A Sarno-Hanson Synthesis

I just wanted to note that MCTB-style insight meditation also draws quite heavily on the idea that we identify with muscle tension and that sometimes it feels like we're using muscle tension to make ourselves do stuff, or that our inner conflicts can be present in opposing muscle tension. The specific technique that you mention doing sounds kind of similar to a cross between Goenka-style body scanning and Tara Brach's RAIN technique (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-Identification).

I'd encourage both you and the other rationalists who're digging into methods for breaking your sense of self into interacting sub-agents to really consider reading MCTB before you start continually applying these sorts of techniques to dissolve all your problems. Scott does a good job of highlighting Daniel Ingram's cautions about how many easy meditation techniques can seem to solve all your problems up until they completely stop helping and you end up stuck in difficult mental states:

If this last part sounds ominous, it probably should. If the fourth stage looks like a manic episode, the next five or six stages all look like some flavor of deep clinical depression. Ingram discusses several spiritual traditions and finds that they all warn of an uncanny valley halfway along the spiritual path; he himself adopts St. John’s phrase “Dark Night Of The Soul”. Once you have meditated enough to reach the A&P Event, you’re stuck in the (very unpleasant) Dark Night Of The Soul until you can meditate your way out of it, which could take months or years.

Ingram’s theory is that many people have had spiritual experiences without deliberately pursuing a spiritual practice – whether this be from everyday life, or prayer, or drugs, or even things you do in dreams. Some of these people accidentally cross the A&P Event, reach the Dark Night Of The Soul, and – not even knowing that the way out is through meditation – get stuck there for years, having nothing but a vague spiritual yearning and sense that something’s not right. He says that this is his own origin story – he got stuck in the Dark Night after having an A&P Event in a dream at age 15, was low-grade depressed for most of his life, and only recovered once he studied enough Buddhism to realize what had happened to him and how he could meditate his way out:

There's really nothing special about the existing meditation techniques that leads to this. Any consistently-applied enough introspection technique can lead there, especially if you're objectifying things as just thoughts, as sub-agents, or as muscle tension. I strongly suspect that the mental effects mentioned above are due to megadoses of the neurotransmitters underlying the Predictive Processing model. So I'd try to consider either limiting your use of methods like this or to acknowledge that heavy use might end up leading you to "meditate your way out" and read some discussions of what that might be like.

Try throwing in some coherence therapy cues as well. It sounds like your stance is still that the subconscious is dumb in many ways. Be open to the idea that your conscious mind is the who is wrong with significant probability.

A good example of the proposed mechanism at work can probably be seen in the variety of psychosomatic symptoms experienced and reported by soldiers who fought in the first world war (Often diagnosed as "shell shock", "male hysteria", or "war neurosis"). Symptoms included hysterical blindness, deafness, becoming mute, even paralyzed limbs without any apparent cause were a thing.

Also, the "thousand yard stare" seems to be explainable by a similar mechanism: The module producing conscious experience seemingly "detaches" itself from the body it inhabits in an attempt to distance itself from horrors, which seems to be very similar to depersonalization disorder, which can also be triggered by highly distressing experiences.

Related to the sleep example, because you didn't say exactly this, and it makes a stronger case:

I noticed some time ago that my misery when waking up was a negotiation tactic from when my parents would wake me up. They were nice enough to let me sleep a little longer if I looked sufficiently upset at being woken up. It became obvious recently that I was pattern-matching my alarm to a parent. How do I know this? Because I knew that if I started loudly singing a cheery tune with a smile on my face I'd automatically become less miserable, but I never did, because I didn't want to be less miserable, even though my parents weren't around anymore. I started doing it when I realized this, and it works pretty well!

(There was one more problem, of feeling like I'm manipulating myself, which seems at first to be at odds with building self-loyalty. I think this went away as I got more comfortable with the idea of sometimes "wanting to be manipulated" for my own success, of desiring less freedom (which would be sacrilege to my younger self). Reading about Kegan's model of adult development and experimenting with BDSM helped me get there somehow.)

One problem with applying this thesis (did I mention I wholeheartedly agree with it?) is that it's hard to refrain from inadvertently reinforcing such negotiation tactics when someone else looks miserable (like my parents did), ie ferberization is painful (not to mention patronizing when done to adults). I think it's possible to be honest about it with someone reasonable and smart enough to grasp the subtleties, and then, usually only after they're done having their episode, but there's no good solution to this AFAIK. Else we wouldn't have hard problems of income redistribution either - the problem of helping those who need it without inducing weakness/dependence.

BTW, Is there an economic term for this specific problem?

Ten years ago I had a whole miserable year of Repetitive Strain Injury (and other things too) and then had a miraculous one-day recovery after reading Sarno's book. But I didn't (and still don't) agree with the way Sarno (and you) describe what the mechanism is and what the emotions are doing, at least for my own experience and the couple other people I know personally who had similar RSI experiences.

I think it's possible to use muscles in a way that's painful: something like having the muscles be generally tense and their blood supply constricted. I think state-of-mind can cause muscles to operate in this painful blood-supply-constricted mode, and that one such state of mind is the feeling "These muscles here are super-injured and when I use them it's probably making things worse."

If you think about it, it's easy to think of lots of things could predispose people to get stuck in this particular vicious cycle, including personality type, general stress level, factual beliefs about the causes and consequences of chronic pain, and so on. But at the end, I think it's this pretty specific thing, not a catch-all generic mechanism of subconscious expression or whatever like you seem to be thinking.

It is interesting also from the point of view of the AI alignment: should AI align with conscious mind, subconscious mind, or both?