The ABC's of Luminosity

I have to confess I hate introspection, it's one of those things I'd rather be doing pretty much anything than.

More or less like exercise, I only engage in it because I self-consciously know it's good for me and I will eventually be glad I did it. I've had to develop some specific introspection-akrasia techniques, for instance doing it conversationally (as when someone "asks a luminous question" around here) lowers my resistance to it quite a bit.

I've often been advised to keep a journal or diary, and I periodically try it and eventually quit. So instead, I jump at the chance to answer questions like the above, and often try to save my writing to a local hard disk. I'll often reread what I wrote some years back, and assess what kind of progress I've made.

Sadly I was a poor recordkeeper prior to 1997, there are some conversations I had with creationists on BBSes in the early 90's that I dearly wish I could find now. I have a pretty much complete and continuous record of my email archives from 1997 onwards; in 2004 I started freewriting as an alternative to journaling and have saved all such snippets since; and of course now that we live in the Google age there are cases when I use Google to ask my past self what it thought about X.

Recent techniques I've picked up include Dual-n-backing to track WM progress, I'm waiting for the right time to try and use some of pjeby's stuff, I've used some PUA tricks as suggestions on what to look at in myself. I'm getting interested in this "status" thing though, so far, mostly confused at what people say about it.

My experience with MBTI seems to track Alicorn's, I use it mostly as a "foil" to construct a richer picture of who I am. One thing that it's helped me with is notice that some times I just don't feel like being with people, on such occasions I'll just tell whoever I'm around that "I need some cave time" and that helps me be OK with it. That's supposed to be an Introvert thing, although I've also noticed that my thinking tends to be Extroverted, that is, I think better in conversation, and tend to know things more solidly after I've explained them out loud. (Writing helps, but not quite as much as conversation. OTOH after some conversations I lose interest in writing stuff up.)

I wonder if my scoring as an F on the online MBTI might be as a result of explicitly concentrating on expressing my feelings in recent years. (Of course it could also be that MBTI has low reliability.) If so, I probably should work on the Sensing vs Intuitive distinction, but I have no clue how to do that; it already feels as if I'm paying as much attention to data as I can.

I measure my "real" progress by how successful I feel my life is, and I can't complain: for a while now I've felt like I should take more risks because I'm not failing often enough. I'm aiming at increasing my income a fair bit in the coming years, by moving into a more entrepreneurial position now that I'm comfortable freelancing. (I guess "perceived rate of success or failure" is a C-category observation.)

"Saturate" is good advice, many little things help a little, there are few big things that seem to help a lot.

You have anticipated the post "Lights, Camera, Action". It looks like I either got the ordering very, very right, or very, very wrong...

Is it really that difficult to relax at home?

It can be, yes. Stating an observation about my circumstances, I find that my thought patterns can alter significantly according to where I sit down.

If I sit at my work desk, I enter a state of general boredom and tediously pay attention to my various monitors. If I do nothing more than turn around and instead sit with my chair at the table which is normally behind me, I enter a state of critical thinking and desire to tackle problems. And when I go down to the snack room at lunch time and sit in one of the small tables while eating dessert and looking out the window, I immediately begin thinking of fantasy stories that incorporate interesting philosophical problems.

If I sit out on the porch of my family's cabin in the woods, looking out over the lake, I hardly think of anything at all.

I never got why people have to move over 500 miles to relax. Is it really that difficult to relax at home?

This may be a confusion over the meaning of 'relax'. I find a vacation away from home more energizing than one spent at home partly due to the 'a change is as good as a rest' phenomenon.

I think for me being removed from environmental cues that are associated with the stresses of day to day life is also helpful. I found climbing a mountain on my vacation last year more 'relaxing' in this sense than spending the same amount of time sitting around my apartment despite it being physically taxing for example. I also find myself more relaxed/replenished if I've gone snowboarding on a Sunday than if I've sat around my apartment all day watching TV.

This may be a 'personality type' thing.

I love "Codd help you". Brilliant!

In general, I find heuristics for focusing my attention other than where it falls naturally to be interesting only as novelties - soon I'm back to paying attention to whatever strikes me.

Same here. In daily life I don't find this much of problem but I sometimes regret that when I have to choose between for example TVTropes or something else, TVTropes usually wins.

I can entertain time-consuming meditative or introspective exercises to the extent I hope that I'll gain some permanent, low-maintenance benefit, like learning new information that will be useful without constant recitation, or forming more effective habits (in behavior or what I attend to).

One way I found to form habits is to try to change the environment in such a way that the habit you want to learn is also the path of the least resistance. If that isn’t possible, you can try to make it so that you pause and give yourself time to consciously make a decision instead of executing your old wrong habit routine.

For example, I usually hibernate my work laptop. After a couple of weeks however my ram usage tends to go to 2 Gb and stay there (not in the least thanks to visual studio & firefox with +100 tabs) and everything is starting to feel sluggish.

A reboot usually helps but I strongly dislike interrupting my work to reboot so I don’t do it much and, unfortunately, hibernating is always quicker then shutting down when leaving the office. So when I leave, I don’t have much incentive at the moment itself to shut down.

My solution was simply to schedule a batch file to run every Friday afternoon that disables hibernation (and another batch file to enable it again on Monday morning).

A good deal of A -> C goes through B, but not all. Affect can directly influence things like heartbeat and other physical conditions, which I've classified under C, without going through voluntary action, which is B.

Actually, thinking you should be hungry while not actually hungry is pretty common. I once lost a great deal of weight by simply not eating unless I actually felt hunger - we often eat because there's food around or because it's a mealtime instead of because we're hungry. (The weight loss alarmed my pediatrician and she told me to stop doing whatever I was doing, and I've never been able to reduplicate the feat.)

You find "smash a window" gratuitously abnormal, but choose not to comment on having been taken hostage at the bank?

Starin at the blank page
Before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words
That
You cannot find
Reaching
For something in the distance
So close you could almost taste it
RELEASE YOUR INHIBITIONS
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