Published on September 23, 2025 1:11 AM GMT
A lot of what motivated the approach I've taken in this sequence has been a desire to avoid predictable failures - to find things to do that I don't know to be dumb, relative to what I know and care about. When most of the "technique" is just "don't try to do dumb things," it makes "failure" conceptually weird. How do you measure success if it comes primarily by ditching stupid goals?
When success comes from picking winning battles, 'failure' gets harder to define
For example, if you're not careful you might think "Neat story about the irrational fear of heights, but it's anecdotal. Maybe cherry picked. Let's see an RCT to see what fraction of the time you succeed in fixing irrational fears!". The problem with this line of thinking is that the fraction is necessarily 0/0. I couldn't possibly have failed to fix her irrational fear for the same reason I couldn't possibly have succeeding in fixing it; you can't fix what ain't is. The whole point of that story is that she never had an irrational fear, and it was the illusion that she did which preserved that internal conflict in the first place.
The fire poker example is an even clearer example. The kid literally had no problem with the pain, but because no one there could notice this, they inadvertently pressured him into not noticing either. Again, the only "technique" was not getting fooled by the nonsense problem statement, and therefore not trying to do something foolish like "help him not feel pain".
A reasonable response to noticing this is "Aha! Let's instead measure how effective these insights are at resolving disagreements!" -- which is a good idea. But the concept applies here as well, complicating things further.
In the pool situation I wasn't trying to "resolve the disagreement", I was just playing -- and it's exactly that playful lack of attachment to any outcome that enabled the resolution of the disagreement. If I had instead tried to "resolve the disagreement", then what happens to any hint that she's not interested in resolving the disagreement?[1] Or that I am not interested in doing what it'd take, for that matter? Either I take it into account and stop trying to resolve the disagreement, or else I shut out information about why I might fail -- which is exactly the kind of information that is important in order to prevent failure. If I were to ignore that information, then any push in that direction requires pushing back with "No, you need to provide a convincing rebuttal, or else change your mind", and that isn't the attitude that tends to convince people they want to talk to you.
But still, it seems like there's something to the question.
What failure is left
For example, if I were to tell you I fainted last time I got my blood drawn, it'd seem like "Wtf? I can buy being afraid of heights until you check your knots, but I have a hard time buying that you thought that was a good time for a nap". It really does seem pretty simple with an obvious right answer, which means there shouldn't be any disagreement or fainting going on. It's not that this can't happen based on what I've said so far, but that it really shouldn't be a very stable sort of affair, so if it manages to show up at all there's something to be explained, and it seems to deflate the apparent usefulness of this sequence.
If, on the other hand, I told you that I used to faint when I got my blood drawn, and then over the course of figuring this stuff out, I stopped flinching against the reality that I had this response, and that once I stopped flinching I found it pretty funny and I stopped having that vasovagal response... that'd seem like more what you'd expect if what I've been talking about is real and useful.
If I were to say that both were true -- that I used to faint, that it went away the moment I looked at it for what it was and that it came back and I fainted again last time -- then it'd be cherry picking to talk about one over the other. So the concept has merit.
In reality neither of these are quite true, but something like both of them is. Since this post is about failure, let's pick that one to talk about. This is an example of something that happened very recently, after writing the rest of this sequence. I decided that rather than give you a polished conclusion, I'd work through this failure with you, so you can see a bit of what the thought process is like when things aren't going well, and how to make sense of things when that happens.
Vasovagal struggles
What should have happened, is nothing. Or rather, nothing of note. In reality, I didn't actually faint, and it wasn't about getting blood drawn, but I was recently surprised by having an overactive vasovagal response in a new context. Enough that I had to stop and address it, and that I wasn't sure I wouldn't faint.
I felt sufficiently sure that it wasn't an appropriate response that I should be able to "just not do it" and would normally expect to be able to demonstrate trust in myself in situations like that. It's not like "it was more blood than I'm used to" or anything -- I've handled worse situations completely without issue, so there's something else that was going on. Before figuring out what is actually going on, it sure looks like something that shouldn't happen, and is therefore evidence either that I'm failing to follow my own framework or else that the framework is incomplete -- either way, somewhat damning for the usefulness of reading this sequence.
The way the experience went was something like this:
Oh great, vasovagal response; this isn't helpful. Okay, let's make sure we're not freaking out over nothing, and compose ourselves. Okay, yeah, that's not helping. I'm unable to "just decide" to do something different and have my body follow, which means I'm out of touch with why I'm doing what I'm doing. Why am I choosing to do this?
I was willing to listen, but I had no answer. Not even an opaque felt sense that could be weighed or focused on. This the exact thing that shouldn't happen if I practice grok what I preach. And it was happening.
It had been a while since I had an experience like that. Usually, the sense of "My brain is doing the wrong thing" does very rapidly resolve into either choosing to do something different, or else a recognition that I actually don't know what the right thing to do is and a focus on figuring out what to do on the object level.
But in this case I really was stumped. My own behavior seemed obviously dumb, and it wasn't immediately resolving when I noticed that and the lack of immediate resolution wasn't immediately convincing me that maybe it's reasonable after all. I was genuinely interested in why I was doing it, but I wasn't at all expecting to be convinced which is the cue to be the one speaking, and that just wasn't working. I was genuinely failing to relate to the experience as "just unsure what to do", and therefore unable to live up to the aim of "not having psychological problems, just real ones".
This was a little annoying. Especially just having written a sequence on why it basically shouldn't happen once you understand where "psychological problems" come from.
It's not that "Oh no, I have a disagreement I wasn't able to resolve"; that happens. But even with things like allergies, when I think "This is dumb, I shouldn't do allergies", I actually manage to stop being congested... only to have an immediate sneezing fit and realize that I prefer being congested, but still. There's at least an unbroken thread of "I can actually change this if I know what I want to do instead", and last I left it was at "Actually... how do I know whether this is a response to something genuinely benign like pollen in the air, or whether I'm fighting off a cold?" -- which is exactly the kind of thing that should happen, when it turns out that changing behavior isn't as easy as it seems like it should be.[2] It's supposed to be about not knowing what to do, not about not knowing how to do it.
So afterwards I kept wondering. What is the purpose of the vasovagal response?. I may not have been able to experience it as "being unsure what to do" in the moment, but I still recognized it as a disagreement between parts of my own brain, even if I wasn't able to functionally corral it into one coherent "I" in the moment -- so I was curious.
I don't buy the "to play dead from predators" just so stories. It feels much more like a symptom of poor regulation than anything intentional, but there still must be a purpose for that direction, or else there'd be no reason to ever err in that direction. So what's that about?
Another hypothesis I found was that it's compensation for sympathetic nervous system activation. "It's an overcompensation" -- but that doesn't feel right either. My heart rate didn't spike and then tank. There never was that sympathetic nervous system activation needing compensation, so that doesn't fit.
But I had a hint.
Back when I had the initial bit of vasovagal response due to getting needles stuck in me, one of the nurses said "It's something that actually happens more often to 'tough guys' because they're trying to over-control their responses". It's a feel good reassurance thing to tell someone so I didn't actually believe it, but it stuck with me because it was interestingly plausible. So I looked up what it correlates with. Motion sickness.[3] Sensory sensitivity. Okay, that's me. Neat.
Okay, so "over-controlling" fits. Perhaps it's not that I'm "trying to almost faint", and not "responding too strongly to sympathetic nervous system activation" but rather that I'm avoiding sympathetic nervous system activation.
...That fits.
The original sensitizing event makes a lot more sense now.
The first time I ever had this response came as I watched a nurse try and fail to set up an IV when I was really sick with pneumonia. I watched her dig around with the needle for thirty seconds or so (Because why not watch? It's just information, right?), then pull the needle out, and stick it in to dig around for another minute or so. I thought it was "just too much". I don't think that's it anymore.
So far as I can tell now, it's specifically that she was incompetent, and I would have been better off taking the needle and doing it myself. I have very large veins in my arms, to the point where even when dehydrated the big one is still impossible to miss. I pointed this out to her, and she told me "That's where we take blood out. We put IVs in at the wrist". When she finally left, she muttered something about it not being her lucky day on her way out. She must have said the same thing to the nurse she got to replace her, because that nurse came in saying "Lucky day, my ass! Look at this huge vein! Let's use this one."
The suppressed sympathetic activation had become clear.
Get the fuck out of here and let me do it, you incompetent fool
Testing it against other situations where I had no issue, it fits. I could put myself back in that initial situation and feel the vasovagal response. If I swap in someone I personally know to not be an idiot, and competent with a needle, it's not a concern. In all the situations that were "worse" where I wasn't squeamish about a pint of blood or whatever, I was in control -- or at least, doing my best to be, whether I succeeded or not. I had things to do which justified a sympathetic nervous system response -- even if that thing to do was nothing more than the equivalent of "Watching to see whether it's time to tell the nurse to get another nurse who knows how to put an IV into an obvious and large vein".
What went wrong
With that purpose in mind, I could feel what I could do. Putting myself back "in the driver seat", even just sitting there thinking about it, resulted in perceptibly higher blood pressure in my face. Part of that was that the mindset came with more core tension, but even when I relaxed my core I could still feel it. That action of "let's compose ourselves here, and make sure we're not freaking out unnecessarily" was the blood pressure lowering move; I was fighting against the response I would have had, if I were just to drop all inhibitions. I wasn't able to "choose not to" because I had my signs wrong. I wanted to fix problems caused by pushing the stick too far down, so I pushed the stick... down. Like an idiot.
So why would I do that? What was I thinking? What bad would happen if I didn't suppress the sympathetic nervous system response?
Oh.
Right.
That.
In the previous post I talked about gradually losing my mind over a particularly stressful month, and finally getting to the point of feeling tempted to give up and cede control without endorsing that as a good decision. Increasing my blood pressure would have meant going back to that. Going back to trying to take control of a situation that I would struggle to stay on top of even at max capacity, which I had become pretty averse to by the end of the last one -- and in a case where that probably wasn't necessary given what I knew at the time. And in hindsight turned out to not be necessary.
That was the flinch. I hadn't gotten around to going back and sorting out when it does make sense to decline to take on that stress, and what it takes to justify it, so I was defaulting to not doing it and wasn't sufficiently open to considering doing it. So I couldn't see my own stupidity, and couldn't avoid this failure mode.
Okay, so if that's what happened, then what?
How is it that I ended up in a situation where I wasn't able to relate to the problem as an object level uncertainty, despite knowing that it's fundamentally a disagreement and having worked out what my options are and where to look for resolution?
Does it point at something missing or invalid in my framework? At something in my own framework that I failed to grok?
I'm still trying to work this out for myself, as I write this.
It's obviously an example of the perils of navigating blind to maps, due to the whole "Oh no, BP dropping, push the stick down further" idiocy. But also, more importantly, that error was enabled by the fact that I was more focused on getting away from an undesired response than I was at getting towards anything. It was ultimately caused by an insecurity noticing "If I don't flinch from this opportunity I might engage too much and lose too much sanity" -- and I didn't recognize the insecurity flinch for a while.
Why didn't I notice the flinch?
That's a good question. I don't really know.
I guess I didn't recognize that I was aiming away from a certain response rather than aiming for anything in particular -- or maybe, didn't notice the importance of this because I didn't notice "Don't wanna deal with this shit, and I don't think I have to or should" as insecurity. Or, as a problematic insecurity, I guess? It pretty clearly is a flinching from the firehose of information, but it's for a different reason. Instead of "I'm afraid of what I might find" and "I have strong reason to find out", it's "just too fatiguing" and "I really don't have sufficient reason to". Or.. is that true though? Since I did have reason to -- I just didn't believe it was valid.
That fits. I was aware that there was an imperfection in my map there, I just didn't think that it mattered nearly as much as it did, so I didn't even think of it as an "insecurity" even though it was.[4]
I guess the way I'd say it is that our own minds are part of the territory, and there's legitimate uncertainty about what's going on in there too. Knowing the structure helps you throw out limiting (and false) beliefs, and helps you notice where to look. And that does lead to a lot of things -- most things, even -- feeling a lot more like "I'm not sure what to do" than "I gotta figure out how to get this brain to do the right thing". But it also takes skill, experience, and clearing out mistaken beliefs in order to get there. So even with practice, there'll be occasional failures -- for the same reason you can still find the occasional bug even in relatively mature software. They'll be fewer and further between, but there are always more unexplored corner cases to bump into.
I think I'm happy with that.
I did fall off, but I think I'm back on track.[5]
And I don't see any way to have gotten back on track more quickly this time, though I see ways to do it faster next time.
When I originally said "You'll never struggle with irrational fears!" in the intro, I was kinda laughing about how it's a little bit cheating because it's not like you get to magically stop feeling fear in the face of real danger that you haven't taken seriously yet, or that you get to figure out all disagreements let alone easily.
At the same time, a lot of formerly "sticky" problems really do dissolve.
And even when you do genuinely fail at something you took your best shot at, you'll still have a path available to figure out why you failed. In case it's important enough to figure it out, should it come up again.
- ^
Like when she responds with "Are you calling me ugly?" rather than immediately addressing the inconsistencies between her beliefs that I had highlighted.
- ^
A few days after writing this I had what I thought was allergies, decided to be a bit less congested and managed that without a sneezing fit -- and it turned out to be a cold.
- ^
Motion sickness is another one I've struggled with which seems "obviously wrong" enough that it should be a trivial fix, and hasn't been. It's not a big enough issue that I've ever sat down when not motion sick and tried to sort things out, but in the moment I've only had partial success and more failure than success in matching what seems like the right outcome (i.e. not feeling sick) with my actual behavior (i.e. feeling sick). It's kinda by definition when I'm already overwhelmed, and more often when low on sleep, so it's not really that surprising, I guess. Perhaps I should sit down and address it just out of curiosity to see what happens.
- ^
I did mention that insecurities can be very subtle.
- ^
Since writing this, I have had a bit of a test. Not quite the same thing and perhaps less triggering so who knows, but it went well.
Discuss
