Practical considerations for mental training
The process of cultivating mindfulness
Hello again, friend! In my previous article on the mind process, we discussed what I call the “sensation model of thought”, its implications for our relationship with the experience of thought, and both the possibility and importance of mental training. In this article, I’m going to assume I’ve already convinced you that mental training is something you should be interested in, and we’re going to spend our time examining what it looks like in practice.
At its core, mental training is not that crazy of an idea. It’s pretty much the same as any other training regimen which might already be a part of your life (like working out). Just like those other types of training, you start by building some basic skills and then scale up from there. In our case that basic skill is mindfulness, the awareness of your experience in the present moment.
There are many exercises you can use to cultivate mindfulness, but it’s hard to beat the proven practice of meditation. It can be hard to explain, even if you’ve been at it for years and experienced it first-hand, but meditation just seems to grasp onto some basic component of human psychophysiology like a lever and let the weight of time and physics drag the mind process into alignment.
And that’s what we’re talking about here: physics. There’s no woo. Like a scientist conducting an experiment in a lab, all you can do is set the pieces in their proper place. What happens next will happen in the exact way and at the exact pace dictated by the laws of physics. But there are better and worse ways of setting up that experiment, and you can put safeguards in place to protect you from your own bad habits. Garbage in, garbage out, right?
You are a process, the action of a complex system. Luckily for you, you are also an evolving system and, with a bit of care, you can guide that evolution in a direction that you prefer.
Sound good? Let’s get started then.
Do you even lift?
Mental training is the deliberate, structured training of qualities of mind. Note that I’m not talking about “brain training”, like in those apps where you try to remember how many ducks there were on the screen and the color of their tails or whatever. Nor am I talking about productivity hacks, though you could use mental training to develop those. I’m talking about shaping those higher-level processes of mind that produce the behaviors that you might call your character or personality.
The idea of training, of deliberate self-improvement, is something we’re all familiar with. Generally, it involves following a controlled process to achieve a specific goal.
Take physical training as an example. At some point in your life, you might have said to yourself I want to run a 10k! Or maybe it was to hike up a certain mountain, squat a certain amount of weight, bike to a certain lake and back, swim across a certain body of water. Maybe it was to compete in a dance competition, to make it to tennis regionals, or to be able to walk across one of those slackline things without looking like an utter fool. Or maybe you have the modest and increasingly ubiquitous goal of walking 10k steps every day.
Even if you’ve never experienced any of the above inclinations, just pick one and imagine making that your goal for the summer. How would you go about achieving that goal? What actions do you think you could take so that you’d have a decent chance of success by the time September rolls around?
If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking about making a routine. Maybe you look online for training programs others have used with success. OK, I’ll run X times a week for the next Y weeks, increasing the time or distance each week until I reach 10k. Pretty straightforward, right?
The process is the same for learning new skills (e.g. learning to cook), acquiring new knowledge (e.g. studying psychology), or any other situation where you decide that you want to improve some aspect of yourself: you put some system in place and follow it with the expectation of some specific and beneficial change on the other side.
Now tell me: are any of the following thoughts familiar?
I wish I was more patient with my sister.
That was a mean thing I just said. I should be kinder to my coworkers.
Hmm, I keep making the same poor decisions. Why do I never see it coming?
Jenny is so generous. I’m going to try to act like her more often.
Yes? You’ve felt something along these lines at some point in your life? And then what did you do? Just go on with your day like normal? That’s bizarre, isn’t it? After all, which do you care about more: running a race, or that feeling that you’re constantly racing against your own temper? Reaching the top of a tough mountain climb, or being able to look back on your choices with approval?
We all more or less agree that qualities like patience, kindness, and wisdom are “Good Things” and that, all else being equal, we’d enjoy our lives a lot more if they were part of the main cast and not relegated to sporadic cameo appearances. Then why be so quick to accept the inheritance assigned to you by the lotteries of genetics and life experience?
There are limits to what mental training can achieve, of course. Eons of evolution won’t be overcome by even a lifetime of diligence. Certain things are just biologically impossible, and coming to know those limitations is part of the training process. That still leaves a lot of room for us to get some good work done, though.
The philosopher Emmanuel Kant had this idea he called the categorical imperative. Legit philosophers might blow their tops at this paraphrasing, but it more or less boils down to “let yourself be guided by principles that could guide everyone without turning the world into a shitshow”. He believed that you had an obligation to find and follow those principles. Well, I can’t imagine a better guiding principle than genuinely trying to be a better person at the end of each day.
But you don’t need such selfless motivation for mental training. Do you enjoy the experience of impatience or anger? No! They’re unpleasant, right? Well, if you could do something to avoid that unpleasantness in the future, why wouldn’t you? If you constantly stub your toe on the way to the bathroom at night, you could keep yelling and grabbing your foot in pain and asking who the hell builds such a tall threshold there anyway?!
Or you could use a night light.
Mindfulness comes first
Mindfulness, or the awareness of your experience in the present moment, is the fundamental skill of mental training. After all, if mental training is a system for improving the character of your everyday experience, don’t you need some way of accurately measuring that experience to be sure you’re making progress?
The idea that you might need to train an awareness of your experience might understandably strike you as a bit silly. I’m already aware of my experience, you might be thinking. How can I not be? I’m living it every second of every day!
It’s simply an unfortunate fact of human psychology that the untrained mind is reliably unaware. What’s worse, as discussed in my previous article, the processes of thought are largely unconscious, and no amount of training can change that biological fact. Cultivating mindfulness is your way of turning lemons into lemonade, of making the most out of the little bit of data that is available to you: your conscious experience.
Consider again a runner training for a race. Jenny wants to run a 10k in under an hour. So, she puts together a training schedule and goes for a run three times a week. But that’s not enough by itself, is it? It seems almost too obvious to mention, but she has to actually record the times of her runs to know if she’s making any progress, right? Maybe she runs faster when she shortens her stride. Maybe it helps her not to eat before the run. Or maybe a certain breathing rhythm does the trick. But if she doesn’t have a stopwatch, or if that stopwatch only ever reads Time: probably pretty good, then there’s no way to tell what’s working for her.
Mindfulness is your stopwatch. It’s your way of knowing what you’re thinking or feeling right now, how it differs from what you were thinking or feeling five minutes (or days, or months) ago, and (most importantly) that you have a good reason to trust that knowledge. The more you hone this skill, the more and better data you will have in training any other aspect of your mind. Without it, you’ll find yourself constantly surprised and swept away by the chaos of the current moment.
To bring this idea home, here’s a quote from a Mindscape interview with psychologist and champion poker player Maria Konnikova:
One of the things that I learned while playing poker that I’ve then applied to other areas of life that I really just encourage people to do if they want to make better decisions, is keep track of your thinking in the moment…
Because if the decision worked out, it’s so easy to say “Yeah, of course, I made it right for the right reasons.” And it’s so powerful to do that because in life, we so often just say “Oh well, I knew that, but I did it because of blah, blah, blah,” and…you’re actually rewriting history…
I bet you weren’t expecting me to throw poker at you as an example of mental training, were you? I brought up this quote because I want to stress that mindfulness is a skill that can be trained by many different techniques. Granted, I think some techniques are better than others (I’ll get around to my spiel about meditation, don’t worry), but mindfulness is the goal, not any particular method of developing it.
Maria is talking about training the process of decision making, but her advice applies equally well to other potential targets of mental training. It also highlights the importance of mindfulness in that training process. Mindfulness lets you see the situation as it arises, which acts as your cue to fire up your training plan — in Maria’s case, to “keep track of your thinking in the moment”. If you get swept away by emotions whenever the rubber hits the road, then you’ll have no chance of implementing that plan. In fact, you’ll probably forget to even try until after you’ve made your (probably unwise) choice.
On the unreasonable effectiveness of meditation
This is the part of the article where I tell you to meditate. Don’t worry! I’ll keep it brief because, as I mentioned above, mindfulness is the goal. Meditation is just a tool. That said, it’s a damn good tool, but it can seem ridiculous to someone who hasn’t tried it before. So I’m supposed to set aside time every day to sit and do nothing? Are you kidding? That’s just a waste of valuable Netflixing minutes!
That’s totally fair. Even as someone who’s been meditating for years, it can be hard for me to give a clear explanation of exactly how meditation cultivates mindfulness. The fact of the matter is simply that it usually does — neuroscientists are working on the details. Nonetheless, let me try to provide you with some intuition for why it might work.
First, I need to make clear what I mean by “meditation”. These days, it’s easy for some popular YouTube video called “BEGINNER Meditation for Happiness” or whatever to get you started on entirely the wrong foot. If it involves music, mantras, chanting, crystals, incense, chakras, or any other nonsense, WALK AWAY. Trust me, there’s plenty enough going on inside your noggin, and our goal is to learn to pay attention to it. Adding unnecessary distractions isn’t going to help. I’ve mentioned apps like Waking Up and Headspace before, and I think they’re a pretty good place to start.
When you make a habit of meditating for 10 (or 30, or 60) minutes every day, you’re going to observe the mind in all its different moods. Some days you’ll be stressed, others relaxed, others tired, hyperactive, anxious, angry, happy, sad, impatient. Some days you’ll have arguments with people who aren’t there, others you’ll be genuinely excited to see what appears in the mind, and others you’ll feel like you just can’t even right now.
But then you’ll sit down anyway and just observe. That choice takes effort in and of itself. When the problems of the world are pressing down on you, it’s hard to just sit with them even for a little while. You don’t try to do anything other than just be aware of what’s happening in the mind right now.
Over time, the patterns of your thoughts will become familiar. Oh, there’s that thought again about how my dad never approves of my decisions. Hello again! You’ll become comfortable with those thoughts and emotions simply because you’ve seen them so many times before. They might be unpleasant, and at first you’ll have the urge to get up and do something about them. You’ll get all caught up in that train of thought, speculating about some imagined future or reliving (re-writing?) some powerful memory, and you’ll completely forget that you’re supposed to be focused on the present (the breath is a common choice for an object of focus).
Then you realize that you’re lost in thought. Of course, that by itself doesn’t make the train of thoughts you’ve been chasing any less captivating. You’ll still want to dive right back into that mental conversation. But it’ll have to wait, because now is the time for meditating. So you disengage. It takes effort, but you do it. You don’t try to stop the thoughts or anything, you just don’t engage with them. Soon enough, they pass away, just like they always do.
You keep doing this, day after day after day. You get lost in thought, you notice it, you disengage. You get better at it. You recognize your distraction more quickly, and it’s easier to let the thought go.
And then, one day, when you’re having that conversation with your dad (again) about why you don’t need a Ph.D. you’ll see those familiar thoughts and feelings arise. Right on schedule. But it’s fine, you’re used to them. Why should they have any effect on this conversation?
Disengage.
Once again, consider what Maria Konnikova has to say about the training process:
It’s something where there’s a disconnect between what you know you should do [and] what you actually do… you need to have everything be in sync. And that’s difficult. So I think the way that one does that is first through practice. So you have to just do it over and over and over…
What you’re trying to do is get it into that part of your brain where it becomes almost instinct, where it becomes something that’s easy for you to do. It’s like when you’re learning any new skill.
This is what psychologists call automatization. Meditation is something you sit for. When you stand up, though, you take the mindfulness with you.
And you’re totally allowed to sit in a chair, by the way. You don’t have to do it cross-legged on the floor. Furniture technology has come a long way since Buddha’s time, we don’t need to pretend like we haven’t invented more effective ways of resting the tuchus.
So I hope you’ll give meditation a try, it really is an effective tool. If you’re dead set against it, though, just find a tool that works for you. Maybe it’s poker. Personally, I was surprised by the amount of mindfulness I developed while training for a marathon. Pick something and be consistent.
And that’s all I will say about meditation in this article.
Are we there yet?
As we’ve discussed at length in previous articles, the mind is a physical process. During your training journey, then, the changes undergone by the mind are by definition physical changes. That means that change will happen at exactly the pace dictated by the laws of physics. Unfortunately, physics doesn’t care if you’d like things to pick up the pace, already!
What’s more, these changes are occurring in processes that, while they eventually contribute to the production of conscious experience, are themselves inaccessible to consciousness. You’re not going to feel your anterior cingulate cortex getting heavier as gray matter accumulates. You won’t notice the re-regulation of activity in the default mode network.
What you can notice, if you’ve developed the mindfulness to do so, are changes in the outputs of these physical processes: experiences of thought.
When I learned to surf, I went out for two hours every morning to practice. Each time, I found myself exactly as good (or bad!) as I was. I was definitely improving as a result of that practice, but I couldn’t explain exactly how it was happening or why it didn’t happen any faster.
Then, one day, I went out and it just “clicked.” I found myself able to “pop up” on the surfboard nine times out of ten, whereas the day before it might have been two or three. Moreover, I couldn’t even really break down the movement anymore. It had become this atomic thing that I could do, like walking or moving my arm.
Seriously, try to explain to someone how you move your arm. You just do, right? That’s the automatization we talked about.
The process will happen at its own pace. It’s just physics. I could have had a burning desire to become a champion surfer, or I could have felt it was nothing more than a fun morning activity. So long as I went out and practiced in the same way for those two hours every morning, though, the exact same results would have come along at exactly the time they did.
Notice how I emphasized “in the same way”. Obviously, technique matters. This is why athletes and trainers are always arguing about things like the combination of repetitions and weight that most effectively promotes muscle growth, or the amount of time to wait between sets. What you want is to develop a system — a combination of effective tools along with the processes by which you use those tools — that is optimized for producing a certain result.
The Rube Goldberg machine
Have you seen the music video for “This Too Shall Pass” by OK Go? You know, the one where they have dominoes and marbles and umbrellas and paint and other sundry items that set off increasingly awesome chain reactions? This one!
That ingenious contraption is called a Rube Goldberg machine, and it’s more or less how I think about the training process.
You start by playing with each tool or technique, figuring out what you can (and can’t) do with it. This is why mindfulness is so important, it helps you see how your mental processes tend to operate. Once you have a good grasp on the individual pieces, it’s time to start putting them together. You can manipulate your routine or your environment so that those mental processes tend to get activated in certain ways that you prefer.
As we’ve discussed before, personality and behavior are strongly influenced by external factors. In his book Personality and Assessment, Walter Mischel — the psychologist that came up with the famous Marshmallow Test — argued so strongly for the power of the situation to determine behavior that some misunderstood him to be dismissing the idea of a fixed personality altogether. I wouldn’t go that far (and neither would Mischel), but one of the benefits of rejecting the idea of an “inner self” (see my previous article) is the ability to accept and leverage this kind of malleability.
You will behave differently in different contexts, sometimes so differently that it almost feels like you’re a different person. So why not shape the context to produce the behavior you want? Just like you might craft a playlist that gets you pumped for a workout, you can tailor your headspace to bring yourself closer to the person that you want to be.
You set the pieces up, and then let physics do its job.
Here’s a simple example: willpower is a limited resource. There’s a limit to the number of decisions you can make in a day, the number of impulses you can resist, before decision fatigue sets in and you’re practically a zombie. Why do you think they put the candy right next to the checkout in the supermarket? That’s when you’re most likely to give in and scarf down that king-size Snickers. So if you’re someone that struggles with food cravings, maybe don’t go shopping in the evening when you’re mentally exhausted. The you who goes shopping on Saturday morning makes better decisions than the you who goes after work on Wednesday. You get to choose which you does the shopping!
If mental training were only good for dieting success, though, this would be a complete waste of an article. So let’s be a bit more ambitious in our next example while keeping the same theme of impulse control.
If you are like me, you easily find yourself over-committing to projects. It’s just so easy to get caught up in the conversation, the excitement of the project owner is infectious, you’re vibing and bouncing ideas off of each other. Yeah, I can totally help with that!
Then the call ends, you’re coming down from your social-interaction-induced emotional high, and you look at your to-do list. Sure, this project is a good idea, but so are all these other projects. And actually, now that you think about it, this is a lot more work than the project owner realizes. When are you supposed to be able to fit it in?
You apply your mindfulness to analyze the patterns of thought that led you here, and you come up with a plan. First, you set some specific goals, like to reduce the number of projects on your plate to the three that are most meaningful to you. Next is the process: from now on, any time someone pitches you an idea and you notice that impulse to help creeping in, you will state upfront that you can’t commit to anything right away and will need a few days to review the details. Even better, you’ll just start the call with that disclaimer to make expectations clear.
Next time you’re getting swept away and just want to say Let’s DO IT, you’ll catch yourself (mindfulness). You’ll remember the ground rule you set at the start of the call, and you’ll hold back from agreeing to anything — if only to avoid contradicting yourself. It’ll feel forced in the beginning. You might even need to write your plan down and keep it in plain sight to avoid forgetting to set that ground rule.
Eventually, though, your reactions will change. Cautious consideration will become your first instinct. Your own past behavior will start to seem ridiculous to you. How could I have ever been that impulsive? I need to consider the details first! Of course, I’m going to start the call by setting realistic expectations. That’s just… wise.
Level up, +5 to wisdom. Mental training, yo.
Get to work!
I admit, the examples I’ve given might not be the most glamorous or spectacular. But if I had started with “here’s how to become a kinder person”, I might have come across as yet another peddler of overzealous self-help nonsense. Kindness, generosity, and any other aspect of mind can be trained, of course, but I’ll leave it to you to take the examples I’ve given above and consider how they apply to those areas of your life that matter most to you.
I hope you’ve found this article useful. Until next time!
