is something that you don't mind doing for a long time, but also don't mind interrupting and coming back to later.

• When you take a day off, you feel no pressure to get lots of other things done.

  • If the opposite is true, the feedback loops that keep you productive are still on, regardless of whether you are supposed to be "resting" or not.

How does it work?

• At any given time, your mind is probably keeping track of dozens of activities and issues, and struggling to keep all of them under control.

  • This happens on each scale, ranging from "is my makeup OK?" to "am I doing something useful with my life?".

  • You can recognize these feedback loops by the emotions which they consistently generate. What you are looking for is repeatedly having new thoughts and emotions about the same topic, often in changing directions depending on the situation.

  • Another clue is what kind of thoughts automatically enter your attention, especially when you are idle.

• The goal is to put all the feedback loops temporarily on pause.

  • It's not about solving all your issues (that's impossible).

  • It's also not about reducing the importance of some issues, relative to others.

  • Pausing a feedback loop shouldn't feel like giving up on it. Each loop represents something you care about, and it's there for some reason.

    • This reason might be good or bad, and stepping out of the loop might give you the perspective to consider it in a clear-headed way. However, this should be optional and separate from simply putting the loop on hold, while leaving it unchanged.

• If you succeed, you will be rewarded with long stretches of refreshing freedom in your own mind.

  • This naturally causes a tendency to focus on your body, and the things that are right in front of you.

  • At the same time, your willingness to do anything at all will drop significantly. So it's wise to have some plan already in place to make sure you'll get back on track.

How to learn it?

• Step 1. Plan your rest.

  • It will be hard to relax completely unless you make sure that your life is still OK when you come back to it. So think about how long you can afford to rest, and how to make sure that afterwards you'll smoothly go back.

    • If it feels to you like your life is never OK enough to take a break, you probably need to backtrack and Tune Your Emotional Processing.

  • Prevent all the usual distractions from reaching you, and pulling you back into the loops.

• Step 2. Start some calming, grounding activity.

  • It ultimately doesn't matter what it is, as long as it helps you reach a restful mind state.

  • Activities that provide mild, pleasant sensory experiences tend to work well for this (e.g. walks in nature, tea ceremony, massage, or simply sitting comfortably).

• Step 3. Notice what you are ruminating about.

  • Almost invariably, when you start a relatively slow and low-pressure activity, your mind will gravitate towards all the feedback loops that are still active.

  • Try to notice each time when your thought stream turns to something unrelated to what you are currently doing.

    • Each of these thoughts corresponds to some feedback loop, which means that there is something your brain wants and there's also something that your brain is trying to use to get what it wants.

    • Think about how you'll certainly go back to processing that issue later, because you already made plans to that effect.

    • Also reflect on the fact that getting rest will make you be better equipped to deal with the issue. And if you keep being anxious about it now, you'll not rest and ultimately get less of what you want.

• Step 4. Pause the loop.

  • This is a specific mental motion that is hard to describe, and you'll have to explore how it feels in your own mind.

  • Both ease and speed of doing this can be greatly improved with practice.

    • Your clue that you got it right is that for the time being, your thoughts no longer go back to that particular issue.

    • Of course, there are probably other loops which have been waiting for their turn, and will pop up as soon as your mind has enough space for them. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as necessary.

Further progress

• At some point you will find that you can directly access the mental motions of noticing and pausing mental feedback loops. This means much less need to do any special preparations to get rest.

• When working through psychological issues or other difficult problems, it is often helpful to do it from a fully calmed mind state as a starting point.

  • From there, it's much easier to bring up one particular issue, and work on it without being overwhelmed or anxious.