Yes, it seems to be a symptom of an inability to emotionally regulate.
I just felt kind of bad when I wrote this because I experienced some social rejection. Afterward, I did an internal double crux type thing. That was actually pretty difficult because I was constantly being pushed in the direction of procrastinating. A part of me said the following:
Having people like you can have enormous benefits. Having people not like you can have enormous downsides. Therefore, I am the algorithm in your brain that sees social rejection as something strongly negative. Social rejection means that a person doesn't like you enough or doesn't think you are qualified enough, not important enough, etc. to be granted the thing you requested.
So that part of me wants me to avoid social rejection. There is the failure mode of then just avoiding all social interactions. I have been falling into that failure mode for most of my life. The actual thing that this algorithm tries to accomplish is to make you optimize for making people like you. To avoid the isolationist failure mode you got another algorithm that makes you feel lonely.
As I was lending my voice and mental abilities to that part of me[1], and as I was speaking those words I felt an enormously positive feeling pulsing through my body. It was like the algorithm telling me "Yes you understood me. Great job!" Afterwards, I felt not bad at all anymore. Like literally not bad at all. Predictably the pressure to procrastinate went away too. This happened multiple times to me in the last couple of weeks. It feels like I am finally managing to figure out how to handle my emotions.
I find this truly incredible. When you actually understand your emotions it actually makes you feel really good apparently. I expect if I keep doing this my brain will just automatically update itself in the correct direction. I am actually kind of looking forward to feeling bad again, such that I can analyze why and feel really good already.
Maybe my brain got really confused before and sort of erroneously thought that entertainment is actually figuring out my feelings.[2] That would make sense because there where no video games, TV, or pornography in the ancestral environment.
I say that I did perform an internal double crux, but my technique might be significantly different from an internal double crux. I kind of made up this technique when I was doing a guided double crux for the first time. My guide at some point when I asked them if I was doing it correctly said "We have been off-script for a while now." But this seems to work very well. Maybe it is better than the original method. ↩︎
You know not really because we are probably just talking about adaptation executors but I think you get what I mean. ↩︎