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handoflixue comments on Suffering as attention-allocational conflict - Less Wrong
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Have you pushed the limits of how flimsy they can be? Can you tell yourself in a serious mental tone of voice "My horoscope said I have to pick X" and have it go away?
Can you do the full analysis and have confident answer without getting it to go away?
My quick mental simulations say "yes" to both and that it's not so much 'having an explanation' as it is deliberately flipping the mental "dismiss alarm" button, which you do only when "you" are comfortable enough to.
This actually sparks another thought: When I was a kid, I got very annoyed with the way my body let me know things. I understood that sometimes it would get hungry, or need to use the bathroom, but sometimes I had to wait before I could viably handle these needs. I thus started viewing these states as "mental alarms", and eventually managed to "install a dismiss alarm button." I now refer to it as my internal messaging system: My body sends me a message, and I get a little "unread message" indicator. I'll suffer until I read the message, but then I have no obligation to actually act on it. If I ignore the message, I usually get another one in an hour or so, since my body still has this need.
At first, a dismissed alarm would last ~5 minutes. Now I can actually dismiss my sense of hunger for a couple days if food just doesn't come up. Dismissing an alarm when I have easy access to take care of something (for instance, trying to ignore hunger when someone offers me a nice meal) is much, much harder.
It does run in to the failure state that I sometimes forget to do much of anything for hours, because I'm focused on my work and just automatically dismiss all of my alarms. This occasionally results in a couple hours of unproductive work until I pause, evaluate the reason I'm having trouble, and realize I haven't had anything to eat all day :)
Can you use this for non-physical signals, such as purely emotional pain?
The "dismiss alarm" button doesn't work as well for pain of either sort - I can temporarily suppress it, but it will keep coming back until I do something to actually resolve it - for physical pain, this is generally pain killers. For emotional pain, some combination of "vegging out" on mindless activities (TV, WOW, etc.).
For mild pain, it's pretty easy to just dismiss alarm and ignore it. For moderate pain, I usually have to convert it in to something else. This is easier to do with physical pain, where I can tweak the sensation directly. I can induce specific emotional states, but it's harder and less stable. For intense pain, I'll usually be unable to function even if I'm doing this, and it will sometimes hit a point where I can't redirect it.
Long term, persistent pain is also much more exhausting to deal with; this is probably some of why emotional pain is more of an issue for me - it tends to be a lot less fleeting.
I managed to use a visualization of a "car sickness switch" that helped tremendously, though the switch did keep turning itself on every couple minutes.
I need to work on being more explicit with this- that happens to me without the interrupt flag ever being set.
Yesterday at the end of our LW meetup one of the attendee's was talking about how he hadn't eaten because he got sucked into the conversation, and we were giving him shit about it since we were meeting in the middle of the food court. I even asked myself I was hungry.. "nah, not really". As soon as I get home I get the message "you have a serious caloric deficit, eat a 2000kcal meal"