For naturally struggling people, the main motivation for behavior is the need to get away from bad things. If you give them a productivity or self-help technique, they might apply it to get rid of their largest problems... and then, when the biggest source of pain is gone, they momentarily don't have anything major to flee from, so they lose their motivation to apply the technique. To keep using the technique, they'd need to have positive motivation that'd make them want to do things instead of just not wanting to do things.
This is actually only one of three things that stop naturally struggling people from successfully applying self-help techniques on an ongoing basis.
The first of the other two is simply that, if you're trying to use a self-help technique in order to get away from something, then you are simply perpetuating the negative motivation, so you're still in an essentially struggling state. (I was stuck like that for years.)
Explaining the second requires an explanation about the "mental muscles" concept, but to save time I'll just give a cross-reference and an example. A mental muscle is essentially my term for Marvin Minsky's concept of a brain "resou...
I love that you point out that we drastically overestimate threats to our safety (and probably status/affiliation). I've often had to call myself, and friends, on exactly that.
I can't conceive that anyone familiar with your contributions on this site would think that you only have a tiny handful of things to say. ;-)
I don't seem to have positive motivations, or at least very few. I play video games to stave off feelings of boredom and loneliness as much as because I enjoy playing them. That, and it gives me a fake feeling of achievement in lieu of achievements that actually affect social status.
Okay, the two "examples" of akrasia that come to mind most easily are procrastination and addiction. If you're procrastinating, then you're failing to do something, and so you need some positive, "gain brain" motivation. If you're addicted, then you're failing to not do something; does this mean that you need some negative, "pain brain" motivation? If I'm addicted to heroin, should I try to visualize all the horrible things that will happen to me if I don't overcome my addiction?
"Should you be seeking to gain in that particular moment?...Hell no! Right? Because you don’t want to take a risk of falling or getting into a spot where the tiger can jump up and get you or anything like that. Your brain wants you to sit tight, stay put, shut up, don’t rock the boat… until the crisis is over. It wants you to sit tight. That’s the “pain brain”."
Yet procrastination mostly consists of finding more fun things to do.
Yet procrastination mostly consists of finding more fun things to do.
Chronic procrastinators don't usually have fun procrastinating. They do something safe, familiar, and unambitious -- to pass the time while they're waiting for the tiger to go away, and to take their mind off the fear.
I am skeptical of the evolutionary explanation he poses for inactivity.
I don't believe large numbers of people were typically thrown out of hunter gatherer bands for incompetence, surely not more than inactive people (http://books.google.com.au/books?sitesec=reviews&id=ljxS8gUlgqgC). And in how many crisis situations is doing nothing really the best option? Hiding from a predator would surely be one of only a few.
Thanks, Kaj and PJ. The Instant Irresistible Motivation video seems to ring true with me, I am currently in a very motivationally difficult sitation, so we'll see if it works out.
I'd like to know more about how to banish negative motivations too: I seem to have a bunch of them. Is there anything I can read now about that?
From experience, I find that the acronym uniqueness threshold is about four: if an acronym is at least four letters long, it will be easy to search Wikipedia or Google for its expansion, but if it's only three letters long, it may be impossible.
Anyway, I'm guessing that EFT is the Emotional Freedom Technique, RMI is Relaxed Mental Inquiry, and NLP is Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
The "Instant Irresistible Motivation video" link is broken. Was this what you were referring to?
If you haven't already, do check out Eby's Instant Irresistible Motivation video for learning how to create positive motivation.
Interesting. In fact, it seems to mesh with the process I've successfully used to do things like cleaning my desk.
Unfortunately, many of the tasks I have to do don't lend themselves to the visualization in step 1. How does one visualize having studied for an exam, or completed an exercise routine?
Now, this is where the fun bit comes in. Pay attention to how your brain just successfully defended you against changing your assumptions.
Specifically, the assumption that your parents need to be proud of something... when, in fact, normal healthy parents are proud of their kids when they make mudpies or say "gaga" or something.
To put it another way, your brain has habituated to assuming that your parents' pride is supposed to be conditional on you doing something, and that it's therefore somehow "not right" for you to feel pride in yourself, unless you're doing something that would get your parents to be proud of you.
This is the way SASS imprinting works -- we pay attention to what our parents and peers give us positive and negative SASS for, and then we internalize the algorithms we observe them using, for when to give ourselves (and other people) positive or negative SASS.
This is how we acquire our (effective) value systems, and the way to undo it is by changing the rules under which our self-supplied SASS pellets and shocks are delivered.
Part of doing this is just realizing that it's really you who controls your own SASS allocation. Just now, by me askin...
What about peers (past, present, or imagined)?
They can also be imprimers, but your parents tend to get first crack at you and lay down a lot of stuff before you even have any conscious/verbal comprehension of what's going on. Fixing a block generally has to happen at the earliest point where a rule was created, not where it was later simply reinforced. Otherwise, they have a tendency to come back, which is really annoying.
I'm getting a little better at imagining it, and I can believe it of my mom, but I don't know if it's actually true of my father. And I think it would be good to want to believe the truth, whatever it is.
If I set the thermostat on my wall to a temperature that it's not at, does that mean I'm disbelieving the truth of the current temperature?
The objective here is not for you to believe something happened that didn't happen. Rather, it's to correct your mistaken judgment that your level of self-pride is to be determined by your quantity of effortful and worthy accomplishments, as judged by others.
Specifically, what happens when you imagine that your parents were always proud of you, is that your brain is forced to realize (emotionally, not just intellectu...
I already suspected that negative motivation is bad... And that pain is not a good long-term motivator!
"Therefore attempts to overcome procrastination or akrasia via willpower expenditure are fundamentally misguided. We should instead be trying to remove whatever negative motivation it is that holds us back,"
Problem is there is no positive motivation for anything for me! I know terrible things to which there is no counter! Like roko, even if that was proven false, dunno currently as you can't read about it!!! But I have 3 other theories that are as bad! Of...
"You just have to imagine that every bruise is a hickey from the universe," Finn says, "and everyone wants to get with the universe.".
Sometimes, when the pain level of not having done a task grows too high - like just before a deadline - it'll push you to do it. But this fools people into thinking that negative consequences alone will be a motivator, so they try to psyche themselves up by thinking about how bad it would be to fail. In truth, this is only making things worse, as an increased chance of failure will increase the negative motivation that's going on.
It appears that this part confuses two aspects of negative motivation: the magnitude of the consequences vs. the chance of fa...
Hi Kaj, Eby,
For naturally struggling people one useful thing can be to find ways how to doing nothing can be useful and healthy. I have very good experiences with intermittent fasting - for an NSP "just suffer and deal with it" i.e. fasting is FAR easier than "cook something weird, unusual and healthy". But an unexpected advantage I found was what through IF positive motivation and energy kicks in, through the good old hunger pathway. Apparently the old adage "stay hungry" is true in a non-symbolic way as well: a bit of fasting puts the body in a generally motivated, pushed, "let's go hunting" mode.
Another of Eby's theses is that negative motivation is, for the most part, impossible to overcome via willpower.
Doesn't that constitute an immediate refutation of the "instant irresistible motivation" strategy? In other words, it takes willpower to remove the negative motivation, or to employ the desktop strategy, for example...
Thanks, Kaj and PJ. The Instant Irresistible Motivation video seems to ring true with me, I am currently in a very motivationally difficult sitation, so we'll see if it works out.
I'd like to know more about how to banish negative motivations too: I seem to have a bunch of them. Is there anything I can read now about that?
Thanks, Kaj and PJ. The Instant Irresistible Motivation video seems to ring true with me, I am currently in a very motivationally difficult sitation, so we'll see if it works out.
I'd like to know more about how to banish negative motivations too: I seem to have a bunch of them. Is there anything I can read now about that?
This post doesn't agree with my experience. Shameful as it is, I work fastest when I have a deadline to be afraid of.
Construal Level Theory (the one used to explain near-far mode) can also be used to explain self-control. One of the creators of the theory explains in a paper here%20construal%20levels%20and%20self%20control.pdf) and another paper is here.
...The authors propose that self-control involves making decisions and behaving in a manner consistent with high-level versus low-level construals of a situation. Activation of high-level construals (which capture global, superordinate, primary features of an event) should lead to greater self-control than activation of lo
Note: this post is basically just summarizing some of PJ Eby's freely available writings on the topic of pain/gain motivation and presenting them in a form that's easier for the LW crowd to digest. I claim no credit for the ideas presented here, other than the credit for summarizing them.
EDIT: Note also Eby's comments and corrections to my summary at this comment.
Eby proposes that we have two different forms of motivation: positive ("gain") motivation, which drives us to do things, and negative ("pain") motivation, which drives us to avoid things. Negative motivation is a major source of akrasia and is mostly harmful for getting anything done. However, sufficiently large amounts of negative motivation can momentarily push us to do things, which frequently causes people to confuse the two.
To understand the function of negative motivation, first consider the example of having climbed to a tree to avoid a predator. There's not much you can do other than wait and hope the predator goes away, and if you move around, you risk falling out of the tree. So your brain gets flooded with signals that suppress activity and tell it to keep your body still. It is only if the predator ends up climbing up the tree that the danger becomes so acute that you're instead pushed to flee.
What does this have to do with modern-day akrasia? Back in the tribal environment, elicting the disfavor of the tribe could be a death sentence. Be cast out by the tribe, and you likely wouldn't live for long. One way to elict disfavor is to be unmasked as incompetent in some important matter, and a way to avoid such an unmasking is to simply avoid doing anything where to consequences of failure would be severe.
You might see why this would cause problems. Sometimes, when the pain level of not having done a task grows too high - like just before a deadline - it'll push you to do it. But this fools people into thinking that negative consequences alone will be a motivator, so they try to psyche themselves up by thinking about how bad it would be to fail. In truth, this is only making things worse, as an increased chance of failure will increase the negative motivation that's going on.
Negative motivation is also a reason why we might discover a productivity or self-help technique, find it useful, and then after a few successful tries stop using it - seemingly for no reason. Eby uses the terms "naturally motivated person" and "naturally struggling person" to refer to people that are more driven by positive motivation and more driven by negative motivation, respectively. For naturally struggling people, the main motivation for behavior is the need to get away from bad things. If you give them a productivity or self-help technique, they might apply it to get rid of their largest problems... and then, when the biggest source of pain is gone, they momentarily don't have anything major to flee from, so they lose their motivation to apply the technique. To keep using the technique, they'd need to have positive motivation that'd make them want to do things instead of just not wanting to do things.
In contrast to negative motivation, positive motivation is basically just doing things because you find them fun. Watching movies, playing video games, whatever. When you're in a state of positive motivation, you're trying to gain things, obtain new resources or experiences. You're entirely focused on the gain, instead of the pain. If you're playing a video game, you know that no matter how badly you lose in the game, the negative consequences are all contained in the game and don't reach to the real world. That helps your brain stay in gain mode. But if a survival override kicks in, the negative motivation will overwhelm the positive and take away much of the pleasure involved. This is a likely reason for why a hobby can stop being fun once you're doing it for a living - it stops being a simple "gain" activity with no negative consequences even if you fail, and instead becomes mixed with "pain" signals.
And now, if you’re up the tree and the tiger is down there waiting for you, does it make sense for you to start looking for a better spot to sit in… Where you’ll get better sunshine or shade or where there’s, oh, there’s some fruit over there? Should you be seeking to gain in that particular moment?
Hell no! Right? Because you don’t want to take a risk of falling or getting into a spot where the tiger can jump up and get you or anything like that. Your brain wants you to sit tight, stay put, shut up, don’t rock the boat… until the crisis is over. It wants you to sit tight. That’s the “pain brain”.
In the “pain brain” mode… this, by the way, is the main reason why people procrastinate, this is the fundamental reason why people put off doing things… because once your brain has one of these crisis overrides it will go, “Okay conserve energy: don’t do anything.”
-- PJ Eby, "Why Can't I Change?"
So how come some important situations don't push us into a state of negative motivation, even though failure might have disastrous consequences? "Naturally motivated" people rarely stop to think about the bad consequences of whatever they're doing, being too focused on what they have to gain. If they meet setbacks, they'll bounce back much faster than "naturally struggling" people. What causes the difference?
Part of the difference is probably inborn brain chemistry. Another major part, though, is your previous experiences. The emotional systems driving our behavior don't ultimately do very complex reasoning. Much of what they do is simply cache lookups. Does this experience resemble one that led to negative consequences in the past? Activate survival overrides! Since negative motivation will suppress positive motivation, it can be easier to end up in a negative state than a positive one. Furthermore, the experiences we have also shape our thought processes in general. If, early on in your life, you do things in "gain" mode that end up having traumatic consequences, you learn to avoid the "gain" mode in general. You become a "naturally struggling" person, one who will view everything through a pessimistic lens, and expect failure in every turn. You literally only perceive the bad sides in everything. A "naturally motivated" person, on the other hand, will primarily only perceive the good sides. (Needless to say, these are the endpoints in a spectrum, so it's not like you're either 100% struggling or 100% successful.)
Another of Eby's theses is that negative motivation is, for the most part, impossible to overcome via willpower. Consider the function of negative motivation as a global signal that prevents us from doing things that seem too dangerous. If we could just use willpower to override the signal at any time, that would result in a lot of people being eaten by predators and being cast out of the tribe. In order to work, a drive that blocks behavior needs to actually consistently block behavior. Therefore attempts to overcome procrastination or akrasia via willpower expenditure are fundamentally misguided. We should instead be trying to remove whatever negative motivation it is that holds us back, for otherwise we are not addressing the real root of the problem. On the other hand, if we succeed in removing the negative motivation and replacing it with positive motivation, we can make any experience as fun and enjoyable as playing a video game. (If you haven't already, do check out Eby's Instant Irresistible Motivation video for learning how to create positive motivation.)