I experienced physical pain when reading about those bills and threatening letters, and I thus reading this took some hours in three parts. Still feeling uneasy just by having this tab open.
I wonder if this sort of reaction was what you were talking about?
Dude... I'm not a qualified psychiatrist, but I THINK YOU MIGHT HAVE A SLIGHT UGH FIELD AROUND BILLS... ;-0
It is a head trip to see a pet term for a quirk of behavior reflected back at me on the internet as an official name for a phenomenon. More interesting, this is the first I've ever heard of temporal difference learning or displacement activity being related to that idea... although both are interesting angles.
Personally, I think one of the areas where the term really shines is helping you get a handle on issues as a matter of dealing with "daily life" long before you become a "rationalist super being" or whatever. The framing of "ugh fields" lets you talk about issues in a way (1) that does not attribute any kind of essential badness to anyone, (2) that helps you adopt a scientifically curious orientation to the phenomenon, and (3) that has various reasonably helpful implications for management. Part of the term's value also came from being "helpfully ridiculous", because its not like a theory of "ugh fields" could even really be deeply true or anything, because as a model it is obviously too simple... so it was safe to use for a while and be very comfortable throwing away if a better theory comes along :-)
For example, the idea ...
If I remember correctly, it was my term for a problem that I was dealing with more than Anna was, but that was back in 2001-ish when we were both part of a really keen group of people in a seminar on complex systems theory. There were generally 4-6 people at each meeting from a larger circle of about 9 and the ideas would bounce around so much it was hard to really take personal credit for anything with a straight face. Steve Rayhawk was also part of the group.
For ugh fields, the term really shines in social groups where people are trying to coordinate around things that can acquire ugh fields because they help explain some of the difficulties that come up around reminders/nagging/comments. Relatively innocent comments can be heard as "nagging" if they remind people of ugh fields that they're dealing with. From experience on both sides of the equation, nagging about X usually makes the ugh field worse, whereas asking someone if they have an ugh field around X is likely to be a first step towards a real solution. It would make sense to me as a useful term in Benton House that Anna might introduce and that might get a whole new set of meanings in that context.
In the sam...
I suffer from this severely and pervasively, and was already aware of that before reading this post. So I just wanted to comment that your post fits spot-on with my experience. I tend to develop ugh fields around projects at work when I get stuck on them for awhile, and get emails from people asking when they will be done, and start to fear getting email about them at all, and then about thinking about them, and so on.
I have also gone through periods of 'ugh'ness centered on my voicemail box and my email inbox, each time when I knew or suspected they contained items likely to make me feel shittier about myself for whatever reason (e.g. reminding me about some thing I was in the process of failing to get done.)
Well, the Ugh Field around emails doesn't start as being about email; it starts as being about some specific item in the inbox. But then as I avoid checking email for days in order to avoid looking at that item (and more from the same party), I start to realize that there are probably now other important things in the inbox that I haven't seen, since I haven't been reading it; and I probably don't want to read those either, especially since I'm probably now late in replying to them.
And so on.
I observed an ugh field today: making sandwiches.
Around lunch time, I announced I was going out to pick up some lunch.
'Why don't you just make a sandwich?'
I thought about touching slices of deli meat (are they fresh enough? how would I know?) and placing them on the bread (how many slices? how to arrange them?), a quick flurry of negative associations all jostled together, and the definite outcome of the decision was, "No, I'll just go pick something up."
"How about if I make the sandwiches?".
A roast beef sandwich toasted in the oven with melted cheese? Delicious! "Yes, please."
"You are so lazy!"
Lazy? I was willing to get in the car and drive somewhere and pick up food. Certainly making sandwiches would be less effort. But for whatever reasons, I've conditioned myself through rather irrational negative associations to avoid even thinking about making them.
This phenomenon you call Ugh Fields sounds like a less serious form of PTSD. While most people think PTSD is about constantly reliving the traumatic event, one of the most important symptoms is that the patient tries to avoid thinking through their trauma when it does come up.[1] Something will trigger memory of their trauma, but then they'll force themselves to stop thinking about it while their mood suffers. One of the methods for treating PTSD [2] involves getting the patient to actually think seriously about the trauma that happened to them, talk it through out loud with somebody, and that confrontation with what they've constantly avoided helps them get over the negative conditioning.
I'm fairly certain both Ugh Fields and PTSD describe the same mental process just at different levels of severity
I have ugh fields about people.
That fact makes me really sad. I was aware of having formed some negative associations, and of shying away from certain social situations, but what you're describing pretty well matches what's going on: I've had unpleasant experiences with a given person in the past, leading to some evasion, which kept us a little bit distant, probably leading to more awkwardness ... and at this point, I almost literally flinch at the person's name. When it comes up in conversation with someone else, I feel unhappy, regardless of the context.
And we don't even dislike each other! We're actually pretty similar, we have good friends in common, and I think we'd get along pretty well if it weren't for the above. We've had some good times together.
I've tried to address this directly by making a point of spending time with the person and noticing that it's usually fine. But every once in a while it isn't, and then I retreat again. This suggests to me that it won't work until I address what causes the occasional discomfort, which I've also tried to do, so far without success. I wonder what to do next.
Here's my own little example.
I use a web-based newswire service for sending out press releases, and the process of submitting a release through them used to be a pain -- it required writing stupid confirmation emails with compulsory quotes from long, badly designed web pages, making choices from unexplained options I still don't understand, phone calls in the middle of the night due to Russia / US time zone difference and other annoyances.
Recently they have completely redesigned the submission process, and now it's a breeze -- easy, quick, even pleasant. I already submitted several releases via the new pipeline, but I still remain negatively conditioned by the previous experience -- I still flinch every time I prepare a release.
The 'flinch' seems to have faded a bit, perhaps thanks to my constant self-reminding that the new process is actually pleasant, but it's still there.
Key to this is framing the "take control" action as a "positive" outcome enabler will facilitate action, as Kaj and PJ have already told us.
Actually, positive framing doesn't help -- it just intensifies the conflict and the need for willpower.
What does help is fully engaging with the flinch in order to locate the center of the "ugh field". When training people, I look for the flinch and then immediately steer them towards it.. Avoiding the feeling, OTOH, ensures that you can't access any of the information that creates the feeling in the first place.
(If you've looked at the seventh chapter I sent you, you'll have seen both my advice to "lean into the pain" to "find the fence", as well as one method for dealing with the most overwhelming types of "ugh".)
but it seemed like a good idea that, once you have done that, you should find an alternative plan that focuses on achieveing a positive outcome.
If you simply remove the negative, this focus shift tends to happen automatically. And by "tends to", I mean, like every single frickin' time (lots of different clients with different situations).
Per the pain/gain post, when you are not experiencing negative motivation, possible choices of action tend to become mighty clear. The routine thing that people say after the last negative in an area is removed is, "Oh, I think I'll do X. Wonder why i didn't think of that before."
OTOH, if you have to make an effort to focus on the positive, it's an indication that you're pushing against something. If you actually remove that something, you don' t have to push -- the door just flies open when you touch it.
I love this post.
The really depressing thing about my "ugh fields" is how they stop me from doing things that really aren't even difficult or time-consuming, like filling out a one-page form and putting it in the mail. On the other hand, this is just as likely to come up with things that may be difficult or time-consuming, but are in some sense 'fun' for me: for instance, I've found it steadily harder to buckle down and study as I've progressed through school, in a topic (mathematics) that I started in because it was fun for me.
I hope maybe having the phrase "ugh field" to associate to this, will remind me to do something about it. I'd like to say it will improve my life, but I'll have to go live some of my life for a while and see how improved it is.
I guess what I should do is make some sort of rule: When I encounter an Ugh Field, I should immediately do whatever thing it is I'm feeling the 'ugh' about.
I have to say, this and the previous post have significantly improved my life. I am really looking forward to any more posts along these lines.
Just to play devil's advocate for a bit...
Patterns of "treatment -> cure" are notorious for being able to trick a percentage of people into believing in treatments via confirmation bias and the fact that many problems seem to have background rates of natural remission.
I see from your longer "testimony" that you've been dealing with depression for a while and then more recently became romantically with someone. Depression is one of those things that frequently has "natural remissions" and improved social circumstances would be expected to go along with this based on some ev-psych theories of depression.
This is not to say that the theories didn't really help, just to point out that there may be other explanations worth keeping in mind as well. Can you any way to test whether the theories from lesswrong truly were causal factors in the recovery from depression?
I flinch every time I think about Ugh Fields. ;).
BTW, wondering why you chose to be so specific about TDL, rather than just saying 'reinforcement', which is a term both appropriate (IMHO) and easier to understand for broader group of people.
I'm surprised that nobody's pointed out the dual phenomenon of "yay fields", whereby a pleasurable stimulus's affect is transferred to its antecedents.
The field of behavior modification calls this "conditioning", and "higher-order conditioning" if the chain has more than two stimuli.
I'm presently trying to overcome ugh fields by giving myself chocolate every time I do something stressful. Will see how it goes.
The "usually involves comfort" link doesn't go anywhere.
Otherwise a good article; I like the name ugh field.
Sry if there are any spelling errors, or if the format is not good, my first post here.
Prolonged participation here does have some effects, but it's probably best to improve your spelling and grammar in other contexts, since we don't have an unusual standard in that regard (just unusual adherence to the standard). Please rely less on abbreviations and be more careful with sentence structure.
Scott Alexander wrote a solid follow up to this piece last year.
TLDR; the brain obviously wishes to avoid pain, but not at the cost of like, avoiding thinking about painful things at all costs.
Like, you don't want to be eaten by a lion, so you avoid doing things that lead to you being eaten by lions.
But this pain avoidance shouldn't compromise on your epistemics; you shouldn't go so far to avoid pain as to avoid thinking about lions at all. this doesn't work.
This is potentially also what's going on with ugh fields. avoiding thinking...
This is very similar to a basic phenomena described by Internal Family Systems (a psychotherapy model), i.e. 'parts' of our minds seek to protect us by 'generating ugh fields' when we think about certain things.
The first time I read this, a few things came to mind as possible ugh fields in my own mind, such as "borrowing/lending" or "making conversation", but on reflection my behavior isn't consistently ugh on these subjects.
A powerful ugh field I do seem to have, based on observations of my own past behavior, is one of imposition. Courses of action which involve imposing on another person are slow to even occur to me as options, which to my intuition seems more like what an Ugh Field would feel like from the inside, rather than a mere conscio...
I agree with your basic analysis of how the "ugh field" works, but I wouldn't be so quick to categorically label it as a problem - cultivating an "ugh field" could also be an effective anti-akrasia technique if honed properly. What if you manage to train your usual (wasteful) displacement activities to trigger the "ugh field", so that your new "displacement" activities become what you originally intended to do to begin with?
I'd like to think that I've encountered some success by basically doing this myself - I probab...
My experience is that ugh fields are invariably unfortunate in their effects. While it might indeed be useful to have a disgust reaction to candy or video games, the "ugh fields" seem not to be visceral disgust, but visceral, conditioned-pain-induced tendencies to cut off thought. Shadows you hide from in your own mind.
My experience is that the more ugh fields I can clear out, and the better I can get at not accumulating them, the more I can actually honestly think, can notice choices rather than just feeling stuck, and can find myself with energy to take on new projects. That is, there seems to be a general property of "having a clear mind" or "facing things" vs "hunkering down with willful tunnel vision lest I run into something painful", and allowing or clearing out an ugh field around an email or a broken conversation or whatever it is affects my overall state, not just that one area.
I found The Flinch (Julien Smith) to be a good read! It’s less a book, and more an extended self-help essay. It was also useful to approach it as learning a soft skill, rather than explicitly gaining novel information.
Most readers will agree the term "ugh fields" describes the avoidance part of basic procrastination. Finding an brand level scientific term for it with an emotional storytelling soundbite with only three letters is the part that needs to be acknowlegded here – kudos ... but flattery, ugh, read next article.
This resonates slightly with the idea that Robert Pirsig put forward in either ZMM or Lila. I don't remember where, but I think it was ZMM.
His hypothesis out there was of course that there is a driving force of quality, which I guess would be rejected by most LW-ers. To be honest, I used to kind of believe in that thing and did identify with being spiritual, till I read the MAMQ sequence.
Nonetheless, I highly recommend both of these books. Pirsig beautifully demonstrates how the feeling , happens before the process of active cognition. If rationality is in...
The subtlety with the Ugh Field is that the flinch occurs before you start to consciously think about how to deal with the Unhappy Thing, meaning that you never deal with it, and you don't even have the option of dealing with it in the normal run of things. I find it frightening that my lizard brain could implicitly be making life decisions for me, without even asking my permission!
Relational frame theory is a theory of language cognition that attempts to explain this. The basic idea is that we form associations between thoughts, and when we think of ...
Thanks for sharing the new name and/or new idea about this Ugh Field.
At first I skimmed your paper, but I soon decided to read it word-for-word.
As I read it, I scanned my memories (primarily of my life, but also of the lives of people I had known) looking through a filter for where the putative Ugh Field concept could increase my understanding of life.
What I have to report for now is I think I shall keep the idea in my head and wait until I see the Ugh (Barrier) "happening" to myself or someone else in real life. I like doing field experiments in the field of rationality.
My solution to ugh fields is to develop an ugh field around ugh fields...when I'm about to flinch away from something now, I feel a strong aversion towards that feeling and throw myself headlong into whatever it was I was trying to avoid.
I think these ugh fields are typicall called "repressed memories". You are providing an explanation for them, saying that they are caused by conditioning (classical or operant? I am not sure.)
if the soil of the "ugh field" is stress, which produces the classic (and sometimes irrational) neuroendrocrine cascade within seconds, then this lecture may prove helpful ~ 'Stress, Neurodegeneration and Individual Differences' by Robert Sapolsky http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1877467554618436978#
from the The Grass Traveling Scientist Program ~ Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, Stanford University's Dept. of Biological Sciences in a seminar sponsored by the Dept. of VCAPP and the Northern Rocky Mtn. Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience.
There are things one should not just accept and absorb and they are those things that harm others or are incompatible withe the other person having the same freedoms as you
Tl;Dr version: Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an "Ugh Field"1. The Ugh Field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing huge costs.
A problem with the human mind — your human mind — is that it's a horrific kludge that will fail when you most need it not to. The Ugh Field failure mode is one of those really annoying failures. The idea is simple: if a person receives constant negative conditioning via unhappy thoughts whenever their mind goes into a certain zone of thought, they will begin to develop a psychological flinch mechanism around the thought. The "Unhappy Thing" — the source of negative thoughts — is typically some part of your model of the world that relates to bad things being likely to happen to you.
A key part of the Ugh Field phenomenon is that, to start with, there is no flinch, only negative real consequences resulting from real physical actions in the problem area. Then, gradually, you begin to feel the emotional hit when you are planning to take physical actions in the problem area. Then eventually, the emotional hit comes when you even begin to think about the problem. The reason for this may be that your brain operates a temporal difference learning (TDL) algorithm. Your brain propagates the psychological pain "back to the earliest reliable stimulus for the punishment". If you fail or are punished sufficiently many times in some problem area, and acting in that area is always preceeded by thinking about it, your brain will propagate the psychological pain right back to the moment you first begin to entertain a thought about the problem, and hence cut your conscious optimizing ability right out of the loop. Related to this is engaging in a displacement activity: this is some activity that usually involves comfort, done instead of confronting the problem. Perhaps (though this is speculative) the comforting displacement activity is there to counterbalance the psychological pain that you experienced just because you thought about the problem.
For example, suppose that you started off in life with a wandering mind and were punished a few times for failing to respond to official letters. Your TDL algorithm began to propagate the pain back to the moment you looked at an official letter or bill. As a result, you would be less effective than average at responding, so you got punished a few more times. Henceforth, when you received a bill, you got the pain before you even opened it, and it laid unpaid on the mantelpiece until a Big Bad Red late payment notice with an $25 fine arrived. More negative conditioning. Now even thinking about a bill, form or letter invokes the flinch response, and your lizard brain has fully cut you out out. You find yourself spending time on internet time-wasters, comfort food, TV, computer games, etc. Your life may not obviously be a disaster, but this is only because you can't see the alternative paths that it could have taken if you had been able to take advantage of the opportunities that came as letters and forms with deadlines.
The subtlety with the Ugh Field is that the flinch occurs before you start to consciously think about how to deal with the Unhappy Thing, meaning that you never deal with it, and you don't even have the option of dealing with it in the normal run of things. I find it frightening that my lizard brain could implicitly be making life decisions for me, without even asking my permission!
Possible antidotes to Ugh Field problem:
1: (Credit for this idea goes to Anna Salamon and Jennifer Rodriguez-Müller. Upvotes go to me, as I wrote the darn article)