Of Blood and Bone · 3:45pm Oct 25th, 2016
So, treatment three down.
At the end of my second session, I used two metaphors for sessions one and two to describe them to a fellow participant who was obviously not getting the same depth of experience that I did: the first was like hitting a rusty old screw with a worn-down head with a hammer to loosen it up for removal; the second was like peeling back layers of the mind and then putting them back carefully enough to smooth out any ripples or blemishes.
Session three was more like donning flying goggles and rocket skates and having blind faith that I wouldn't run into any walls. I can see how that sort of thing could be addictive. But much like before, as long as I remember that all I'm doing is best-guessing I think I can say that I learned a lot. Plus, it starts with something Derren Brown said. That has to be a worthy start, right?
To paraphrase: "There's no such thing as motivation."
This annoyed me at the time – not because I thought it was wrong, but because it confirmed something I was slowly coming around to which implied that I had a large hole in my knowledge that needed to be filled. It was aggravating because I didn't really know where to start. That was before my treatments, which is where the rocket skates come in.
If I were to phrase it more meaningfully, my three sessions would be arranged thusly: 1) deeply interesting until I realised how out of control I was, at which point I tried to stay in control and was duly terrified; 2) choosing to relinquish any attempt at control, I discovered that I had never been in control in the first place and that dropping the pretence made me more relaxed than I have even been; 3) having accepted that I am not in direct control, I experimented with how much influence I could exert working in tandem with my mind, rather than trying to wrestle it into compliance. Short answer: rocket skates. Longer answer: I feel like I had a bit of a sit-down with my unconscious mind and hammered out exactly how a few vital systems actually work while having a bit of fun on the side.
So does motivation exist? Yes and no. The devil is most definitely in the detail. I think it exists, but only in the framework of a system, rather than an experience, emotion, or drive. Depending on where you're at, this will probably seem like a silly thing to say, but for contradictory reasons that I will try, albeit awkwardly, to explain.
To a highly-functional person, motivation is a feeling derived from wanting something. It has probably always been there in some fashion and will rarely, if ever, earned enough scrutiny to be explainable. It just is, and there is no reason to mess with it. You want a thing and somewhere in your brain something stimulates you to go get it, with the strength of that stimulation providing a sense of degrees of motivation. This is, however, not technically true. That technically is very important. If I have it right, motivation is how we describe the result of a system and not the system itself. But this is not how people commonly describe it, because people with lots of it are unlikely to have ever studied it enough to explain it in detail.
To be more specific, it is virtually a 'resting state' for humans to push forwards. With nothing in the way, even a stray thought would have all the motivation of the human spirit behind it. Usually, it manifests trivially, like choosing your favourite colour or measuring out the correct ingredients to bake a cake from memory. We could just collapse on the spot and do absolutely nothing, but it's just not natural – it's not human nature. So I would call that natural state of moving forward the inherent joy of simply being human. It is enough to exist and motivation is part of the joy of existence.
To a person weighed down by anxiety (and I will consider anxiety as the primary precursor to depression for the purpose of this explanation), motivation appears to be an explicit drive. It doesn't come easily or naturally and it warrants a great deal of idle speculation (hardcore analysis isn't exactly the norm). Since other people who appear to have motivation are generally awful at explaining it, it is common for the general description of 'having motivation' to create this warped view how we work. Speak to a number of seriously depressed people, or people suffering addictions – including weight-loss clubs – and you'll hear that kind of talk frequently. I know because I heard it a lot and I was saying much the same sorts of things just a few months ago. That's how people tend to talk about it so that's how one ends up imagining it. This is unhelpful, at best, actively derailing, at worst.
A 'lack of motivation' can be thought of as simply lacking the joy of being human. But even that explanation misses the mark, however, as my experiences have also shown me that we probably never really lack that joy. Rather, we stop being able to feel it. Functionally, it seems like the same thing on the surface, but I think that having the metaphor fit what I understand of neural physiology is a powerful tool that should not be trivialised. To the joy-restricted, motivation obviously exists as an explicit thing because they lack it to some degree and can see it working in others. To them, motivation is how they get the drive to do the things they need to do, which is backwards, as it so often is.
Both camps will say it exists, but neither can say what it is. I only feel that I can go deeper because I have direct experience of both perspectives after already learning the tools I needed to understand them. By having these psychoactive experiences, supported by periods of augmented functionality between, I think I have a working model now, however rudimentary it may be.
Joy is the natural state of being, but that natural state of being is dependent on the brain being fully functional. Think of it as our emotional power source burning away like a star and emitting energy in all directions at all times. It lifts us up, makes us feel warm, gives us energy to act. When we get anxious, it is like we become heavy and that energy flow can no longer support us – it no longer affects us. We feel like we are falling, feel colder, and we feel more lethargic. Anxiety is like our lead-lined coffin; the joy can no longer reach us.
So what is anxiety? The desire for control, specifically the desire to control that which we fear. When we release our desire to control that which is not ours to control, anxiety dissipates. Thus, the time we spend trying to find joy is time potentially wasted on a faulty assumption: you don't find joy, you release anxiety. This distinction is fundamental, and the stoics – bless their cotton socks – figured this out somewhere around 300BC (thanks for that one, Derren!)
If anxiety is the desire to control that with is uncontrollable, then depression is weariness bourne of never getting to truly rest. Depression interdicts the ability to sense joy in the absence of anxiety, which can breed more anxiety. It's a sort of burnout, meant to suppress all feelings as a sort of emergency handbrake. Unfortunately, our society's understanding of it is so poor that we prompt people to push harder rather than trying to take the handbrake off. Which it not to say that that approach is without merit, but if you don't know why one approach should work over another, then such pushing is like putting petrol in the tank without checking whether it is a petrol or diesel vehicle. The results could be catastrophic.
Now imagine that everything I have said about anxiety is functionally identical to how confidence works: confidence does not exist – there is only anxiety getting in the way.
42. If you're not asking the right questions, the answer will be meaningless.
I believe I am a lot closer to the right questions. Actually, I believe I was pretty close already. I did think thing where I went off to reference something I wrong three years ago in Shades of Grey and ended up reading the whole thing again. What I believed true then feels more like a certainty than ever. It conforms to both my practical experience and predictive testing (that is, if it is correct it should have predictive value, so I have tested it by making and then evaluating predictions like a good scientist). What I hadn't quite accounted for is how much easier the healing actually is once everything is in place; it's the habits that are a bitch to break. I also never quite grasped that it is not enough to accept being out of control. Needing is an anxiety state – it is the sense that something is missing – and merely surrendering to your lack of control does not arrest the anxiety. You must relinquish the need to control or you will not gain any significant release. This I have done, but I still have forty years of lived experience to re-align.
It's going to be a long road. I'm sure I will have more later, but this is quite long enough as it is.
-M
So basically, burnout isn't a form of depression, but the other way around - depression is a burnout of trying to exert emotional control at all times, with the end-point of numbing all emotions to get rid of the anxiety it causes? Highly interesting stuff! As ever, thank you for the time and effort you put into these blog posts.
4270679 That is my current understanding of it, yes. I think the critical point is probably where anxiety becomes self-perpetuating because of the deleterious effects it has on the ability to experience happiness as a background feeling. Less joy becomes means anxiety which means less joy which means more anxiety, and so on.
I always liked the meme I saw many years ago: "Depression doesn't mean you're weak. I means the load you are carrying is too great."
4270695 Indeed, a positive feedback loop of anxiety so to speak. No wonder this vicious circle is so hard to break. Say, how did you manage to relinquish the need to control as you say in your blog post? This seems to be the crucial step. I can imagine knowing all this but still being perfectly unable to do anything about it.
4270705 Well, I guess the crux of it is that I had the rare chance to cheat the system. I knew the basics, but I could only truly put the pieces together during a psychoactive event where my sense of reality was sufficiently warped that I think my trains of thought influenced my subconscious more directly that most could. For me, it was the certainty of knowledge and experience that made it possible; once I actually knew what it was i was trying to do, it was relatively easy.
Which is to say, I had come to a place where I understood that the feeling I was experiencing was exactly that: just a feeling. I decided it was okay to have that feeling and stopped trying to resist it. I supposed it's a learned non-responsiveness. I have done a lot of mindfulness and anxiety management work leading up to this, which I imagine prepared me or the how, so I could act on it when the what made itself known. Even just generic breathing exercises would probably be good practice. Empty your mind and focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else until that state becomes familiar enough that it can be maintained effortlessly, rather than through focus. I imagine this is a great deal of what meditation is meant to teach: exerting influence rather than forcing control. When you can choose to let go effortlessly, you can do so without letting anxiety creep in.
Without chemical assistance, though (which should never be taken lightly, of course), I would suggest that focusing on what makes you feel the most relaxed is what you need. The more relaxed I am, the more capable I seem to be of making wilful impressions upon my psyche. I think talk therapies are absolutely fundamental for people with significant issues, and helpful for damn near everyone. Knowing why you're having an emotional reaction goes a long way towards experiencing it freely without the need to intervene. I found that the more accurately my mental model fit my practical experience, the less effort it took to choose not to respond. In essence, it's all about having the skills to achieve an emotionally non-responsive state. Familiarity, focus, habit. Think of it as pinching yourself repeatedly and training yourself not to flinch.
Huh. Glad it's helped.
4270738 Wow, okay. Yeah, that's pretty much meditation as I understand it as well: disassociating the conscious mind from emotional reactions. Great you had all that training up your sleeve to benefit from the treatment in such a way.
Very Epictetusian.
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That was one hell of a read.