A message you didn’t get. A plan that quietly fell apart.

Suddenly everything starts to feel heavier.

In moments like this it's very easy for you to remember other bad things.
This makes you overestimate how likely it is that more bad things will happen.

You get anxious.

From here it’s very easy to spiral.

And even if you recognize it:
“Oh no, here I go again.”

…it doesn't do anything.

But if there is a spiral down, there must be a spiral up.
Let me explain…

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How Your Brain Starts the Spiral

When something bad happens, your brain immediately starts asking:
“Is this going to happen again? How likely is it?”

The problem is:
You can’t actually calculate that.

The real world has an indefinitely large set of variables interacting in an indefinitely large number of ways.
Even a supercomputer couldn’t track them all.

You deal with this problem by using heuristics:
Mental shortcuts that help you cut through and zero in on the relevant information.

One of those is the representativeness heuristic:
You judge how probable an event is by how prototypical it is (how salient it is) and how much it stands out in your mind.

And that will often interact with the availability heuristic:
You judge how probable an event is by how easy you can remember a similar event occurring, or how easily you can imagine something like it happening again.

Now the problem is, if you're in a negative state (because something went wrong in your day) you trigger a process called "Encoding Specificity":

When you're sad, it's very difficult for you to remember times when you were genuinely happy.
But it's very easy to remember times when you were sad.

That's because your memory stores not only the facts, but also the state you are in (and all that perspectival, participatory knowing).

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Notice what’s happening here:
​You're in a bad state so it's easy for you to remember bad things.
That means you judge the probability of bad things happening to be increasing.

Now all of this is interacting with what's called "Confirmation Bias":
It is an adaptive strategy you use where you tend to only look for information that confirms your judgment, because finding disconfirmation takes too long and it's very difficult and complex.

So as you go through your memory in your imagination, you will tend to look for things that confirm your belief that it will probably happen again.

As your brain starts to conclude that the probability of negative events is high, you get anxiety.

What does anxiety do to you?

You lose cognitive flexibility.
Your framing on things becomes very narrow, rigid, and limited.

What does that do?

It reduces your ability to solve problems.
You start making more mistakes.

Each failure then feeds your anxiety, which reinforces your sense that bad events are happening to you (and will keep happening).

It starts to gather in your mind as:
“I'm doomed!”

If you keep going like this, you’ll start interpreting more and more events (even neutral ones) as bad.
The whole thing begins to feed on itself.

​

And notice how most of this is happening automatically in a self-organizing fashion.

Why?

Because your cognition is inherently self-organizing.
Your processes need to be happening simultaneously bottom up and top down.

Like what you are doing right now: you're reading both the letters and the words.

Ultimately that means that the very things that make you so intelligently adaptive…

Your cognition which:

• zeroes in on relevant information
• is so complex and capable of complexifying itself and organizing itself
• is trying to fit you to the environment and process information in a way that's doable within the real world

…simultaneously makes you vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.

Which implies that every time you're exercising your intelligent agency, you're making yourself vulnerable to self-deceptive, self-destructive processing.

This is called Parasitic Processing.

It’s ‘parasitic’ because it takes up life within you…and it takes life away from you.

It causes you to lose your agency.
It causes you to suffer.

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And this is the crucial thing to understand about parasitic processing:
Even if you know when you're in one of these spirals…
“Oh no…here I go again.”
…it doesn't do anything.

Because the issue is not a single thought that you can correct.
It’s a complex, self-organizing, adaptive system.

When you try to intervene in just one place, the rest of the system simply reorganizes around your attempt.

It can adapt and preserve itself as you try to destroy it, because it's making use of the very machinery by which you adapt.

​

But remember: if there is a spiral down, there must be a spiral up.

Realize that the same complex machinery (that is operating against you) can be repurposed, so that it reduces your capacity for self-deception (instead of amplifying it).

How?

By cultivating a counter-active dynamical system that is operating for you.

That doesn't intervene just at one place in your cognitive machinery one at a time, like your efforts:
“Let me try this…oh, that didn’t work…okay, I’ll try that…”

…because every time you do that, the system simply reconfigures, and you find yourself doing the same thing again (in the fifth relationship, the third new city).

That's why people end up in therapy.

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So what might such a system look like?

An example of this is the cultivation of an ecology of practices:​
​Sets of practices with complementary strengths and weaknesses, organized together so they can support each other.

A dynamical system that can intervene in multiple places in your cognitive machinery simultaneously (in a coordinated fashion) which ultimately doesn’t just operate at the level of your beliefs, but operates at the level of your state of consciousness and your traits of character.