Type 4 problems have a wrinkle I've found interesting/useful once I identified it. Successfully executing on the strategy mentioned for Type 4 requires what I call self-trust. That is, the system breaks down if you form these agreements with yourself and then have a pattern of breaking them. This can happen regardless of the content of the conversation between System 1 and 2 you have at the time. It is not automatic to ask yourself a question like "what is my track record with this sort of agreement" and much more common to just model your future self as being more virtuous than your present self. Fortunately, I think this problem is amenable to a general counter-strategy that had positive spillover effects elsewhere in my life. Building self-trust can be done with offline training.

For those not familiar with the technique: Let's say you want to stop pressing the snooze button on your alarm clock, but like clockwork every morning you do. Instead of trying to train in the actual scenario you need the skill in you try training in an artificial situation. You lie down, set your alarm and practice getting up as soon as it goes off. You do this multiple times per training session until you have built a mental circuit for "getting up when alarm goes off." If all goes well you then find online execution easier.

So to circle back to building self-trust. You practice lots of pre-commitments in low stakes situations and make sure to reward yourself a lot (could just be internal rewards) when you succeed and don't punish yourself when you fail. You are building the mental circuits associated with "I do what I say I will do." After sufficient practice many things start becoming easier. The biggest spillover effect for me was that my internal selves started getting along much better when I could tell a sub-agent that I would attend to their needs later and have them actually believe it and calm down about the current situation. Eventually sub-agents stopped being so "grabby" about my attention.

BTW can we get Anna a time turner so she can post more? This is an excellent post.

I expect that The Work of Byron Katie will be particularly useful for your type 3 classification, as it's specifically intended for getting system 1 to update on "X should/shouldn't be/do Y" beliefs. (e.g. "that person shouldn't be making munching sounds")

Per note 6, The Work actually involves a process of asking "Is that true?" about your beliefs, along with some other questions, and some pattern reversals... eg. "I shouldn't be making munching sounds", which helps in realizing that you actually have options.

For example, options that were not obvious before because system 1 was so stuck on the idea that things just shouldn't be that way. (For example, you might suddenly realize that you can wear earplugs, leave the room, politely ask someone to stop, etc.)

Of course, it might be even more helpful to question the belief "I shouldn't be petty", as it would have an even broader positive impact. ;-)

I say that because I've noticed in general that the impulses which propel people to self-improve are precisely the impulses that need to be negated in order for them to actually improve. That, e.g. a desire to "not be petty" leads precisely to a continued experience of one's self as being petty... in much the same way that the desire to not be an inadequate writer leads to a continued experience of feeling inadequate as a writer.

The thing that distinguishes these desires from healthy ones is that they're about you (the generic "you", not you, Anna Salomon specifically), rather than about the world, and that they are trying to avoid a perceived negative about the self, rather than being a desire to improve who you already are. (Even if the surface phrasing of the desire is positive, it's the emotional "tone" (as you called it) that matters.)

"Not being petty" or "being a good enough writer" are self-descriptions, not goals. A goal is, "have a good relationship with person X" or "have a good ad written". These are 1) not about one's self, and 2) can be reduced to positively-stated sensory descriptions of outside-world phenomena, without reference to your internal state.

Conversely, self-directed improvement goals (what Heidi Grant Halvorson calls "be good" goals) are negative descriptions of internal state, and lead to lots of back-and-forth and frustration because there isn't actually anything for you to optimize or move towards. All you can do is continually run headfirst into whatever you are trying to prohibit yourself from experiencing: i.e., the awareness of yourself as being "petty" or an "inadequate writer". Awareness of these self-descriptions triggers a negative self-judgment, which is painful. So your brain tries to avoid awareness, but this only perpetuates whatever outside situation is triggering the awareness (munching, needing to have a finished ad), because you're not doing anything to actually resolve the situation.

So, the solution is to question the belief that one ought not to be petty (or ought to be a good writer, or whatever), so as to discover that it is not necessary to achieve some state of perfect internal grace in order to accomplish one's true, external goals. Systems 1 and 2 will usually object, of course, because System 1 thinks that if you give up on not being petty, something awful is going to happen, and System 2 will back System 1 up with perfectly logical reasons why giving up the injunction to not be petty will in due course lead to the fall of civilization as we know it. ;-)

One of the peculiar side-effects of the way our brains render these personal injunctions is that they act like an override on both System 1 and System 2. We can't actually think about solutions to the problem of a munching noise, if the injunction is triggered by the mere thought of our not liking the noise. (Because in our mind, "not liking a noise" equates to "being petty".) So we don't even get so far as considering solutions, because we're barely even allowed to admit there's a problem.

Which is why just admitting to problems is often a helpful first step. Admitting to one's self that, "yes, actually, I am petty, if petty means disliking munching noises. And yes, I am an inadequate writer, if I define that as "not having written this ad yet"." In each case, the problem isn't the (accurate!) self-definitions, but rather, the belief that the self-definition is horrible and ought to be avoided at all costs. (And/or, the belief that the pejorative labels "petty" and "inadequate" are truly relevant or applicable to the neutral facts of the situation.)

Anyway, an awful lot of stuff is like this. Enough so that I've chosen to primarily specialize in the field of just problems that work like this. Tons of addictive and self-sabotaging behaviors build on things just like this, so I'm not going to run out of people to help any time soon. ;-)

This might be random; I'm not sure how it fits, but for some reason I feel like it's worth saying.

Sometimes I like to think about pain/suffering/bad things as good because they're a signal to how I could improve. I'm referring to any trivial bad thing at all.

I think what led this comment to pop into my head is that I imagined you (author) deriving the ideas in this article from doing it. Ie. I imagined you sitting in bed upset because you wanted your laptop and it was far away, and then thinking:

"I'm upset right now... this is signaling an opportunity for me to improve... how can I improve?... how is my mind screwing up?... it's sort of trying to use telekinesis..."

Is that my cartoon?

I recently watched this Coursera course on learning how to learn and your post uses different words for some of the same things.

The course described what you call "shower-thoughts" as "diffuse mode" thinking, with an opposite called "focused mode" thinking and the brain only able to do one at a time. Focused mode uses ideas that are already clustered together to solve familiar problems while diffuse mode attempts to find useful connections between unclustered ideas to solve new problems in new ways. Not sure if these are the formal/correct terms from the literature that was behind the class, but if so it might be worth using them instead of making up our own jargon.

As for the class it definitely had some stuff that I still try to keep in mind, but it also had some things that I haven't quite figured out how to incorporate (chunking) or didn't find useful (some of the interviews). There is some overlap with what CFAR seems to be trying to teach. Overall I'd recommend taking a look if you have an hour or so per week over a month for it.

This idea of 'attempted telekenesis' is a good label for most peoples reactions to frustrating events I think. One type of frustration seems to occur when the result of an action is not as expected and yet we try to repeat the action but with more anger and expect things to change but predictably they don't.

I've had great success over the last decade or so by really reminding myself in times of frustration that it's my actions causing the events, and that if I want events to change, I need to alter my actions accordingly.

Entirely unrelated to this excellent post, but we should have a regular thread of math riddles. I got nerd sniped in the middle there.

I have a few recurrent self-actualization fantasies that make use of fanciful abilities and resources. Sometimes the ability is time travel, which made this tweet by Liron Shapira stand out to me:

A time machine is a mechanism that lets you pretend like something far from you is actually near you, with respect to causal distance.

Likewise with your telekinesis and "vanishing into the floor", I propose that daydreams (as recurrent, unproductive consideration of situations involving plans that are, in reality, non-actionable for their use of fanciful skills and resources) commonly serve as agency-superstimuli: imagined successes, relying on expanded abilities (such as those which reduce effort, cost, or uncertainty of achieving some material effect), produce an inference with in-pretense-validity of one's own exceptional personal character.

Maybe it's worth distinguishing "wishing for an outcome", and "imagining the experience of the desired outcome (eating breakfast)", and "imagining a fantastical plan for achieving the outcome" as having different effects on one's motivation / decisions.

For your copy writing example, you list a few interesting techniques which show up later in only abbreviated form in the section of responses to Type 3 problems. Rephrasing and expanding a little bit, if you're worried about poor task performance you might motivate yourself by: 1) highlighting to yourself that you are uncertain about your performance quality, rather than certain that it will be bad, and that you're thus neglecting the possibility that you will do well at the task, 2) highlighting your comparative advantage in solving the problem for reasons other than skill (such as being in a unique position / time / place to solve the problem, or having special access to relevant resources, or having a title with related useful liberties / authorities), or 3) highlighting your (role-consonant) duty to try / to perform, while trivializing your duty to evaluate your performance (perhaps diffusing that responsibility by deciding that it belongs to some non-specified others).

I might add that questioning whether your own performance will be adequate / sufficient, probably has at least these three functions: 1) to make you change/improve your plans, or give up on your plans if they seem inadequate, 2) to motivate you to ask other people for information about your current/future performance, and 3) to excuse future failure ("I knew I couldn't do this. I kept saying I didn't know how. Everyone heard me. I shouldn't have been forced to do this. This isn't my fault. This outcome shouldn't/doesn't justify an inference decreasing anyone's estimation of my skill / social standing."). (Please not that I'm using "you" rhetorically. I don't know the specifics of your work with CFAR, haven't perceived any failure, and am not trying to accuse you of any, I don't know what you call that, "epistemic misfeasance" maybe.)

These suggest a few ways to suppress (the decision relevance / import of) such worries: 1) making more resolute in your mind that a) nothing more can/should be done to improve your plans / your expected future performance, that b) "backing out" would be more costly than continuing, 2) asking aloud for others to help evaluate / improve your performance, or 3) verifying (to your satisfaction in advance of the performance) a communal perception of the validity of your excuse by (confirming that others will not / persuading others that they should not) make such a judgment to bad character, due to whatever circumstances are in effect.

I think one of the most interesting parts of this post is your conceptualization of System I and System II as not just being parts of your decision making apparatus, but as being separate person with their own preference, beliefs, and signature behavioral characteristics. Is there other literature which suggests that dual process of decision making are paired with dual processes of motivation (appetitive/aversive drives (and also maybe some preference-like psychological state behind habitual / scripted action) vs. reflective / higher order, verbally endorsed, ego-syntonic preferences)?

Great post. Some cases of "attempted telekinesis" seem to be similar to "shoulding at the universe".

To stay with your example: I can easily imagine that if I were in your place and experienced this stressful situation with CFAR, my system 1 would have became emotionally upset and "shoulded" at the universe: "I shouldn't have to do this alone. Someone should help me. It is so unfair that I have so much responsibility".

This is similar to attempted telekinesis in the sense that my system 1 somehow thinks that just by becoming emotionally upset it will magic someone (or the universe itself) into helping me and improving my situation.

Shoulding at the universe is also a paradigmatic example of a wasted motion. Realizing this helped me a lot because I used to should at the universe all the time ("I shouldn't have to learn useless stuff for university because I don't have enough time to do important work."; "This guy shouldn't be so irrational and strawman my arguments"; etc. etc.)

First of all I'm french so please forgive my language mistakes Thanks for this article very interesting . A bit unconventional in methods that are used but still logic, so where is the problem? :) Then, this article is incredibly well done, a lot of details and examples a big Bravo ChapelierdeCheshire

Congratulations for having reinvented the idea of managing expectations! If you managed to do it independently without ever having read about it, it is quite a feat! I was taught this in a Buddhist meditation group, they told me it is not having to endure something unpleasant is what makes us unhappy, but the expectation, the hope that the unpleasantness will go away, and then feeling let down when it doesn't. And the solution is to work on your expectations.

That is of course easier said that done. A thought exercise like assuming the munching sounds will go on forever and you just have to live with it forever is certain helpful. Mindfullness meditation done right helps even more. In this type of meditation you just take every thought or sound as it is, without judging it, without hoping any change or lack of change, without expecting anything and letting impressions come and go.

Also, problems like this are solvable. The problem is that you don't want to offend coworkers. While that would worth an article on its own, it seems offense happens in an uncanny valley between being super nice and super funny rude. Because it is obvious that being super nice offends no one, but also we males tend to have a second trick with each other: be really super rude and it too will not offend people because it goes beyond that and becomes a parody of an offense, a good joke. So I could tell a male coworker hey hippo if you did not chow crap down your hideous excuse of a gullet all the time while sounding like a whole flock of rabies infected swine feeding, you would not have your own gravity field dwarfing some lesser planets. Then he would call me a pimple full of puss on a donkey's backside and suggest me to orally please a metric ton of tiny monkeys and we would both laugh and there would be no offense done and he would get the message of turn down the noise. But I know women don't usually do this. I think women need to learn to borrow this. This is classic counter-signalling: being overly rude means you are good friends. If you are not sure signalling a problem nicely would not give offense, you could try signalling it so rude that it can only be a friendly joke.