Recently, someone on the Facebook page asked if anyone had used rationality to target anxieties.  I have, so I thought I’d share my LessWrong-inspired strategies.  This is my first post, so feedback and formatting help are welcome.  

First things first: the techniques developed by this community are not a panacea for mental illness.  They are way more effective than chance and other tactics at reducing normal bias, and I think many mental illnesses are simply cognitive biases that are extreme enough to get noticed.  In other words, getting a probability question about cancer systematically wrong does not disrupt my life enough to make the error obvious.  When I believe (irrationally) that I will get fired because I asked for help at work, my life is disrupted.  I become non-functional, and the error is clear.

Second: the best way to attack anxiety is to do the things that make your anxieties go away.  That might seem too obvious to state, but I’ve definitely been caught in an “analysis loop,” where I stay up all night reading self-help guides only to find myself non-functional in the morning because I didn’t sleep.  If you find that attacking an anxiety with Bayesian updating is like chopping down the Washington monument with a spoon, but getting a full night’s sleep makes the monument disappear completely, consider the sleep.  Likewise for techniques that have little to no scientific evidence, but are a good placebo.  A placebo effect is still an effect.

Finally, like all advice, this comes with Implicit Step Zero:  “Have enough executive function to give this a try.”  If you find yourself in an analysis loop, you may not yet have enough executive function to try any of the advice you read.  The advice for functioning better is not always identical to the advice for functioning at all.  If there’s interest in an “improving your executive function” post, I’ll write one eventually.  It will be late, because my executive function is not impeccable.

Simple updating is my personal favorite for attacking specific anxieties.  A general sense of impending doom is a very tricky target and does not respond well to reality.  If you can narrow it down to a particular belief, however, you can amass evidence against it. 

Returning to my example about work: I alieved that I would get fired if I asked for help or missed a day due to illness.  The distinction between believe and alieve is an incredibly useful tool that I immediately integrated when I heard of it.  Learning to make beliefs pay rent is much easier than making harmful aliefs go away.  The tactics are similar: do experiments, make predictions, throw evidence at the situation until you get closer to reality.  Update accordingly.  

The first thing I do is identify the situation and why it’s dysfunctional.  The alief that I’ll get fired for asking for help is not actually articulated when it manifests as an anxiety.  Ask me in the middle of a panic attack, and I still won’t articulate that I am afraid of getting fired.  So I take the anxiety all the way through to its implication.  The algorithm is something like this:

1.       Notice sense of doom
2.       Notice my avoidance behaviors (not opening my email, walking away from my desk)
3.       Ask “What am I afraid of?”
4.       Answer (it's probably silly)
5.       Ask “What do I think will happen?”
6.       Make a prediction about what will happen (usually the prediction is implausible, which is why we want it to go away in the first place)

In the “asking for help” scenario, the answer to “what do I think will happen” is implausible.  It’s extremely unlikely that I’ll get fired for it!  This helps take the gravitas out of the anxiety, but it does not make it go away.*  After (6), it’s usually easy to do an experiment.  If I ask my coworkers for help, will I get fired?  The only way to know is to try. 

…That’s actually not true, of course.  A sense of my environment, my coworkers, and my general competence at work should be enough.  But if it was, we wouldn’t be here, would we?

So I perform the experiment.  And I wait.  When I receive a reply of any sort, even if it’s negative, I make a tick mark on a sheet of paper.  I label it “didn’t get fired.”  Because again, even if it’s negative, I didn’t get fired. 

This takes a lot of tick marks.  Cutting down the Washington monument with a spoon, remember?

The tick marks don’t have to be physical.  I prefer it, because it makes the “updating” process visual.  I’ve tried making a mental note and it’s not nearly as effective.  Play around with it, though.  If you’re anything like me, you have a lot of anxieties to experiment with. 

Usually, the anxiety starts to dissipate after obtaining several tick marks.  Ideally, one iteration of experiments should solve the problem.  But we aren’t ideal; we’re mentally ill.  Depending on the severity of the anxiety, you may need someone to remind you that doom will not occur.  I occasionally panic when I have to return to work after taking a sick day.  I ask my husband to remind me that I won’t get fired.  I ask him to remind me that he’ll still love me if I do get fired.  If this sounds childish, it’s because it is.  Again: we’re mentally ill.  Even if you aren’t, however, assigning value judgements to essentially harmless coping mechanisms does not make sense.  Childish-but-helpful is much better than mature-and-harmful, if you have to choose.

I still have tiny ugh fields around my anxiety triggers.  They don’t really go away.  It’s more like learning not to hit someone you’re angry at.  You notice the impulse, accept it, and move on.  Hopefully, your harmful alief starves to death.

If you perform your experiment and doom does occur, it might not be you.  If you can’t ask your boss for help, it might be your boss.  If you disagree with your spouse and they scream at you for an hour, it might be your spouse.  This isn’t an excuse to blame your problems on the world, but abusive situations can be sneaky.  Ask some trusted friends for a sanity check, if you’re performing experiments and getting doom as a result.  This is designed for situations where your alief is obviously silly.  Where you know it’s silly, and need to throw evidence at your brain to internalize it.  It’s fine to be afraid of genuinely scary things; if you really are in an abusive work environment, maybe you shouldn’t ask for help (and start looking for another job instead). 

*using this technique for several months occasionally stops the anxiety immediately after step 6.  

TL;DR: There is probably some costly problem in your life right now that you are not even aware of. It is not that you are procrastinating on solving it. Rather, this problem has gradually blended into your environment, sinking beneath your conscious awareness to the degree that you fail to recognize it as a problem in the first place.

This post is partially an elaboration on Ugh fields, but there are some decisive differences I want to develop. Let me begin with an anecdote:

For about two years I've had a periodic pain in my right thigh. Gradually, it became worse. At one point I actually had a sort of spasm. Then the pain went away for a few weeks, then it came back, and so forth. All the while I rationalized it as something harmless: "It will probably just go away soon," I would think, or "It only inhibits my mobility sometimes." Occasionally I would consider seeking medical help, but I couldn't muster the energy, as though some activation threshold wasn't being reached. In fact, the very promise that I could get medical help whenever convenient served to further diminish any sense of urgency. Even if the pain was sometimes debilitating, I did not perceive it as a problem needing to be solved. Gradually, I came to view it as just an unfortunate and inevitable part of existence.

Last Monday, after hardly being able to walk due to crippling pain, I finally became aware that "Wow, this really sucks and I should fix it." That evening I finally visited a chiropractor, who proceeded to get medieval on my femur (imagine having a sprained ankle, then imagine a grown man jumping on top of it). Had I classified this as a problem-needing-to-be-solved a few months earlier, my treatment period would probably be days instead of weeks.

Simply, I think this situation is of a more general form:

You have some inefficiency or agitation in your life. This could be solved very easily, but because it is perceived as harmless, no such attempt is made. Over time your tolerance for it increases, even if the problem is worsening (Bonus points for attempts at rationalizing it). This may be due to something like the peak-end rule, as the problem doesn't cause any dramatic peaks that stick out in your memory, just a dull pain underlying your experience. Even if the problem substantially lowers utility, your satisficing lizard brain remains apathetic, until the last moment, when the damage passes a certain threshold and you're jolted into action.

While similar to procrastination and akrasia, this does not involve you going against your better judgement. Instead, you don't have a better judgement, due to the blinding effects of the problem.

Possible Solutions:

I didn't solve my problem in a clever way, but I've begun employing some "early warning" techniques to prevent future incidents. The key is to become aware of the worsening inefficiency before you're forced to resort to damage control.

• Do a daily/weekly/monthly reflection. Just for a few minutes, try writing out in plain text what you currently think of your life and how you're doing. This forces you to articulate your situation in a concrete way, bypassing the shadowy ambiguity of your thoughts. If you find yourself writing things about your life that you did not previously know, keep writing, as you could be uncovering something that you'd been flinching from acknowledging (e.g. "Obligation X isn't as rewarding as I thought it would be"). A more elaborate formulation of this practice can be found here.
• I kind of feel that "mindfulness" has become a mangled buzzword, but the exercises associated with it are quite powerful when applied correctly. I've found that following my breath does indeed induce a certain clarity of mind, where acknowledging problems and shortcomings becomes easier. Using your own thought process as an object of meditation is another excellent method.
• While the previous two examples have been personal activities, other people can also be a valuable resource due to their uncanny ability to be different from you, thus offering multiple perspectives. However, I doubt expensive talk-therapy is necessary; some of my most useful realizations have been from IRC chats.

Mudus Ponies wrote: 

If you are a human, then the biggest influence on your personality is your peer group. Choose your peers.

If you want to be better at math, surround yourself with mathematicians. If you want to be more productive, hang out with productive people. If you want to be outgoing or artistic or altruistic or polite or proactive or smart or just about anything else, find people who are better than you at that thing and become friends with them. The status-seeking conformity-loving parts of your mind will push you to become like them. (The incorrect but pithy version: "You are an average of the five people you spend the most time with.")

I've had a lot of success with this technique by going to the Less Wrong meetups in Boston, and by making a habit of attending any event where I'll be the stupidest person in the room (such as the average Less Wrong meetup).

 66 people upvoted it.

Before, Lukeprog and Ferriss had mentioned the same: You are the average of your surroundings. 

I believe that. I would prefer that to not be the case, but I do think that even if you are not truly the average of the five, it is better to act as if you were the average of the five than to act as if you never heard this advice. 

If I am to follow such advice I have a problem: I should spend time with: Nick Bostrom, Natalie Portman, Whoever parties as hard as Sean Parker does in "The Social Network", Steve Pinker and Ferriss.  

I'm going to throw some problems in, and present no solutions, I hope comments may provide them if anyone knows one:

1)The people one would like to be average of are incredibly busy doing what made them become those people 

2)They do not live at the same place

3)They seldom have reason to be near you 

4)If they displayed well enough, their success precludes them from taking new people in due to lack of cognitive space. 

5)They may be interested in you and what you have to say in as much as that is something you can provide them, but not necessarily that means they will share what you'd like them to with you. 

6)If you were literally the average that wouldn't help much since most of us want to succeed in more than one domain, and we usually model ourselves with people who are monomaniacal, who are the only ones who thrive enough to be seen in a 7 billion world.

I would like to know a lot of stuff as I mentioned in Drowning in an Information Ocean, but I also want to be creative and engaging like Natalie, work/party hard as Sean, speak eloquently as Pinker, think well as Bostrom, and acquire skills and money at Ferriss' speed. 

Aubrey is fish oil. He hooked my attention when 17 because he sells eternity.
Bostrom is LSA. He hooked me because he sells the future of the universe.
Eliezer is Modafinil. He hooked me because he sells the map between one's current situation and the future of the universe.
Hofstadter is LSD. He hooked me because he sells broadness of converging/academic knowledge.
Natalie is marihuana. She hooked me because she sells the compatibility between academic excellence and divergent/artistic knowledge.
Partying hard is cocaine. It hooked me because my nucleus accumbens works in the normal way designed by evolution.
Effective Altruism is food after starving, it hooked me because it sells counterfactually relevant actions that create quantifiably improved markets. 
Ferriss of course is Speedball, the ultimate salesman. He sells the entire dream. He sells a quantifiable way to siphon one self into awesomeness without overload so you can party hard and become superman one skill at a time. 

These are only a few of the awesome people around, public figures visible to Lesswrong. There are dozens of others. I don't want to do what one of them did. I want to do it all. This is of course impossible. My intrinsic, core values relate to going in many directions at the same time. I think most people are like that. There are just so many options around and only one life to enjoy them all (which is why Aubrey is the entrance-drug). 
As put by Lev: 

I don't know what I want. 

There are these cool things around, but I suspect, after many years on earth, and visiting interesting people everywhere, that at least a good 50% of people (even the most rational, non-broken people) truly do not want anything in particular that much. The ones who seem like they do just took the plunge into saying so and self-reinforcing into wanting something. If they dug deep enough, they actually just don't have a clear want. Or if they do, like me they would have many. Many more than they can actually act on.

I truly and fully believe the advice that one should live as if one were the average of the five people one spends most time with. I just have no idea on how to do it, or whom to pick among a set that contains not 5, but 5000 people or more.

How did you solve this problem? Does it cause you to experience an Ugh Field when you think of the current 5?

Related to: Ugh Fields

Ugh Fields are internal negative reactions that occur before the conscious mind has an opportunity to process the information, often resulting in less than optimal decision making.

We have previously discussed Ugh Fields that involve performing tasks, but as far as I can tell we haven't had any posts on Ugh Fields about ideas.  Ugh Fields towards ideas can be experienced both while trying to weigh the merits of an argument, or after one's opinion has altered.

On Less Wrong, many ideas are accepted as true that, in some places, have negative connotations.  And if someone has an Ugh Field towards an idea because of this, it can be difficult to change this to a neutral or positive position. This can cause problems while trying to think about these ideas rationally.

For example, I grew up in a heavily liberal household.  And because of this, when I was young I had a negative view on libertarianism. This caused problems, to the point where in my early teenage years I didn't weigh someone's economic views as highly just because they identified as a libertarian.  But, once I actually looked into the policies of libertarianism and the results of these policies, my views shifted.  And although my reaction improved over time, I still flinch away when I hear the word "libertarian," despite considering myself one!

And there are many other topics on Less Wrong someone could have this reaction for, including AI, FAI, atheism, transhumanism, cryonics, immortality, alternative diets, optimizing utility for charities, and metaphysics.  An Ugh Field towards any of these ideas can hinder one's ability to update properly on hearing information about it.

Some techniques I have used that have helped include:

• Mentally correcting myself whenever I notice that I'm flinching away from an Ugh Field.
• Actively think about why my view should change when I'm far (Which may be supplemented by reminders from an Anki deck).
• Going through the arguments that convinced me that I should think differently in the first place.
• Considering myself one of them, e.g. calling myself a libertarian rather than merely saying I support libertarian views.  Caution should be taken with this to prevent too much in-grouping.
• Getting into a discussion with someone who holds the view I previously held (Essentially a combination of the last two).
• Trying to imagine positive outcomes as a result of updating in the right direction, or the negative results of not updating.
• Reading more about the position to normalize it in my brain.

Things I have not done, but might work:

• Reciting the Litany of Tarski.
• Writing down a list of ideas I have Ugh Fields, and reminding myself that these are problems (Could also use Anki).

Does anyone else have suggestions?