Each of the five anti-social-anxiety techniques described in my last post made life better. But even with all of them together, my phobia was still crippling. I’d solved about 15% of the problem, and I was running out of low-hanging fruit.

It turned out to be the process of solving that 15% that really mattered. Every new successful technique fed a much larger success spiral. The gradual discovery of one after another replaced the trapped and helpless feeling with powerful confidence in my ability to conquer my weaknesses, to do apparently impossible things, and to domain-generally self-modify.

This is where it gets seriously strange and awesome. But first, a little background on hypnosis.

I’ve been playing with hypnosis recreationally for a few years. I’ve dabbled as both a hypnotist and a subject, though much more the latter than the former. Thus, I have considerably stronger priors for the reliability of hypnotic effects than mere academic research would justify given the current state of science on the matter (which is abysmal). I know for sure, and feel on a gut level, that hypnosis can do some really cool things.

According to my standards, the bottom-up, gradual improvement approach to overcoming social anxiety wasn’t moving quickly enough. When I asked myself, “How can I cheat?” hypnosis was the most obvious thing to reach for. Why slowly shape through operant conditioning when you can access unconscious processes directly?

How exactly to use it, though, was not so obvious. I puzzled over that for at least a week, worrying that I might have to understand the root cause after all to devise a workable plan.

Then I encountered the Miracle Question. The Miracle Question goes like this. “Imagine that there’s a miracle overnight, and you wake up tomorrow morning to find that your problem has magically disappeared. What is the very first thing you encounter that is evidence of the change?”

For me, the answer was, “I think about a potential future social interaction, and I don’t feel anxious.” Even for extremely familiar interactions, there was always at least a tiny bit of anxiety. For example, I noticed at one point that I was consistently careless about cleaning things up in the kitchen because I knew that my housemates could walk in at any time, so I wanted to leave the communal space quickly. I thought I might as well use that as a starting point. 

I played through the following strategy in my mind. First, I’d have my hypnotist friend put me very deeply into trance. He’d set up a clear trigger for “relax, calm, untroubled”. Then he’d have me begin to think about a social interaction. The moment I noticed the slightest hint of anxiety, I’d indicate that and he’d give me my “calm” trigger, causing me to feel completely untroubled. We would keep doing this until I could imagine social interactions while remaining calm, possibly over several sessions. Finally, he’d give me access to the “calm” trigger as a post hypnotic suggestion, so that I could activate it myself at the first sign of anxiety.

Note that I spent about three minutes developing this plan, and I was in my mental state for “creative problem solving” the whole time, which involves intense inward focus and devoting extra resources to my imagination. That might be important.

During the conversation in which I described my plan to him, we meandered to the topic of a meetup of professional hypnotists he’d recently attended. He told me they talked in passing about what it’s like to change their own behaviors. They all knew they could use a long, draw-out induction (or series of inductions and post-hypnotic suggestions) to self-modify if they wanted. But that takes time and energy, and it turns out that if you’re sufficiently confident it’ll work… you don’t have to bother with the hypnosis.

Think about that for a minute. They treated it as a perfectly normal, every-day occurrence. Basically they were saying, “Yeah, when I don’t like what System 1 is doing, I just tell it to do something else instead. No biggy.” They seem to have this available as a primitive action.

Initially, I said it sort of tongue-in-cheek: “Ha, well I guess we don’t really need that induction I described then!”

Pause.

System 2: No. We really are being stupidly overconfident if we think we have a shot at that. It can't possibly be that simple. Nobody cures a life-long psychological disorder overnight. Don’t be ridiculous.

System 1: It would be our greatest superpower yet. Up up down down left right left right B A! We’d level up by like ten levels all at once! We have to try it. Pleeeeease?

System 2: What am I going to do with you? Sometimes I think I should spend some time purposefully crushing your dreams to prevent you from making us take this kind of absurdity seriously.

System 1: All right, so you think this is impossible. That’s perfect! I said we could do anything, and you told me to prove it. Here’s our opportunity to become invincible. PHENOMINAL COSMIC POWER!!!

System 2: …I must admit that’s a fair point. We can’t surprise me if I don’t let you indulge us in crazy hard things. Hm. Is it dangerous?

System 1: Ooo, danger! *bounces*

System 2: Oh right, I’m in charge of risk management. Um… All I’m getting is that it might reduce our confidence in the longer term plan. But that’ll probably just make the long-term plan take longer, and the VOI is staggering.

System 1: Yeah! That! What you said!

System 2: I guess it doesn’t really cost much. We just have to put off the explicit induction plan for a few more days. Are you really really sure it’s true that the explicit induction plan would work if we went through with it? What I believe might not matter much here, but this really is totally pointless if you aren’t sure.

System 1: YES DEFINITELY. Hypnosis is AWESOME. 

System 2: I didn’t ask whether it’s awesome.

System 1: Yeah, I don’t really get your fiddly distinctions between awesome, true, good, and effective. Also, have you SEEN all the kick-ass self-modification we've been pulling off lately? By Friday the world will be OURS. BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

System 2: *rolls eyes* Oh for god sakes, no it won’t. But we really do seem to be in the middle of a success spiral. What the hell, let’s give it a try.

My friend agreed to wait. I’d watch for anxiety to hit, then snap my fingers as though the trigger already existed. That was the idea, anyway. I’m not sure how seriously he took my hypothesis. I’m not sure how seriously I took it. I suppose part of me must have been totally serious.

The next morning, I remembered that I’d been invited to a dinner party that night. Perfect opportunity to test it. I waited for the first jolt of panic, fingers poised to snap, pleasantly excited by my curiosity even as I braced for the impact -

- but nothing happened.

There was no jolt of panic.

I kept waiting. I imagined going to the dinner party. I even imagined scenarios in which embarrassing things happened, everyone thought I was stupid, everything went horribly wrong. I reminded myself that the dinner party really was happening, and it really was tonight, and I really did have to go to it. Some of those awful scenarios were even plausible.

Nothing. Slight disapproval toward the imaginary disasters, but not a whiff of anxiety.

My observations strongly contradicted my model of the world. Psychology just doesn't work that way. I purposefully scheduled several historically uncomfortable types of social engagements throughout the week, trying to break whatever weird and presumably temporary coincidence was happening. I even committed to a Skype call. Something had to make me anxious, or I wouldn’t get to test the trigger.

That was three months ago.

I'm still waiting.

In our last episode...

System 2: *sigh* You know, to be honest, I'm not sure we could do this even if we tried.

System 1: Hey. You take that back. We can do anything.

System 2: No, I don't think so. We don't even have a plan.

System 1: What are you talking about? Since when does that stop us?

System 2: I don't think we can cure social anxiety. We'll just have to hide in academia forever and never save the world, let alone achieve our full potential.

System 1: Oh HELL no. We can totally cure social anxiety. That's not even close to impossible.

System 2: Oh yeah? Prove it.

System 1: WELL OK THEN LET'S DO THIS.

And so it began.

I tried many things over a period of about six months. I drew techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy, from the suggestions of others, and from hypotheses based on my own observations. Here are the five changes that made noticeable positive impacts.

1. I made a special effort to spend what social energy I had on people who made me feel especially comfortable, happy, and fulfilled.
2. I was completely and utterly honest about my project with just about everyone. I told them I was battling social anxiety, that I'd only like to schedule the date if we agreed I would be free to cancel at any time, that I was looking uncomfortable because I was scared of social interaction and not because of anything they'd said, and that they should keep on asking me to hang out even if I said no nine times in a row because by chance they'd eventually catch me on a really good day. I explained that certain kinds of socialization are worse for me than others, and that I'd respond better to proposals of goal-directed meetings than to proposals of free-form hangouts. Rather than indefinitely dodging their phone calls, I told them I have a strong preference for meeting in person or chatting through text. This hugely mitigated my fear that others would take my symptoms personally. Yay tell culture!
3. I installed a habit of imagining a version of myself that wasn’t afraid whenever I needed to make an important policy decision, and I counted on my simulation of her to reason sensibly when I couldn’t. I predicted her actions and followed suit rather than deciding whether to socialize. Deciding, it turns out, engages the affect heuristic in a way that predicting does not.
4. I almost completely cut out caffeine, prioritized sufficient sleep, and replaced part of my usual meditation with progressive relaxation. This dramatically reduced the frequency and severity of full-blown, spontaneous panic attacks (which are different from the anxiety feedback loops described below). 
5. I installed a habit of distancing myself from my emotional reactions whenever I noticed that they were excessive or forming dangerous feedback loops.

Emotional Feedback Loops

An anxiety feedback loop looks something like this: You make a mild faux pas, and your friend asks you not to do it again. You experience this as scolding—that is, you automatically model your friend’s mind as including the intention to cause painful feelings—which is an anxiety-inducing interpretation. The emotions of shame and guilt make the scolding interpretation far more salient than any other interpretation, and your certainty that you’ve been scolded increases thanks to availability bias. Greater certainty of scolding heightens the anxious feelings, and the cycle continues. If you’re very familiar with the cycle, you get bonus epicycles caused by anxiety about becoming even more anxious.

Depressed people tend to get in very similar feedback loops, especially when subvocalizing about their mental states. They start out feeling bad. Then they tell themselves about how bad they’re feeling, and it makes them feel worse, which makes them say even worse things to themselves about how bad they feel. I expect that distancing is equally effective in the depression version.

Panic attacks have this feature as well. In the midst of a panic attack, a basically normal experience triggers you to wonder whether something's wrong, which draws your attention to anything that might be slightly off. Focusing intently on things that might be slightly off feels unusual, and you take that as evidence that something is indeed wrong. A fight or flight response begins, and any of the symptoms - racing heart, shallow breathing, trembling, etc. - are easily interpreted by a primed and panicking mind as severe abnormalities. For many people, this goes on long enough that they actually believe they're dying, despite having lived through exactly the same thing dozens of times before.

My anxiety cycles could only escalate so far since my attempts to calm down were usually effective, but they could sustain themselves for an hour or more at whatever level I reached before the calming effect kicked in.

Emotional Distancing

Despite the novelty of the application, distancing had long been in my toolkit. I originally learned it while living at a Soto Zen temple, where meditation sessions are long and frequent. When you first begin a meditation practice, your muscles and joints are not prepared. It can be extremely painful early on if you sit for, say, an hour and a half twice a day, which is typical for a novice Zen monk. I actually began with a week-long traditional Soto retreat, so make that five hours a day at first. 

The only way to get through the physical challenge is to let the pain happen without suffering from it—without “attaching” to it, as Buddhists would say. You assume a mental posture that turns “I am hurting” into “there exists pain”. That's distancing, and it's the opposite of attachment or identification.

With the application of distancing to social responses, I gained the incredibly satisfying ability to stop sudden anxiety cycles in their tracks a majority of the time. Watching a panic reaction as an outside observer severs the connection between beliefs and emotions, so greater certainty of the scolding hypothesis doesn’t increase the experience of shame. 

This didn't immediately end the panic, because my brain was still flooded with the first spike of stress hormones. But the physical response couldn't sustain itself without emotional engagement, so I could just ride out the aftereffects. There was a racing heart, a flash of heat, and an impulse to run and hide. But none of it was mine. None of it was me. It didn’t require my involvement.

From there, my mind could consider alternative hypotheses about the other person’s motivations, because I wasn’t busy engaging with the panic. Usually, some other mental state was obviously more likely, upon reflection, to have caused their behavior than whatever perceived state triggered my anxiety. Did my friend hope to modify my behavior by punishing me, or by informing me of his preferences so I could take them into account? While drowning in waves of anxiety, the second possibility would never occur to me. So besides causing less suffering, the new freedom for my beliefs to grow more accurate made my interactions more effective.

Distancing didn't do much for the constant low-grade anxiety, which was the main problem, but it was a clear improvement nonetheless.

Each of the above techniques made life better. But even with all of them together, my phobia was still crippling. I’d solved about 15% of the problem, and I was running out of low-hanging fruit.

I've had something like social anxiety for as long as I can remember. I haven't always recognized it as that; for a long time I thought I just hated humans. Despite encountering some humans I actually liked, it got worse with age. By the time I was 20, I was having panic attacks and running off to hide in closets during social events.

I knew my goals required I be able to deal with people, so when I started college I decided to learn to socialize. I didn't have to like it, but I had to be good at it. My understanding of how to learn things wasn't very sophisticated back then, so I just threw myself into the middle of socialization. I joined clubs, ran clubs, went dancing on the weekends, and even took a job as an RA. Although I spent much of my free time during college huddled in my room exhausted and crying, I gained many skills very quickly in order to survive the ruthless training.

That whole time, though, I didn't think of myself as having social anxiety, as being constrained by a psychological illness that could be cured. I just thought of myself as extremely introverted. It was part of my identity, more like being obsessed with books than like having a paralyzed limb. As a result, all the techniques I learned for navigating social situations assumed the constraint. I framed questions as, "Given that my brain works this way..." rather than as, "In order to make my brain work differently...".

It wasn't until I returned from my first visit to the San Francisco Bay Area that the reality of my situation hit me. I took a workshop with the Center for Applied Rationality. One of the workshop activities was called "Comfort Zone Expansion", or CoZE for short, and it was basically exposure therapy. They took everyone to a crowded mall and told them to get a little outside their comfort zone. Some of the men had their makeup done, for example, and others were pushing their boundaries just by shaking hands with a few strangers.

The night before CoZE, I couldn't sleep. I was already way outside my comfort zone, spending nearly every moment of every day surrounded by strangers I had to interact with in relatively unstructured ways. During dinner and other break times, I would hide in my room instead of getting to know the extremely intelligent and fascinating participants and instructors. I felt like I was on the edge of a panic attack the entire day leading up to the CoZE exercise. When the time came, I simply couldn't do it. I couldn't even go and sit silently in a crowded area reading a book. The thought of being trapped with other people in a car on the way there made it hard to breathe. I stayed behind.

During the following week, I thought about all the networking opportunities I'd missed. CFAR selects their participants carefully in order to create a certain culture, and to have the largest impact they can on the rest of the world. Thus, the people at their workshops are invariably extraordinary. And I'd more or less failed to make friends with a single one of them. Without the familiar structure of academic settings, my hard-earned coping mechanisms hadn't been enough.

It was not because of my failure that this was a tipping point. I'd failed before to accomplish social goals I'd set for myself. But I'd only wanted to want to do those things, on the meta level. They seemed like a good idea, but I felt no motivation, so I wasn't surprised or really even disappointed when they didn't work out. The difference this time was that I really wanted to interact with these people, on the object level. I wanted it, but I couldn't do it.

I noticed I was confused. If the source of my social difficulties was a deep desire to not interact with other humans, then why, with that desire absent, did the problems remain?

The answer was very obvious when I finally asked myself the question with the usual self narrative out of the way. 

My main symptoms: Intense fear of interacting with strangers, especially in unstructured ways. Fear of situations in which I may be judged. Worrying about embarrassing or humiliating myself (mostly by looking stupid). Fear that others will notice that I’m anxious. Having to fight to make eye contact. Intense fear of tests and being tested. Extremely inconveniencing myself to avoid socialization. Panic attacks that include trouble breathing, tachycardia, shaking, derealization, and belief that I am dying. 

Hatred of humans does not cause things like this. But phobias do.

I struggled with this realization. I was in the middle of a massive paradigm shift that led me to consider suddenly changing course and devoting my life to existential risk reduction rather than academia - right after receiving a five year fellowship from my top choice philosophy program. That was a scary dilemma in itself, but on top of that I now understood that I had a psychological disorder that I could only survive from inside the academy.

It was a very scary time.

This is part of a sequence on my experiences fighting social anxiety. Post two is here.

There's a core meme of rationalism that I think is fundamentally off-base. It's been bothering me for a long time — over a year now. It hasn't been easy for me, living this double life, pretending to be OK with propagating an instrumentally expedient idea that I know has no epistemic grounding. So I need to get this off my chest now: Our established terminology is not consistent with an evidence-based view of the Star Trek canon.

According to TVtropes, a straw Vulcan is a character used to show that emotion is better than logic. I think a lot of people take "straw Vulcan rationality" it to mean something like, "Being rational does not mean being like Vulcans from Star Trek."

This is not fair to Vulcans from Star Trek.

Central to the character of Spock — and something that it's easy to miss if you haven't seen every single episode and/or read a fair amount of fan fiction — is that he's being a Vulcan all wrong. He's half human, you see, and he's really insecure about that, because all the other kids made fun of him for it when he was growing up on Vulcan. He's spent most of his life resenting his human half, trying to prove to everyone (especially his father) that he's Vulcaner Than Thou. When the Vulcan Science Academy worried that his human mother might be an obstacle, it was the last straw for Spock. He jumped ship and joined Starfleet. Against his father's wishes.

Spock is a mess of poorly handled emotional turmoil. It makes him cold and volatile.

Real Vulcans aren't like that. They have stronger and more violent emotions than humans, so they've learned to master them out of necessity. Before the Vulcan Reformation, they were a collection of warring tribes who nearly tore their planet apart. Now, Vulcans understand emotions and are no longer at their mercy. Not when they apply their craft successfully, anyway. In the words of the prophet Surak, who created these cognitive disciplines with the purpose of saving Vulcan from certain doom, "To gain mastery over the emotions, one must first embrace the many Guises of the Mind."

Successful application of Vulcan philosophy looks positively CFARian.

There is a ritual called "kolinahr" whose purpose is to completely rid oneself of emotion, but it was not developed by Surak, nor, to my knowledge, was it endorsed by him. It's an extreme religious practice, and I think the wisest Vulcans would consider it misguided¹. Spock attempted kolinahr when he believed Kirk had died, which I take to be a great departure from cthia (the Vulcan Way) — not because he ultimately failed to complete the ritual², but because he tried to smash his problems with a hammer rather than applying his training to sort things out skillfully. If there ever were such a thing as a right time for kolinahr, that would not have been it.

So Spock is both a straw Vulcan and a straw man of Vulcans. Steel Vulcans are extremely powerful rationalists. Basically, Surak is what happens when science fiction authors try to invent Eliezer Yudkowsky without having met him.

1) I admit that I notice I'm a little confused about this. Sarek, Spock's father and a highly influential diplomat, studied for a time with the Acolytes of Gol, who are the masters of kolinahr. If I've ever known what came of that, I've forgotten. I'm not sure whether that's canon, though.

2) "Sorry to meditate and run, but I've gotta go mind-meld with this giant space crystal thing. ...It's complicated."

This Saturday, Michael Valentine and I are taking the most fun and potent habit-formation material from CFAR's previous four-day workshops, and focusing that material towards making rational New Year's resolutions - and then actually keeping them.

If you're in the Bay Area and interested in resolutions, or in seeing CFAR's habit-formation material distilled, this workshop is for you.

We'll meet at the CFAR office in Berkeley from 11AM to 5PM PST on Saturday, Jan. 4th. You can register here - as of this posting, there are still several spots left!

Normally an event like this would cost about $400, but we want to make this workshop more accessible. So, this time the event costs $195. And we’re confident enough in the value of this material that we offer a no-hassle full money-back guarantee: If, after attending this workshop, you decide you didn’t get your money’s worth, ask to have it returned and it’s yours. (We do recommend you try the techniques out for a week or two first. Some of them are likely to surprise you!)

I'm working on a post about how best to use human memory—when it's good to store things in your own brain and why, when it's best to outsource your memory, what memory upgrades are worthwhile in what contexts, and how to integrate and apply memory systems in real life. I'm hoping the following set of memory problems will draw out approaches that haven't occurred to me so I can compare a wider range of methods.

I'll post the first solutions I thought of myself later on, but for now I'd like to hear what you would do in each of these situations and what you believe to be the pros and cons of your answers. Can you think of ways to improve upon your first thoughts and the answers of others?

(You don't have to respond to all of the questions; feel free to post as little or as much as comes to mind.)

These are my suggested to solutions to the problems I posed in Applied Mnemonics: Problem Set. They are not the only possible solutions, nor are they even close to the best possible solutions. I'm just trying to give you a look into how I go about using internal mnemonic techniques.

Summary: Some forms of meditation may train key skills of metacognition, serving as powerful tools for applied rationality. I expect aspiring rationalists to advance more quickly with a regular practice of mindfulness meditation.

Some people seem to be a bit too generous for their own good. I know a precious few people who are especially good at saying "no" when asked to take on new responsibilities that would put them over their limits. I love working with people like that because I can always trust them to tell me when it would be better for me to find someone else to do the thing. I expect this to be an extremely valuable skill it would probably be good for many of us to understand, learn, and be able to teach to people who really need it.