Step 3: Define Your Internal Character
Disclaimer (totally skippable)
All previous chapters of this book focus on information that is objectively true and are meant to be as unbiased as possible. The intent of this chapter holds to that precedent: After you decide what you want from life and how you plan to achieve it, it is objectively worth reflecting on, designing, and becoming the kind of person that would be best at executing your plan. However, the question of how to change oneself requires some hypotheses on how humans think, which removes us from the realm of objectively true and unbiased statements.
First, we must assume a position on what standard of evidence we reference when looking for information on this subject. Given its wide acceptance within our culture, we have chosen scientific consensus as the standard of evidence when possible. When we lack scientific consensus, we default to information gained from personal experience and conjecture based on research. To us, this seemed the most “pragmatic” solution to a situation in which we are forced to take a stance on standards of evidence and ideologies.
We have to rely heavily on limited research and findings from personal experimentation throughout this chapter, as there is no universally accepted model for how the human brain processes emotion at a systems level. While, from the perspective of a neuroscientist, we can say the right precuneus (along with at least a dozen other regions) plays a role in happiness, that information does nothing to help the reader understand how people think.
Even well-trodden, evidence-based models designed for behavioral change, such as cognitive behavior therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy, are focused more on changing problematic responses to stimuli and less on gaining a holistic understanding of how to sharpen a healthy mind into a more powerful tool. That is not to say psychologists have not begun working on these questions under the title of “positive psychology.” However, the field is new enough (and infested with enough pseudo-science gurus) that we are unwilling to hang our hats on any claims it makes as being “scientific consensus.” Positive psychology is still in the transition phase from pop-science to real science, having only been first pushed for in 1998.
Because of this, we have had to build an easy-to-understand, quickly explainable, “close to accurate” model of how a normal, healthy person processes and responds to their experiences on a day to day basis. This easily accessible model should allow anyone to train themselves to alter undesirable personal traits and shave the rough edges off their personality to create the most optimal version of themselves. That said, we need to stress that the model described in this chapter is not the “whole truth” of how emotions are processed, which will be elaborated on later in this section. Nevertheless, we will have an easier time improving ourselves if we use a simple model and not a more nuanced understanding of the admittedly messy human brain.
This model for how we process experiences is a product of personal experience, cognitive behavioral therapy theory, neuroscience, research on neural networks, evolutionary psychology, and marketing. While the model draws heavily from mainstream schools of thought on cognitive behavioral therapy, it does deviate in some small ways by incorporating inspiration from other fields.
For example, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) argues that our emotional reactions to situations are primarily based on learned schema about how the world works, whereas the model described in this chapter is based on the theory that our emotional reactions are derived by our unconsciously referencing a personal mental model similar to the mental models we use to predict behavior in others. This alteration is proposed based on inspiration from these other fields:
- Marketing: Businesses sell to consumers by convincing them they need something to maintain a certain perception of themselves, not by priming schema (unless those schemas are tied to sex).
- Evolutionary psychology: It appears that higher cognition first evolved amongst humans for the purpose of modeling people and behaviors, not for the sake of storing information in an organized library of rulebooks.
- Neural networks: Referencing the already-existing “mental model” system we use to predict behavior in others would be a “cheaper” way for the brain to process emotional reactions (in comparison to cross-referencing a separate library of schema).
- Schizophrenia research: It appears that Schizophrenia is at least in part the result of the mind having overactive mental models, which come to be interpreted as external stimuli (voices in one’s head); because this overtaxing of the mental model system appears to affect emotional responses, it would suggest the systems are linked.
While this chapter’s different approach may seem superficial, it is at least worth flagging. We have no consensus model of human behavior on which we can base this section, so we have had to develop and test our own. Obviously, if you prefer the cognitive behavioral therapy model of emotions, we encourage you to research cognitive behavioral therapy further.
So far, this guide has focused on the topic of how people would think and live their lives in an ideal world: How people determine what they believe about the world, decide what they want from life based on those beliefs, develop hypotheses about how to best achieve those goals, and then execute on those hypotheses. Unfortunately, as we are humans and not hyper-rational robots, this is not a realistic way to live life on a daily basis.
It would be nearly impossible to constantly reference your goals and beliefs about the world every time you make a split-second choice or decide what you will say next in a conversation. Doing so would require immense mental processing power.
Instead, most choices humans make about how to interact with the world are made unconsciously on “autopilot.” While there isn’t a scientific consensus on exactly how this autopilot works, it is clear that this autopilot is neither static nor beyond our influence. Instead, it appears that we have an internal model of ourselves that represents what kind of person we think we are, and we unconsciously reference that model to determine how to react in various situations. This model appears to work similarly to the mental models we use to predict others’ behavior. This mental model system is likely the same system you are utilizing when you have an imaginary conversation with someone else in your head.
To put it simply, when you are practicing an argument with someone in your head, you have sectioned off a part of your consciousness and assigned it a “mental model” imbued with characteristics you think the person you are arguing against would hold. The “program” in your head that controls your reactions to someone in real-time conversations is essentially the same mental model program, only it is imbued with characteristics you believe describe you.
Thus, when you experience potentially reaction-inducing stimuli, such as an insult, you do not think, “To further my goals, what is the best way for me to react to this insult?” but rather subconsciously ask, “How does someone like me emotionally, verbally, and physically respond to being insulted like this?” Depending on the type of person you see yourself to be, this can lead to reactions that you know run contrary to your best interest.
This unconscious response only creates an initial impulse to respond in a certain way. That impulse can be overridden by the logical parts of our conscious minds. This is done through inhibitory control mechanisms in the ventromedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Unfortunately, these inhibitory mechanisms can be weakened by a number of factors that prevent you from controlling your initial impulse.
Factors that limit your ability to exercise inhibition include:
- Alcoholic intoxication (widely known to influence inhibition)
- Lack of sleep, which prevents your brain from functioning at full capacity (inhibition is very cognitively taxing)
- Lack of myelination in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (this region doesn’t fully myelinate until your late teens, leading to inhibition being more difficult for younger individuals)
- Dedication of the inhibitory sections of your brain to other tasks (such as fighting a desire to smoke, stay on a diet, or ogle an attractive person)
- Fatigue from recent inhibition (numerous studies have shown that the inhibitory sections of our brain can be exhausted if used frequently over a short period of time)
Ideally, we should strive to have an unconscious mind that creates initial impulses that we need to inhibit as little as possible. We want our internal model of ourselves to be so closely aligned with the type of person we desire to be that our initial impulse is what we would choose to do if we had the luxury to carefully consider and choose reactions that best serve our objective functions. Fortunately, you can change this initial impulse by changing the type of person your unconscious mind sees yourself to be—by changing the “model” of you that it is using for reference.
Learning to change the internal model your unconscious mind uses to determine your reactions to stimuli does more than give you control over the initial impulses you have—it changes the emotions you feel. In other words, by changing your internal sense of self, which determines how you react to things, you can change your emotions.
Consider how not everyone feels anger when they are provoked. Only those who feel justified in feeling anger when they are provoked, given how they see themselves, will feel anger. If your unconscious doesn’t see yourself as the kind of person who gets angry when provoked, you will not feel anger when provoked. Feelings like anger, sadness, and envy occur because your unconscious mind feels it would be appropriate to indulge in that emotion given what it understands about your place in the world.