Thread by @visakanv

while researching the book i'm working on, i've noticed that there's an overabundance of tactical suggestions to problem-solving but a notable absence of suggestions to reframe and reconceptualize the problem entirely

but when you look for things that people really swear by – for example Allen Carr's Easyway to Quit Smoking – the most important thing is the reconceptualization. In order to quit smoking, you have to truly reconceptualize your relationship with cigarettes, inside out

but it's v difficult to give people "reconceptualization advice". One, it doesn't really fit into a convenient set of instructions.

Two, you have to have a deep understanding of the person's existing concept, and a clear model for a better concept, and the states in between

if a problem seems superficial, but it's extremely persistent and has resisted every attempt to address it, chances are its roots go really deep. perfectionism, inability to rest, etc, might be alleviated slightly with good tactics, but can only be addressed at the root

and the root can be really surprising, because there's typically fear involved, and fear is self-shadowing, self-healing, and will deliberately mislead and misdirect you away from the problem. you dig and you dig and you typically end up with shit from your childhood

cliche as hell, but it's what i've found ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

chances are there's something about your relationship with X (sleep, rest, food, exercise, money, work) that goes wayyy back, past veils of fog, sitting in a radioactive box under your bed in the childhood home of your mind

and then you're like, FUCK! i haven't been able to sleep properly in years because....... (flashbacks of unresolved childhood shit).... and I have been trying to solve this with soothing camomile tea

i mean i'm sure the tea is nice and soothing, but

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1439067975370227723

and then, very, very annoyingly, if you don't immediately translate this insight/knowledge into action steps, within hours, like a dream, it gets forgotten. it goes back in the box, the veil returns, and you have to repeat the entire journey again, probably like a year later

"how tf did he just exactly describe what I went thru" – friend I have been repeating like a dozen versions of this for like 5-10 years lol and it's taken me writing a book full-time to really nail these mfs to the wall

circling back to the smoking example: as long as you conceptualize of cigarette as an escape, as a pleasure, as an aid, and you think of quitting as a kind of repentance, penitence, etc, it will be very hard to quit. you will be tempted again or be thinking of cigs all the time

the way out is to reconceptualize, and see being smoke-free as the pleasurable thing. to take pleasure and joy in being healthy. you strengthen and reinforce this new frame and it displaces the old one

this works in basically any domain I think

but the thing is, you have to articulate what your relationship with X is, honestly, truthfully, before you can renegotiate it, reconceptualize it. this is where journalling really, really helps, because all the nuance can be in the peripheral stuff that you don't know you think

trouble is, people seldom really know how they conceptualize things. when you ask them to articulate their concepts, they will tell you what they think you want to hear, or what they think they're supposed to say, etc. their actual concept often only gets revealed by accident

by accident, or when pushed to the brink, when overloaded, when glitching, etc. it's like you're trying to find bugs in the software, looking for hacks and exploits. and IME the concept will actually kinda actively resist this so you gotta be a lil sneaky about it

"the concept" here is probably actually the ego or the fearbody trying to protect itself from scrutiny, protect itself from pain/discomfort at being revealed to be weak, flimsy, incompetent, etc

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1469220413326585859

anyway i'm not completely certain about any of this, this is just where i'm at in my current process of trying to make sense of wtf is up with [waves hands] everything