From being depressed and burnt out to Being Who I Want To Be - Part 2

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The book Feeling Good made me happy, but it didn’t suffice to fix my other problems, so I thought The Feeling Good Handbook would help me further. It has two chapters about procrastination which are very logical. The techniques actually work, but they take a lot of time and are hard to do. That makes them vulnerable to (meta-)akrasia. The problem gets shifted from procrastinating work to procrastinating the application of effective techniques which make you (want to) work. I didn’t solve that problem until many months later. To be honest, I still haven’t fixed it completely, but I’m pretty motivated now and am still getting better.

Although I didn’t get rid of it completely, The Feeling Good Handbook managed to reduce my anxiety a bit. But it’s not that I had a totally big problem with that to begin with. What Dr. Burns says makes a lot of sense and is good to know in any case. The best thing about the Feeling Good Handbook, however, is the part about good and effective communication. There are five communication secrets that the book reveals:

1. Agreeing: This is a miracle cure for confrontations. Just agree with some true aspect of what the other person says. But don’t be sarcastic. Your opponents will be stunned and disarmed, if you apply this trick convincingly.
2. Empathy: Well, this is not so much a secret, but it’s better to actually express empathy by acknowledging what the other person thinks and feels.
3. Inquiry: Don’t assume to know what the other person thinks and feels. Asking directly and curiously is the better alternative and can also signal interest in the other person.
4. “I feel …”: Express your emotions by beginning your sentences with “I feel”. Starting with “You are …” is much more confrontational in comparison.
5. Stroking: Make compliments, find something positive to say. This shows that you aren’t just trying to put someone down.

These techniques not only work, they also make communication a much more pleasant experience. It’s just that their application might feel quite unnatural at times, and thus requires some training.

After I finished reading the Feeling Good Handbook I started reading a book about behavior therapy, which made me understand some of the techniques applied in behavior therapy, but didn’t provide me with a lot of directly applicable ideas. Anyway, at that time my house dust mite allergy was identified (along with a tree pollen allergy – a test 10 years ago showed no signs of any allergy whatsoever). That explained my problems which breathing, which reduced my oxygen intake and made it difficult for me to focus on anything. That allergy was surely an important factor that made me feel bad, ineffectual and depressed. However, it was probably not the most important reason, as I have done a statistical analysis which showed that my unhappiness and unproductiveness were only slightly positively correlated. If my allergy had been the main cause for my depression, it would have made me unhappy and unproductive at the same time, so the correlation ought to be high. Therefore, the lack of strong correlation indicated that there was at least one problem that was more important. Later on, I became increasingly sure that my motivation problems and my lack of productivity were the most important factors which lead to my last two depressions. Interestingly, those problems were about 10 times harder to fix than my depressions, which, more or less, were merely symptoms of those deeper causes. But at least knowing about my allergy made it possible to implement some counter-measures which increased my quality of life again.

Besides reading books and dealing with my allergy, I continued measuring my “depression score”, wrote lots of thoughts into my online journal, and continued my daily activity logs. Using those logs I found out that I had my best and most productive days when I woke up between 7 and 9 AM. I used my journal for intense self-analysis and tried to replace dysfunctional thoughts with more appropriate ones. Actually, I already did some journaling like that when I was a teenager. It had helped me a lot! Reading my old entries from when I was 14 years old showed me how much garbage cluttered my mind those days. Being reminded of how I was thinking years ago was so painful that I deleted my former digital diary! It was a pretty cathartic decision, which has freed me from my past. From the perspective of wanting to have a thorough documentation of my thought processes it was a bad decision, but I still mostly don’t regret it. Anyway, deconstructing my neuroses was totally important! Journaling is an essential ingredient for becoming a better person.

Image based on Colores Santos by Daniel Melero and Gustavo Cerati CC-BY

While journaling alone is pretty good in itself, it can be taken to a higher level with a technique presented in the LessWrong post City of Lights. It involves splitting up yourself into partial personalities and letting them discuss with each other. It’s a really interesting and insightful game. I never learned so much about myself in so little time! Some weeks after I started those internal subagent dialogs in my journal, my sub-personalities have stabilized, and I have become a much more balanced person. It turned out that I had three major personality aspects / subagents:

• Utilitarian: The one who pushes me to work for the greatest good of the greatest number of persons relentlessly. Utilitarian considers my own personal desires rather as some kind of necessary evil that has to be incorporated into utility calculations, because there’s no way that I can be just perfectly selfless and rational.
• Kallistean (later Anima): Chaotic, complaining, crazy, ambitious, creative, extremely curious personality component. At the beginning I really wondered why I had such an “irrational” aspect in myself, but soon I found out that it totally makes sense. If conventional methods don’t work, then extreme measures have to be tried out. Kallistean is the super-unconventional experimenter who pushes me beyond my limits and far beyond my comfort zone just to find something that really helps me come further and really solves my problems. Later on, Kallistean became Anima, my dominant “soul core”. Anima has become more modest, but is actually the driving force behind my effective ambitions and my self-improvement process.
• Comfort: Wants to get maximum fun with minimal effort. Keeps me from working too much and investing too much effort into projects with rather unsure outcome.

At first, those subagents disagreed with each other and each of them had its own agenda, which wasn’t really compatible with that of the others. Over the course of some weeks, functional compromises were found and a course of action that was in everyone’s interests was found. The climate of competition was replaced with a harmonic climate of cooperation and productive criticism. As a result, I felt more at peace with myself than ever before. Most problems could be quickly analyzed and solved in the subagent dialog.

There are also five other subagents, which are less dominant, but play important assisting roles:

• Curiosity: Is interested in how everything works. Often asks questions.
• Love: Just loves all sentient beings, especially horses. Has more or less the same goals as utilitarian, but is far more emotional and less strategic.
• Intuition: Is great at introspection and coming up with creative explanations and ideas.
• Harmonizer: Intervenes, if there are serious disagreements. Provides compromises and establishes harmony.
• Remarker: Makes random remarks. Speaks out the thoughts nobody else feels responsible for.

The subagent dialog is a very interesting kind of game, which is not only great for understanding oneself better and becoming more harmonic, but it’s also a generally good tool for brainstorming! I found that I could find good ideas much more quickly, if I let my subagents discuss a topic from their own different perspectives. That trick enables a form of holistic thinking that can hardly be matched with any other technique. In other words: It totally kicks ass! It’s effectiveness is quite surprising, but why does it work at all? I think, the reason is that all relevant personal objectives, values, and perspectives are integrated in a way which makes it possible to attack problems for all important directions at once. That approach solves them at a really remarkable pace. It also combines left-hemispheric thinking with right-hemispheric thinking in a quite effective fashion.

If you want to use the subagent dialog on your own, don’t try to replicate the subagents of me or any other person, but let your own ideas flow and make up subagents which seem to be appropriate to you. Don’t shy away from merging different subagents, splitting them up, creating new ones, or deleting old ones which don’t seem to fulfill any purpose anymore. If your decision turns out to be bad, you can undo them in any case. Initially, I started with about 10 subagents and needed some weeks to find the stable and effective configuration of my current 8 subagents. It’s really ok to have more or less subagents – it’s only important that you feel at ease with your own configuration. When you use this technique, write down everything! Do not try to use this technique simply in your head! Almost all the effectiveness of the subagent dialog comes from writing down everything! Writing is a “superpower” you absolutely need to apply if you want to see optimal results! I’ve written down all my dialogs in my online journal or in separate brainstorming documents. Although it’s not necessary to combine the subagent dialog with journaling, the synergy effects are really a good argument for combining both approaches.

So, what’s the City of Lights subagent dialog good for?

1. Learn more about yourself.
2. Finding out what you really want.
3. Reducing internal conflicts and becoming more harmonic and balanced.
4. Generally improving your own life.
5. Brainstorming: Finding creative ideas and holistic solutions.
6. Solving difficult problems by leveraging different perspectives to attack them from many different sides at once.

So, apart from just being happy, I have also become much more balanced by reading The Feeling Good Handbook and applying the City of Lights subagent dialog. Has that really solved all my problems? Not quite. Even though I had found several really effective techniques for improving myself, I still lacked the right tools to make myself really organized, motivated and productive. These tools will be the topic of the next part.

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