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I've noticed a very specific feeling -- a conscious decision to stop fretting about how badly my current situation could go wrong, and to genuinely be calm and composed, focusing entirely on the situation itself. It's hugely useful, but I don't know how it works, or how to teach someone else to do it. I think it's this ability that you're talking about.
And you're right that it transfers to other domains. I once saw a guy with this ability step on a nail. It went right through his shoe and into the sole of his foot. After a few seconds of shouting, he calmed way down, sat down, and removed his shoe. It was pretty damn bloody, and several people around him started freaking out. He began talking in a slow, confident voice to try to calm them down, and then asked them to fetch some bandages and antiseptic, while he used his sock to stanch the immediate bleeding. The guy with the bleeding wound was the one with the most level head!
If anybody can figure out a repeatable way to instill this anti-freakout reflex in someone, that would be potentially life-saving.
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This is similar to the mind hack I am working on to bypass my own hyperbolic discounting.
I assume that I will always make the same choice in similar circumstances. I find that this is a very good approximation of my actual behavior.
I determine the potential consequences of the alternatives in relation to my goals. Sometimes it helps me if I specify the consequences in a way that captures an opportunity cost. For example instead of cost in dollars, I'll consider the cost in terms of new tires for my truck.
I decide what to do -- treating the consequences as though they will occur immediately. In practice I only focus on the top one or two consequences for each alternative -- based on my current value weighting.
For example, every morning at work I am tempted by the pile of donuts in my office's cafeteria.
If I ate a donut every day, in a year I could gain an extra 13 pounds (50 work weeks * 5 days per week * 180 calories per donut / 3500 calories per pound).
These donuts would cost me about $190 (50 work weeks * 5 days per week * 0.75 dollars per donut).
I could consider more consequences, but these are enough. I don't want to pay $190 and gain 13 lbs of weight today -- just for the enjoyment of the donuts. In fact I would probably pay $190 just to lose 13 lbs right now; forget the donuts.
When I started to implement this approach I discovered that I could engage in automatic behavior that was counter to my choice. For example I would choose to not buy the donut only to get up and walk to the cafeteria. I would reaffirm the choice and yet still select a donut and pay for it. This behavior had almost an alien hand sense to it.
To break those automatic behaviors I found that I could simply stop and refuse to do anything that wasn't in keeping with my intellectual choice; I would even close my eyes. Every time I had an "urge" and would start to do or to think something, I would stop and check it against my current goal; if it didn't match I would I would refuse to continue. With repetition this replaced the negative automatic behavior with positive behavior.
It seems to me that one needs to place a large amount of trust in one's future self to implement such a strategy. It also requires that you be able to predict your future self's utility function. If you have a difficult time predicting what you will want and how you will feel, it becomes difficult to calculate the utility of any given precomittment. For example, I would be unconvinced that deciding to eat a donut now means that I will eat a donut every day and that not eating a donut now means I will not eat a donut every day. Knowing that I want a donut now and will be satisfied with that seems like an immediate win, while I do not know that I will be fat later. To me this seems like trading a definite win for a definite loss + potential bigger win. Also, it is not clear that there wouldn't be other effects. Not eating the donut now might make me dissatisfied and want to eat twice as much later in the day to compensate. If I knew exactly what the effects of action EAT DONUT vs NOT EAT DONUT were (including mental duress, alternative pitfalls to avoid, etc), then I would be better able to pick a strategy. The more predictable you are, the more you can plan a strategy that makes sense in the long term. In the absence of this information, most of just 'wing it' and do what seems best at the given moment. It would seem that deciding to be a TDT agent is deciding to always be predictable in certain ways. But that also requires trusting that future you will want to stick to that decision.