Do you think that willpower is something we can use our minds to achieve?
It feels like I am in control as long as I can maintain my ability to stop reacting.
That is to say, if I choose not to react I can get better at being non-reactive.
Not sure you posed that question clearly.
The ideal is that you save as much willpower as you can. Or at least, that when we do use it, is to minimize the amount of willpower we will use in the future.
This is why we procrastinate. Why do a 10 page paper over the course of 1 page a week, 10 weeks, when we could do it the night before? There are reasons not to, but when you think about it from a scarcity mindset (which the brain evolved in) it makes perfect sense.
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Optimal" as a concept you can conceptualize, is something the brain has been developing independent of your consciousness being involved. The logic your brain operates with is not the logic you consciously register, because it would be redundant.
I guess you can say that willpower is like the daily budget you get from the rest of you brain. Ideally you use what little budget you have to yield the most long term yield.
Your brain however, isn't really clued in on this, because like I said the logic form your "reptile" brain doesn't carry over and vice versa.
It's confused when you used your budgeted allowance on something that didn't result in a direct reward. Rewards that we construct socially don't trickle back down to the reptile brain all that much either. Graduation for me was met with an empty feeling for example. Getting an A? Nothing, who gives a fuck? The President?
Behavioral modification is basically lifted straight from B.F Skinners playbook. I believe it's mostly done in who are severely cognitively challenged, but I have tried it. I just needed to pick a different reward besides diet coke. Look up "chaining behavior analysis"
I believe people who are exceptional in a domain, it is due to a two things. It mostly stems from enjoyment AND OR tolerance for tasks that are "economically optimal" over "biologically optimal". I like that distinction.
EX: As much as I love the idea of being an author and force myself to write, I might even reach moderate success with years of dedication, I probably will never compete with the output of people who have some obsession with the process itself or people who face no resistance to the prospect of spending over half their time writing and networking or whatever people who want to be writers do.
Lets say that OBJECTIVELY there is a "
appetitive value" to any activity you can chose to engage in. Doing dishes is a 2. Writing a book might be a 5. Doing meth is a 11.
I experience the world more objectively than some who is obsessed with books. I get resistance about writing because I know I'm going to die one day, and when that happens I don't want to say that I spent most of my time propelling my writing career and the activities that that engages. For me that's a tough pill to swallow, and I would get that resistance all the time.
That person that excels in their career in writing has a brain that is wired to see that activity as a more appetitive thing. Just like the person with straight A's in school, burns out and doesn't make much of their life after schools done,
because there was something about the school that made them work hard, not necessarily something about themselves that lead to their success.
Is this what neurofeedback is like?
What I got from everything I tried to do in school was that busy work was what I had to do all the time. I never had time to stop and focus on relaxing.
The thing with school, video games, and other activities that are made to be consumable is that it is a reduction of what reality is. A simplification where all you have to do is meet X and Y parameter to get Z outcome.
You can abstract and breakdown where your attention/willpower needs to go, to the most critical chokepoints that have the largest influence, relatively easily.
Life isn't like that, and unless you have a structured life with a big bubble around it, you aren't going to do that good of a job improvising success.
When you consider that some people are prefrontal-cortex challenged, it's kinda fucked up when you look at how much more addictive the world has gotten to drive up profits for companies. We are in the most distraction prone era, and people such as ourselves are the one of the biggest victims of it.
You need to build a system, and recognize that once you built that system, that it is meant to perpetuate ONE AND ONLY ONE thing. So if you make a system for work, it is a system FOR WORK. It's not a system that will motivate you to do work. It isn't a system that make you have the most fulfilled life. That can be done with a different system.
For me neurofeedback was weird. I have done consumer FNIRS and EEG neurofeedback.
FNIRS, which is more about blood flow, felt like it really didn't matter what I thought about. It is just hardcore operant conditioning, like palov's dog, and I wasn't sure that was a good thing, but I definitely felt it, and I swear I smelled iron while I was doing it. I did it for a while, and I think it did make me somewhat sharper, but I stopped doing it. I think the reason being that there is no disctintion between "good" blood flow and "bad" blood flow. It's just looking for metabolic changes and that kinda is concerning, but I can definitely see how people with hypo frontality/stroke damage wouldn't care otherwise.
EEG nfb was more at the whim of my moment to moment consciousness. If I was anxious in my mind, it reflected that, and if I was in the clouds it reflected that. It still wasn't something totally under my control. There was no improvising, at best when ever I would consciously "hold my thoughts back" it would work, but not as much as when I just listened to the sounds of the software that are cueing me that I'm "doing a good job".
Apologies if I included info you weren't asking for. Willpower is a pretty complicated subject, so I wasn't really sure what you were looking for, especially in realtion to what you want to achieve.
When I was in the hospital in 2019 I went into a complete disassociation state. They said I was schizophrenic but I believe that is different from DID and they don't test for it in the way I am aware of or would know about because they don't tell me anything.
I am just trying to reintegrate this pain I have with body awareness and it takes a long time to process because I keep going back to the busy work.
Would you say that you have blackouts at your worse?
