Mental Health

I found these good notes somewhere long time ago but don't remember whose are those.

Fundamental model

One way of looking at emotions is as a gradient for wants. All people have a set of root (terminal) desires and values (these might differ from person to person), which they prioritize in different ways. A person’s brain takes these abstract, vague root desires / values and breaks them down into proxy desires and goals. The brain creates emotions as a way to signal whether these proxy goals are being achieved or not. Positive emotions are generated when the brain perceives that the proxy goals are being achieved; negative emotions are generated when the brain perceives that the proxy goals are not being achieved.

People have root wants / desires.

These are usually impossible, or at least extremely difficult and slow to change (one way of intentionally changing them is by repeated targeted application of the depersonalization trick which is described in a future section). The brain breaks these down into proxy wants / desires and goals. The exact way this happens depends on your worldview / belief system. Emotions are generated by the brain to signal whether the brain thinks that the proxy goals are being achieved or not.

Discovering what you want

Direct inquiry:

A simple tool for discovering your root wants and structure of the proxy goals that your brain is generating is repeatedly asking the question why. The algorithm works like this:

You experience a negative emotion E.
You ask yourself “Why am I experiencing E?” Your brain produces a reason X_1
You ask yourself “Why would X_1 make me experience E?” Your brain produces a reason X_2
You ask yourself “Why would X_2 make me experience E?” …
You continue this cycle until you hit a root desire, or until you are genuinely unsure as to why X_n makes you experience E.

When using this process, you want to be careful and to make sure the reasons you’re coming up with are the real reasons why you are experiencing the emotion E. This is not always easy to do.

Focusing [2]

Focusing is a mental tool that helps you investigate and examine what your root desires are, and what are the proxy goals that your brain has constructed.

Step 1: Discover. Figure out what your emotional experience is at this moment. Pay attention to how your body is feeling

What is my experience like right now?
Does everything in my life feel fine right now?
What’s between me and feeling fine?

Step 2: Select a single emotion / sensation from everything that arose in the previous step.

Step 3: Understand the felt sense

How does this emotion feel physically in your body?

Ask questions:

What’s the worst of this feeling?
What needs to happen for this to feel fine?

Make hypotheses and guesses as to what the core of the felt sense is, and ask your subconscious mind if they are correct. Run thought experiments to investigate how you would feel in different hypothetical situations. Often, you'll hit on some words or phrases that "click", but aren't a complete answer. Build on them and explore the most promising areas. At some point, you'll finally hit on a description that "clicks" really well, and feel a release of tension. This is the core of the felt sense.

Exploration

Explore different things (e.g. places / people / social groups / activities / books / art / etc) and observe the thoughts and emotional responses that they generate in you. Try to draw inferences about your proxy goals and core values from these thoughts & emotions.

This kind of exploration can be more or less directed, depending on what your specific needs are.

Handling strong emotions and urges

Exposure therapy

Practice exposing yourself to and managing your mental state in milder versions of the situation that is causing the strong emotion. Gradually increase the intensity of the situations you practice in.

Objectifying / Impermanence trick

When you experience a strong emotion or urge: [3]

Hold the emotion / urge in your attention without acting on it or analyzing it. Allow it to be present.
Observe what the emotion / urge physically feels like
Observe what the emotion / urge mentally feels like
Reflect on how the emotion is just a “thing” / “object” that happens to currently be present in the world, just as any other “thing” / “object”
Observe how the physical and mental sensations are evolving and changing over time.
Reflect on the impermanence of the emotion

Depersonalization trick

When you experience a strong emotion or urge: [3]

Apply the impermanence trick.
Take the “self” as your object of focus. Reflect on how the “self” is just a continuous stream of conscious experience - nothing more, nothing else.
Ask yourself: “Who is having this emotion / urge?”

CBT approach (evaluating the perception & proxy goal)

Ask the following three questions: [1]

Is the perception that the proxy goal is not being met accurate?

Example: I’m feeling angry at my girlfriend because I feel like we haven’t been spending enough time together. However, when I look at my calendar, I notice that we’ve actually been spending a fair amount of time together.

Even if the perception is accurate, does the proxy goal itself make sense? Is it realistic and does it actually help the root desire?

Example (unrealistic): I get along very well with almost everyone in my class, except for a few people. This makes me depressed because I feel like I need to be liked and approved of by everyone or else I’m a bad person.

Example (irrelevant): I’m experiencing anxiety because my college GPA is 3.5. I need to get higher grades in order to be able to later succeed as a startup founder, and I need to succeed as a startup founder in order for people to respect me.

Even if the perception is accurate AND the proxy goal makes sense, does experiencing the emotion help in any way with achieving the goal? What is the most effective way to channel this emotion towards achieving the goal?

Noticing errors / distortions in proxy goal construction & evaluation: [1]

Overemphasizing negative patterns:

All-or-nothing thinking: If your (the other person’s) performance falls short of perfect (or another binary label), you see yourself (them) as a total failure.
Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event / quality as a never-ending pattern.
Mental filter: You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving the whole situation is negative.
Magnification / Catastrophizing: You exaggerate the importance of your errors / mistakes / bad qualities (or those of other people).
Labeling and Mislabeling: Instead of describing your (the other person’s) error, you attach a negative label to yourself (the other person).

Seeing negative patterns where there are none:

Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
Mind-reading: You arbitrarily conclude that other people are reacting negatively to you (or intentionally being malicious).
Fortune teller error: You imagine that something bad is about to happen, and you take this prediction as fact even though it’s unrealistic
Emotional Reasoning: You take your negative emotions as evidence for the truth. E.g. “I feel inadequate, therefore I must be a worthless person”; “I’m angry at you - this means you’ve done something bad!”
Should statements: You try to motivate yourself by saying “I should do this” or “I must do that”. You direct should statements towards others: “He should to X”, leading to frustration.
Personalization: You see yourself (another person) as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you (they) were not primarily responsible for - e.g. “My partner failed to pass her job interview, so I must be bad at giving interview preparation.”

Mistakenly deemphasizing positive patterns:

Disqualifying the Positive: You reject your positive experiences (or another person’s positive actions / qualities) by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other.
Minimization: You inappropriately shrink your (another person’s) successes or positive qualities until they appear tiny and inconsequential.

Generating specific emotions