Lately I’ve been trying to “notice” things.
Noticing is when you clearly define a pattern that you’d like to shift and then load it into your subconscious. Your brain is a pattern-noticing machine. So it’s not that hard to load a new pattern and then have it automatically surfaced to your conscious thoughts without any effort.
Once that happens you get an option to interrupt that pattern the next time it arises.
At first this requires willpower. And feels very hard. For me it feels like I’m pushing a boulder up a hill and I’m like 5% of the way there and already completely exhausted. Hopeless.
But I’ve realized that that’s just the normal first step of most growth, so instead of taking it as a negative sign (this is hard) I’ve been able to notice (!) when I do this and then mentally reframe it as “ooh look I’ve just started growing, this is a good signal”.
Eventually, if you do this enough, the interrupts start to get easier. And then sometimes they just become fully subconscious. This is my model of one way habit change actually happens on a mechanistic level.
Steps
Name and define a pattern you want to change, as explicitly as you can, e.g. I get this very specific shame feeling in my chest and face when I do certain things slightly outside of social norms. I think of it as a microshame, normally too small to notice like normal shame but still something that changes my emotional state and subtly affects my interactions with the world and others. So I call this one noticing microshames.
Load the pattern into your subconscious. I do this by making a Roam tag for it so I can journal on it—in this case [[[[noticing]] micro[[shame]]s]]—and also by making a recurring todo in Todoist for this that links to the corresponding Roam tag. Usually I’ll have it recur anywhere between every day and every week in the beginning, and then once this process is complete I’ll shift it to every ~two months.
Interrupt the pattern. When your brain promotes the pattern to your attention when it’s happening, do something to interrupt it. For the microshame one I just try to do some sort of embodiment/somatic move to come back to my body, and to find the shame in my body, feel it completely without resistance, and just watch it as it eventually floats away.
Embrace the pattern-interrupting being hard in the beginning. Notice that you will probably feel like you want to just give up because the shifting in the beginning is too effortful and emotionally draining, and just reframe that as growth. I find trying to get excited about it helps. Ooh growthy things are happening! This is usually the rate-limiting step for me, it’s very easy to forget that this is ~supposed to be hard and that hardness is a sign of progress (encouraging) not failure (not encouraging).
Repeat until you are satisfied.
Meta-notice that you can do this for any thing in your life you want to change, and get good at noticing specific things you want to change.1 Not always easy.
Polarity Flipping
Other than shifting more easily, one other interesting thing that’s come from this practice for me is around how problems feel. They used to feel hard but now they mostly just feel exciting. The hardest part of a “problem” now feels like noticing there is an actual problem, actually identifying its root, and then defining it super well. Once I have a well-defined problem I can usually solve it. So when I do find one it’s exciting because instead of representing a roadblock it just feels like a patch of my mental map of the world that I have yet to explore, and which I can do easily and which then makes all future exploration easier.
“Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.”
—Dan Dennett
Notes
This seems like a common way people get stuck, just not noticing that some part of their reality is malleable instead of fixed.
"The hardest part of a “problem” now feels like noticing there is an actual problem, actually identifying its root, and then defining it super well. Once I have a well-defined problem I can usually solve it...a patch of my mental map of the world that I have yet to explore" - I like this phrasing. I'm curious if you have any examples of behaviors/mistakes/etc you've done this with