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HungryTurtle comments on Emotional regulation, Part I: a problem summary - Less Wrong
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From my understanding of emotional ranges I would say this statement places too much importance on a biological type. There are definitely people who are born with chemical imbalances that result in fluctuating, diminished, or exaggerated emotional ranges, but for the majority, it is more accurate to say that emotional response habitually and cognitively shaped. I would suggest that this statement is more accurate of your situation:
You have developed a belief system that has led to a pattern of habituation that dampens and redirects your emotional outputs.
Strong belief in rational/other ideology -> pursuing certain actions -> overtime actions become habitualized-> actions develop new cognitive and emotional responses that result in dampening and redirecting strong emotional output.
I would suggest that when you are faced with situations that contradict your ideological base it questions the entire system. You are a cognitively gifted person, so if you encounter one of these situations your mind goes into overdrive reanalyzing all previous evaluations. The result is all the "little annoying things that you have forced yourself to do" over the past months lose their rationale causing a huge flood of negative/doubtful emotions. I have experienced this myself, in my mind I think of it as the over thinkers equivalent of anger management issues.
People who have anger management do not know how to deal with little things that make them mad. Their anger is improperly managed and slowly builds up into a giant torrent of emotions, until the time comes when they explode.
My advice would be a better balance between growth and fortification. Growth comes from pushing yourself to reach new limits; however, if you do not give yourself a break every now and then it is dangerous. Fortification is dealing with the immediate protection of happiness and stability. The majority is excessive in their fortifications and lacks an impetus for growth. You are the minority in your incredibly strong impetus for growth. Just tone it down sometimes. If you like something sometimes you need to do it regardless of rationale. If you don’t like something, sometimes you need a break from it, regardless of rationale. If the majority of your day is spent justifying doing things you find to be annoying, you might want to rethink some of your routines.
Best of luck.
Yes. But IME one's early to mid-twenties are for self-flagellation. You essentially become your own parent, and you don't start out good at it. The effect starts to peter out around 28 or so. Ideally you end up with a more precise model of your strengths and weaknesses than you had at 18.
Makes me wonder about the average age of the "optimization culture" on LW and its associated blogs and forums and such.
I am guessing IME means (in my experience?). I agree that the early twenties of a person's life should ideally be a time of exploration where unhindered by health, career, or familial obligations a person is able to be critical of their chosen course. That said, in my opinion, self-flagellation is taking it too far. What's more, while I do believe that this period of self-criticism and path seeking has an endpoint, I do not think you have accurately placed it.
What was your rationale for making this claim? I hope you do not take offense at this, but I am guessing that your reasoning is due to the fact that you are somewhere around 28-32 and currently feeling very confident/happy with your life navigation in relation to your earlier twenties? I don’t think broad generalizations about the end of a stage in life should be made purely from personal experience, especially when you are still culturally young.
I would suggest that there might still be dimensions of your strengths and weakness that have yet to be explored, and to not give up on the self-flagelating yet.
Yes, in my experience -- which includes observing others -- first world kids who have the luxury of setting high expectations for themselves tend to beat themselves up most when they are in the midst of discovering whether or not they can actually meet those expectations. They do that for a few years and then figure out how hard they're actually capable of working, and at what pace.
I think the self-abuse is just another way of describing what it's like to not know how to intelligently push yourself. You end up pushing yourself too hard before you establish a sustainable rhythm.
I'm 33. I would call myself only moderately confident and happy, but that in itself is a major improvement on my 20s... when I was floundering around doing the above. I'm still getting better at it all the time. Around 28-29 I passed some kind of competency threshold and got slightly more competent than incompetent, with an attendant drop in pain from self-abuse.
I would like to say that this explanation you've put together manages to sum up the most recent period of my life perfectly. (I'm 27 and 9 months, even the age range fits well.)
Considering the cognitive load I was under earlier this morning trying to resolve problems related to exactly this, The feeling that I'm left with is the one Eliezer mentioned in http://lesswrong.com/lw/of/dissolving_the_question/ where all of the unexplained bits and pieces that I was going crazy over are just gone.
I even thought "But wait, what if there is something I missed that would make this a bad explanation that I'm letting myself get fast talked into." (mental review) "Can't find a thing, it really does fit every bit of evidence I can think of."
Thanks!
Wow, you're welcome! Happy to help.
I completely misread self-flagellation as a hyperbole for self-criticism. Thanks for substituting it with self-abuse to help me out. I really do apologize if my tone or words came off as hostile or aggressive. I really like your idea
It is exciting finding something you have never thought of yourself. I think it is a good idea, but I still do not agree that 28-29 is the endpoint. I think you are correct in calling it a threshold, but not a final threshold.
I am a runner. When I first started running I could barely run 2 miles. It was hell. I kept trying to push myself to do it faster, which ultimately was self-abuse. My muscles were not ready, my heart was not ready, my bones were not ready, and mentally I was not ready. After about a month of running 2 miles on the weekdays and 3-4 miles on Saturday, I finally found myself able to run at a speed I liked without killing myself. I find this to be analogous to you at 28-29 being able to manage your time where you were able to be competent without self-abuse. My point though is after breaking that threshold my body was ready to undertake a new threshold. I then began running 5 miles every weekday and 7 on the weekend. The first time I did this it felt exactly the same as two miles, hell again. However, my adjustment to running 5 miles only took 2 weeks, instead of the month it had taken me to get used to 2 miles. When I transitioned to 7 miles daily it still took about two weeks to get used to it without any pain, but the pain was significantly less than my starting pains. I know this is an analogy, but I believe to some extent this applies to life navigation as well. It is probably a much slower process, but I think it is possible to reach new competency thresholds until somewhere between 40-60. I apologize for the large range; this is a hypothesis that I have yet to have the means or method to verify. The idea though is that there is some point in age where you cease to be able to learn radically new systems of thought, habit, or emotion.
When I ask myself the question "is this actually true about me?", it seems plausible. Based on my reactions to events, I think that a lot of my energy, motivation, and self-esteem is tied up in long-term plans. Anything that makes me question "is this really what I should be doing with this period of my life?" makes me very uncomfortable. I don't like rethinking my plans, because I've invested so much in them, but I've trained myself that I have to do the things that make me most uncomfortable, that making-me-uncomfortable or being painful to think about is a sign that I absolutely have to rethink something.
I don't know how much effect this has on my emotional outbursts, though. They're more an automatic reflex to frustration.
This comes across as one of those things that would sound too nice if it were true about me. I want to be that kind of person, so I can't trust my judgement on whether or not I am that kind of person. I do think a lot about personal growth, though, and my justification is that I have a more rigid than average personality, that I'm more uncomfortable in new situations than most people, etc. In order to combat this, I have to work harder than the average person.