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I read this post for the first time a couple of weeks ago, when my partner pointed out the term "neural annealing" to me. I read the comments here, just to see if people have real-life examples they see this pattern in, and I was slightly amused to see that most people found it dense, especially after I just checked with my partner, "did you ever read this in full?" and he seems to be on the same page as some of the replies.
I had no trouble going through it past that I had too many talking points that made me pause and process frequently (I set aside some notes to come back to later). I asked my partner what made him think of it after I told him a personal experience of mine.
For a bit backstory, I was struggling to cut back on alcohol during the first stage of the lockdown. I did not believe I have a "drinking problem", as I was not exerting self-control every time I do not drink, and the craving is not that consistent. The first step was to figure out if people considered the objective experience to be problematic, and sure enough... there is no single benefit to drinking. Then, it became a quest to use other people's solutions to solve my not "drinking problem". That process introduced a lot of cognitive dissonance, among really uninformed experiences from sober and drunk people alike. Every time I drank, onward, it was more unsettling and surprisingly made me drink more for a few months till it became an actual problem for me (hangovers are terrible). It was a very gradual process to finding where my struggle is, as my drinking patterns did not align with any of the experiences I found online. They were inconsistent. No single framework applied. I applied them, one after the other, till I got tired. It seemed to be triggered, sometimes, and desired, at other times; and I only started to think about it as "integration" when the guilt and shame from not complying subsided.
He mentioned the term, when I finished telling him that I could really only cut back once I applied my own whacky version of "titration tapering". I injected drinking alcohol into my sober moments, where I would not even think about drinking normally. And, I made my normally inebriated moments mostly sober.
What's interesting, the amount of alcohol stayed the same the first two weeks of doing this. I was not drinking any less than I did. I still drank in excess when I did. And there was no new "insight". But, I basically achieved spontaneous sobriety gradually since then. He noticed before I realized it, I just thought I was less anxious from work, when he pointed out to me that I have been working similar hours. :)
Instead of resolving to work, resolve to try to work. This is a lot harder to cheat, I know what effort feels like.
This resonates with me, as well. I find that I need to use a combination of top-down and bottom-up techniques or I start to become overly concerned about how my method is not working, or how I am struggling to complete this task. It is particularly the case when the nature of the work has a cold start that is implicit between steps.