An extended version of this article was given as my keynote speech at the 2025 LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin.

A couple of years ago, I agreed to give a talk on the topic of psychology. I said yes, which of course meant that I now had a problem.

Namely, I had promised to give a talk, but I did not have one prepared. (You could also more optimistically call this an opportunity, a challenge, a quest, etc.)

So I decided to sit down at my computer, work on my presentation, and then go from the world where I had no talk prepared to a world where I did have a talk prepared.

However, I found that it did not quite work out that way. Whenever I tried moving toward the goal of having a finished talk, I instead found myself moving sideways.

And whenever I did end up moving sideways, I kept finding myself engaged in various other activities.

You might recognize some of them. I hear that I’m not the only one to sometimes engage in them.

(And yes, that’s the old Twitter logo because it’s Twitter not X, no matter what Elon Musk might say.)

After this has happened sufficiently many times, I stopped and tried to pay attention to what was happening in the moment when I got sidetracked. I described it to myself as follows:

“When I’m in a situation where I’d need to prepare for a talk, I feel a nervous energy in my back and a desire to do something different. It feels like there is a wall in front of me, and it’s always easier to look somewhere else.”

So that nervous energy seemed to be a causal factor in how I ended up repeatedly sidetracked. I let my attention rest on it and tried to describe it to myself.

What emerged was that the nervous energy could actually be broken down into two things. A fear of time running out, and a desire to run away from that frightening thing.

Since the fear of time running out caused the desire to run away, it felt natural to look at the fear in more detail.

When I did that, what came up was a memory of a previous time when I had given a talk and been insufficiently prepared. I had stood in front of an audience without knowing what to say.

I’d stammered things and felt helpless and worthless, and also bad for making other people feel awkward and wasting their time with a bad talk they were too polite to walk away from.

Now, there exists an excellent book called Unlocking the Emotional Brain, which I’ve previously discussed in detail.

It describes what it calls emotional schemas. In its terms, we could say that the situation was activating a mental schema that could be summarized as follows:

Memory of a previous situation: Standing unprepared in front of an audience, feeling awkward, helpless, worthless, and like a bad person.

The problem: “If I try to hold a talk, I’ll end up embarrassed by standing in front of an audience and not knowing what to say.”

Strategy: “Let’s avoid anything that has to do with giving talks, such as preparing them.”

Now, you might notice that there’s a certain issue with this strategy.

It’s not exactly very effective at avoiding the problem. It’s just making the problem worse.

So how did I end up with it?

First, we can notice that the strategy is effective at temporarily avoiding the fear of embarrassment. When I lose myself in an alternate activity, the fear temporarily recedes.

Second, “try to run away from the scary thing” is a very basic strategy that comes built-in to the brain - “flight” is one of our default stress responses, together with “fight”, “freeze”, and “fawn”. If a situation seems bad enough, one of those will kick in, regardless of whether it happens to be a good response or not.

Third, this strategy could work if it were stronger. If it had kicked in the moment when I was asked to give a talk, I wouldn’t have ended up in this situation in the first place. Or if it got strong enough that I’d apologize and cancel the whole thing, that would also get me out of the situation.

In the past, there were plenty of things that I’d said no to, or successfully ran away from because they were so scary, so this strategy made sense. Unfortunately, I now also had different schemas saying other things like “do scary things” and “make use of opportunities”.

So this schema was in an unfortunate in-between territory where it wasn’t strong enough to prevent me from giving the talk, but strong enough to sabotage my progress toward it.

A related issue is that schemas are contextual, and contexts can differ in how similar or different they are.

For example, assuming that you don’t work in a family business - which some of you might, but many don’t - then the contexts of “spending time with my parents” and “being at work” are probably very different for you.

If the contexts are very different, then it is easy for your brain to know which schema to activate in which situation. Spending time with parents gets the “spending time with parents” schema, and being at work gets the “being at work” schema. Many people might notice a distinct shift in their way of being if they go home to spend time with their parents, as their mind resumes very old behavior rules.^[1]

For me personally, another issue was that I had sometimes also given talks that had gone well and that I was happy with. So my brain had two conflicting schemas: one saying that giving talks is a good thing that leads to pride and satisfied feelings, and another saying that giving talks is a bad thing that leads to feelings of helplessness, worthlessness, etc.

This meant that in the situation when I was asked to give a talk, the “giving talks leads to good feelings” schema happened to activate, together with various other schemas like “saying yes to opportunities is good”.

But then when it was time to make a talk and I realized I didn’t have an immediate idea of what exactly to say and wasn’t making much progress, the context started resembling the one that had previously led to failed talks. That caused the fear to kick in.

One way of phrasing this is as saying that my brain was confused about exactly what world it was in. Was it in the world where talks go well and the right action is to work on them, or in the world where talks go badly and the right action is to run away from them?

You might notice that this question is a little incoherent.

It’s not that I get randomly assigned to either a world where my talk goes badly or to a world where it goes well, with the right action then being contingent on that random assignment. Rather, the worlds where my talks go well are exactly the worlds where I prepare them! And the worlds where my talks go badly are exactly the worlds where I don’t!

So the right choice would be to integrate these schemas together, and get my brain to notice this. That my talks sometimes go well, sometimes go badly, and that my degree of preparation is the thing that makes the difference.

Now, in this case there happened to be the happy option where I had been asked to give a talk about psychological problems, and this happened to be a psychological problem I was having. So I could get past the problem of “not making much progress on my talk” by looking at the exact psychological problem I was having and turning it into an example to use in my talk. And by thinking it through, I achieved some degree of integration. If you were wondering why some of the AI art in these slides is obviously from a few years back, it’s because I recycled slides from that talk to this one.

What exactly did I do here?

I started with the problem of “I’ve promised to give a talk, but do not have one prepared”. I tried solving it through the most obvious approach: direct action. Just make the talk.

However, when I tried taking direct action, I found myself repeatedly blocked. So I switched to investigating and trying to remove that blocker. The specific strategy that ended up working involved something like a combination of integrating my beliefs and using the blocker as fuel, but there would also have been other blocker removal approaches I could have tried.

For example, I might have done something like co-working or body doubling with others, which tends to be helpful if I need to get something stressful done. I could also have explicitly reminded myself of all the times when I did have a successful talk and tried to make the anticipated pleasure more salient in my mind than the expected fear, maybe by using something like mental contrasting. Any of these could have served to get me past the “fear of embarrassment” blocker.

Now, something that none of these strategies do is to change the fear of embarrassment itself. They just make it easier to deal with, or try to ensure that I never end up in a situation where I’d have a bad talk and feel embarrassed.

Basically, they are accepting that it is a necessity for me to never end up in a situation where I’d stand in front of an audience and not be sure of what to say. They are accepting the premise that if I’d end up in that situation, I’d feel helpless and worthless and like a bad person for wasting these people’s time.

But I wouldn’t need to feel that way. Someone who ended up unprepared in front of an audience might just improvise something. Or if they weren’t a smooth enough talker for that, they might just deliver a very mediocre talk and possibly feel somewhat bad about it, but also accept that the world is full of mediocre talks and that it’s nothing to lose sleep over.

If it weren’t a necessity to avoid ending up unprepared in front of an audience, the fear of that happening would also dissolve, since there was no scary thing to run away from. And then it would be easier to both prepare the talk and to improvise if necessary.

So if I had done emotional work around feeling worthless, helpless, and like a bad person in that situation, it could also have solved the problem.

In fact, there was also another emotional necessity in play. It was the desire not to let people down by going back on promises I’d made. Another route would have been to remove that necessity, in which case I would have been more comfortable with just apologizing ahead of time and saying that I’m actually not able to give the talk.

Of course, giving good talks is usually better than just declining all scary opportunities that you are offered. So while that would have been another route out of the dilemma, it would have been the worse one. But it is important to notice that these kinds of issues are often caused by being stuck between two conflicting necessities - if there was just one necessity, you could just do whatever it required of you.

Unless it was actually physically impossible, in which case you would have been trapped between the emotional necessity and the necessities arising from the laws of nature.

Which brings us to the fact that it’s sometimes just not possible to do any of the above things. Sometimes, a thing just remains an emotional necessity that you are unable to fulfill. I could have failed to both prepare a talk and to cancel it. Then I might again have ended up in front of an audience while being unsure of what to say, and felt helpless, worthless, and like a bad person.

In that case, the only option available for me would have been experiential acceptance. Just being with those feelings and trying to accept them without resistance. Accept them as something that might be unpleasant, but still something that I can live with.

The need to avoid those unpleasant feelings is by itself a kind of internal necessity. All of this flailing about comes from the deeply felt experience that it’s unacceptable to feel helpless, worthless, and like a bad person. If I can just be with all of those feelings, then… well, it doesn’t make the feelings go away, but it makes them okay to have. They’re just feelings.

Of course, I would still have other reasons to want to give a good talk. I value both my own growth and respecting other people’s time. So giving a bad talk would still not be a preferable outcome. But just feeling bad about it would not by itself be unacceptable.

This implies four levels of solving your problems:

1. Direct Action: “How do I solve this problem directly?”
2. Blocker Removal: “What’s preventing me from pursuing solutions?”
3. Necessity Removal: “Do I really need this to be okay?”
4. Experiential Acceptance: “Can I be okay with not being okay?”

I’m calling these levels, because there is a flow of causality:

• If you lack experiential acceptance (level 4), experiencing unpleasant feelings becomes unacceptable and avoiding them becomes a necessity (level 3)
• If avoiding unacceptable feelings is a necessity (level 3), your mind creates blocks around actions that might lead to them (level 2)
• If your mind has blocks around things that might lead to unacceptable feelings (level 2), it can prevent you from taking direct action (level 1)

Conversely, intervening on any of the levels can affect the levels below it:

• If you remove blocks around direct action (level 2), you become able to take direct action (level 1)
• If you make it so that situations that previously triggered unacceptable feelings no longer do so (level 3), it removes blocks aimed at keeping you away from those situations (level 2)
• If you make it so that all feelings are acceptable (level 4), it is no longer a necessity to avoid situations that would bring up unacceptable feelings (level 3)

The rest of my talk went into more detail on examining the four levels more generally, in a way that basically recapped my previous article on the four levels. I’ll leave out that part of the essay version, since you can just go read the previous article directly.

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1. ^{^}

   Strictly speaking, you’ll have lots of different schemas to cover the various situations that happen within these two contexts, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just talk about a “with parents” schema and “at work” schema.