[Sunnybayes]

This post is basically about why its hard to take action.

hmmm... I feel ok. But still have some weird mental block. I feel like my brain has enough juices in it.

But I'm not absolutely crazy driven like I was 3 nights ago. Though I was more disciplined today and got some stuff done.

Oh, so I'll share a little trick that I've discovered, or rediscovered in a different point of view.

Say you've got a nice plan laid out of just mindless easy stuff that you have to do, and the things are not really related, but you still have motivation to do them.

I found that when I followed the plan, I had a sinking feeling in my gut, whenever I did a transition, like "now i have to move over hear to find a paper, now I have to find an email address on the internet, now I have to clean my room so that I can find my keys", ect.

This sinking feeling happens when you are changing situations because your subconcious has now come across something that you have not expected. And your frontal cortex burns through tons of energy when it comes across something unexpected.

[edit: as I look back on this post 2 months later, I think the resistance also comes because you have to waste energy figuring out how to do new behavior, and also, there is internal resistance from the two halves of the brain, explained later.]

This is explained in the Neuroscience of Leadership article .

The same cognitive dynamics come into play when people face other types of stressful experiences, including any strategic or organizational change. Much of what managers do in the workplace — how they sell ideas, run meetings, manage others, and communicate — is so well routinized that the basal ganglia are running the show. Trying to change any hardwired habit requires a lot of effort, in the form of attention. This often leads to a feeling that many people find uncomfortable. So they do what they can to avoid change.

The second reason change is hard relates to basic brain functioning. Human brains have evolved a particularly strong capacity to detect what neuroscientists call “errors”: perceived differences between expectation and actuality. When a child (or an adult, for that matter) is promised a sweet-tasting treat and then discovers it tastes salty or bitter, the brain emits strong signals that use a lot of energy, showing up in imaging technology as dramatic bursts of light. Edmund Rolls first illustrated this at Oxford University in the early 1980s, with a study involving monkeys. Dr. Rolls found that “errors” in the environment produced intense bursts of neural firing, markedly stronger than the firing caused by familiar stimuli.

These error signals are generated by a part of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex. Located above the eyeballs, it is closely connected to the brain’s fear circuitry, which resides in a structure called the amygdala. (The amygdala is the source of the “amygdala hijack,” the sudden and overwhelming fear or anger response described in layman’s terms by Daniel Goleman in his popular book Emotional Intelligence.) The amygdala and the orbital frontal cortex are among the oldest parts of the mammal brain, remnants of evolutionary history. When these parts of the brain are activated, they draw metabolic energy away from the prefrontal region, which promotes and supports higher intellectual functions. The prefrontal region is particularly well developed in humans, and doesn’t exist at all below the higher primates. Error detection signals can thus push people to become emotional and to act more impulsively: Animal instincts take over.

This is the thing that makes taking action hard. This is what keeps you doing some mindless activity like watching TV.

I had the intellectual motivation there because I knew how all those actions linked to my life goal and purpose, but it still caused resistance in every time I did a transition to do anything new. The "but I don't feel like it..." feeling.

So I figured, well, I'll just not let myself feel that sinking gut feeling my pinching myself. Yup... and it seemed to work. The slight pain of the pinch made my concious mind switch away from the sinking feeling to the light pain of the pinch, and so I was able to do the transitions easier. That way my brain did not form an association of pain with the transitions so that I would not unmotivate myself from following my plan.

I think the same effect might come from doing exercise in the morning. The soreness of your muscles distracts your mind from the sinking feeling of doing transitions.

I think that might be why Tony Robbins did his chest beating motivation.

Tony Robbins says the key to motivation is state management. This means conditioning yourself to feel a certain way via techniques like anchoring (connecting an emotion to a physical trigger). When Tony pounds his chest while speaking, he’s firing off anchors he previously conditioned.

(from steve's motivation for smart people article)

and I also describe this in my post here: My crazy way of instantly overcoming procrastination / getting motivation

Instead of doing the isometric, just a pinch was enough to keep my mind distracted away from the sinking feeling.

Though also I think if I were in a more of high concious state (defined in my dictionary post) that I would be able to induce the correct belief at the top of my hierarchy faster so that my subconcious mind would always be able to anticipate the transition that I was about to make faster, so the sinking feeling would not occur. And I found that I do that when I have to start writing my papers if I've procrastinated too long on it. But it usually takes a bit of meditation to get in that state... I'll have to experiment more with that. And it also seems that being in a high concious state makes me more introverted because I really begin having intuitive thoughts so that I have to take a while to adjust to being extroverted again. Transition to feeling social

Oh yea, and the whole point that I wrote this post. I was going to see if going clubbing tonight would put me back on balance to see if I could have an incredible burst of motivation and creativity again. If that's true then it would be almost mandatory that I go out once or twice a week. But maybe its just that i need time.