10 Ideas I’ve Been Thinking About Lately

I’ve never done a post like this, but I thought I’d give it a shot. If there’s one or two of these that you’re particularly interested in, let me know and I’ll see if I can put together a longer essay.

Pain vs suffering. What’s the most useful way to differentiate the two? Is suffering simply more intense or prolonged pain? Can suffering be physical or is it better thought of as emotional or even spiritual/existential in nature? Is the old saying that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional true? How do acceptance and avoidance mediate the relationship between pain and suffering?
The emotional benefits of adventure. What are the emotional consequences of a life devoid of adventure? And how many of our emotional struggles are best thought of as symptoms of not living adventurously enough? Aren’t many therapeutic approaches (ERP and BA come to mind immediately) essentially guided adventure—deliberately approaching seemingly scary, stressful or unknown things? What’s the proper role of comfort/safety in mental health—too little and too much both seem anti-therapeutic?
When to go big and when to go small. How do we know when the dip your toes in vs dive in head first approach is optimal? And what are the main moderating or mediating factors—personality, context, the goal itself, values? How well do people understand what motivates them—motivational self-awareness? How well do they understand what motivates others?
Reclaiming ambition. It’s always seemed strange to me that people have an instinctively negative reaction to the word ambition—as if it necessarily involves greed, exploitation, and selfishness—but it doesn’t have to be that way, right? Wanting to be a great dad is a form of ambition. Wanting to be an excellent coach and therapist is a form of ambition. Being active with a social or political cause you care about is a form of ambition, right? Maybe we vilify ambition because, deep down, we’re scared of what it would mean to really discover and take responsibility for our authentic ambition?
Modeling. Increasingly, I’m convinced that the best way to influence people (including ourselves) is not through overt persuasion so much as indirect modeling—that is, if you want people to be more X, get them to spend time around people who are good models of X. Who are your models? How are they influencing you, for better or for worse? How deliberate are you about choosing models? Who are you a model for and are you doing a good job? Why do we sit and hope for models rather than pursuing them actively? Often we can’t (or are unwilling) to make drastic changes to our most important relationships, but we can always make changes on the margin—spending a little more time with people who inspire us and a little less time with people who drag us down.
Fragility vs Resilience vs Antifragility. How does Taleb’s idea of the fragility-resilience-antifragility spectrum apply to mental health? Specifically, what would it look like to be emotionally antifragile? How do we develop the capacity not only to be resilient in the face of stressors and negativity, but actually to grow healthier and stronger as a result of them? What are the essential mediating variables in how people respond to stress?
Parts work. IFS and parts work seem to be having a moment lately. Could this be the next big wave in psychotherapy? How important are the central tenets of IFS—for example, I’m unsure whether the concept of an authentic self that sits above or at least separate from the other parts is either true or helpful? What are the non-clinical applications of parts work? What’s the flip side of parts work—instead of zooming in on specific parts of ourselves, what if we zoomed out and asked how we fit in with other parts? Wholes work?
Nervous system calibration. Can we think of anxiety disorders as analogous to autoimmune disorders—the sympathetic nervous system and fight or flight response miscalibrated to overstate risk? Similarly, all treatments for anxiety are essentially trying to recalibrate the fight or flight system to be an accurate detector of risk and danger—minimizing both false positives and false negatives. If the sympathetic nervous systems were functioning perfectly, we would feel fear when we are actually in danger and then never experience anxiety—which by definition is unhelpful or misdirected fear. Obviously we can’t get to perfect sympathetic nervous system calibration, but can we achieve something close to anxiety immunity by training our nervous system well?
Curiosity, flexibility, and psychological humility. How does trait curiosity affect emotional health? It seems to me that most forms of emotional distress involves cognitive rigidity—getting stuck in unhealthy ways of thinking like worry, rumination, self-criticism, etc. which then lead to distinctive forms of emotional suffering like anxiety, resentment, and depression, whereas emotional resilience is almost always characterized by high level of cognitive flexibility—reframing, attention shifting, self-compassion and validation, etc. Does curiosity bias us toward flexibility? Could it do the opposite? Is there a particular form of curiosity (self-curiosity?) that’s at work here—something like the tendency to be open and curious about your own reactions and interpretations of things rather than fixed and certain? What’s the relationship between trait curiosity and growth mindset? What is psychological humility?
”It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.” I saw this quote from Sylvia Plath in a movie recently and it’s been stuck in my head since. Authenticity is such a nice word but we do it (and ourselves) a disservice by throwing it around so casually and superficially. Because it’s brutally hard to be even a little bit more authentic. The pressures to be who other people want us to be—or who we imagine other people want us to be—are profound and often we’re not even aware of them. But to start stripping those external expectations away is terrifying not only for fear of other people thinking less of us, but for a much deeper and existential fear that there might not be much left after all those expectations are stripped away. And if that’s the case, we’re left with the daunting task of deciding who we really want to be—what really matters to us, what goals we really want to pursue, what types of relationships we really want to be in, what types of work we really want to do, what we really believe in. And faced with all that, there’s something very attractive about retreating back to the expectations of others.