This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for April 16-30.
It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
- Established a useful new habit
- Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
- Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
- Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
- Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
- Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
- Tried doing any of the above and failed
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to cata for starting the Group Rationality Diary posts, and to commenters for participating.
Previous diary: April 1-15
Next diary: May 1-15
This is really too strong but it's close. I did use short meditation breaks a few times the last week to question and balance my uneasyness (which I know to be adequate to my current situation but nonetheless). I did this after being exposed to meditation the second time by LessWrong (the first one was this post and the other was the mediation session on the European Community Weekend in Berlin).
So I noticed the following:
Meditation does calm me
Meditation does not give me more clarity of my emotions (yet?)
Meditation allows me to perceive sound (environmental noises), taste (this surprised me) and my heartbeat more intensely/clearly
In fact the presentation on meditation and my successive tries let me update significantly toward meditation being beneficial.