Thread by @xuenay

I think this is at least mostly true. The brain learns which emotional states best achieve its objectives and activates the states that seem to have worked in the past. If one isn't feeling good, it's because of an evaluation saying that feeling something different is more useful

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1368702129846812681

This doesn't mean that you could just decide to become happy, but it does mean that there are different techniques you can use to dig into the brain's emotional learnings in order to evaluate and update them if they are mistaken.

(I would note that "re-evaluating the brain's emotional learnings" may also include unlocking the capability to feel more _negative_ emotions, if it is excessively blocking them. E.g. many people feel uncomfortable with expressing anger, which is not always a good thing.)

"The Upside of Your Dark Side" argues for a flexibility that allows us to switch to non-happy mindstates when it’s beneficial. They call this “wholeness”: a person is whole if they are able to flexibly tap into all aspects of their being when warranted.

kajsotala.fi/2017/12/book-r…

That said, I do think that most people could be vastly happier with few downsides, because much of the learning saying they need to be less happy is outdated. (Even that book suggests that being happy 80% of the time seems like a good number; I'd guess many people are not that.)

So why _would_ (parts of) your brain feel the need to make you unhappy?

Here are a few possibilities.

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1368731308915064838

https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1368849463238868995

https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1368860903471525892

https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1368861838323159042

https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1368862686054858758

So how do you actually revise your emotional learnings?

At the core of it is a process called memory reconsolidation, which I describe in more detail in this post. If you can access the implicit belief behind an emotion, it becomes available to change.

lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3…

Of course, doing that for _all_ of your emotions and issues is easier said than done. There are a variety of techniques and methods you can use, but few silver bullets. (Most of these can be used alone, but work much better with a skilled facilitator or therapist.)

One approach is learning to pay more attention to your "felt senses", through some technique such as Gendlin's Focusing. lesswrong.com/posts/eccTPEon…

Internal Family Systems is another great method, I'd say it uses similar skills as Focusing does but offers more things you can try and a slightly different way of conceptualizing issues. At best, you can have literal conversations with your emotions.

https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1353723528202350594

Recently I've also been getting a lot of value out of attachment repair and ideal parent figure protocol, which aims to heal very early emotional conditioning that other modalities cannot necessarily access, as much of it is pre-verbal in nature.

https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1354018449870233600

I've only done a single session of @DougTataryn 's "Bio-Emotive Framework" but that session was really powerful and unblocked some important emotional programming in me.

bioemotiveframework.com

Core Transformation is a technique some people have a lot of success with; it used to work great for me but eventually I started having issues with it that I never quite debugged. Still, might be worth a try. (Ignore the cringe-inducing cover and title.)

smile.amazon.com/Core-Transform…

Then there are various forms of meditation, e.g. loving-kindness helps your brain notice how nice it actually feels to experience warmth and compassion towards others and how that feeling can actually be maintained.

web.archive.org/web/2015031504…

Then there are various "insight" practices that help you notice how your mind constructs reality and how those constructs can be changed. I'm a little averse to recommending them because they can be risky, but personally I've benefited from them a lot.

vividness.live/meditation-ris…

On the safer-feeling front I might currently recommend shi-ne (which is at least not *supposed* to make you feel bad), vajrayananow.com/2020/07/25/shi… , as well as "mindful glimpses" from @LochKelly1 's Way of Effortless Mindfulness", smile.amazon.com/Way-Effortless… .

All of this said I should caveat that despite doing all of these techniques, I'm _definitely_ not happy all the time, or even 80% of the time, yet.

That said, I'm also _definitely_ _much_ happier, calmer, and emotionally flexible than before I started doing all this stuff.