I, OS: debug your mind’s code — and hack yourself happy
- Founder of Selfhackathon Patrycja Slawuta says shame and guilt are two damaging functions of our human “code” — so how do we reprogram it?
- Entrepreneurship is hugely valuable for humanity — but the mental health cost is high.
- We will get even more emotionally intertwined with tech “when sophisticated AI is combined with deep psychology.”
Startup culture is routinely described in pressured language.
The non-stop hustle, the need to “crush it,” the 24/7 grind, the fake-it-til-you-make-it mantra: for entrepreneurs, the demand to squeeze more out of a day is exhausting.
Extraordinary pressure leaves ordinary people badly exposed. Recent research by Michael A. Freeman, M.D., of the University of California San Francisco, found that, among entrepreneurs, “49% of participants reported having one or more lifetime mental health conditions.” It’s a figure that should give anyone who works in a startup pause for thought — and yet frank conversation about mental health is thin on the ground.
So how should the entrepreneurial community respond?
Patrycja Slawuta, M.A Psych, PhD(c), had an interesting realisation: we’re used to the idea of coding software — but what about our own inner coding?
Patrycja — who founded SelfHackathon, and aims to help people understand their own “code” — frames the mind as a computer. This means that our behaviour is the operating system — and the key to good mental health is maintaining that codebase.
We were fascinated by her idea, as well her journey — and asked Patrycja to describe the life ethos that brought her to a highly logical starting point for dealing with mental health.
TOA.life: You speak about the ability to “re-code” or “hack” our own thought processes. How does drawing on skills from typically emotion-free areas like coding help conquer complex and unpleasant feelings like guilt and shame?
Patrycja Slawuta, SelfHackathon: We can think of patterns in human behavior like a code. Some code was pre-programmed into us (such as psychological biases), some was programmed into us by others (culture, religion, family, early experiences) whereas other code we are consciously writing ourselves (acquiring skills, having new experiences).
There are several questions that are useful to ask oneself: 1) do you know your own code? 2) Who has programmed you? 3) How many times have you upgraded your code? 4) How can you change the old outdated code?
Shame and guilt from this perspective are functions of one of the oldest code human beings have — the emotional OS. It’s an extremely powerful and compelling code.
It makes us react almost instantly and automatically every time is gets triggered. To conquer shame/guilt by asking these four questions is a good starting point.
I believe that code and programming is ubiquitous throughout humanity and the larger world
TOA.life: What is the story behind your realisation that a coding/hacking parallel could be drawn with our minds?
PS: While it may be controversial — I believe that code and programming is ubiquitous throughout humanity and the larger world, although it may express itself in ways that doesn’t connote “code” immediately.
We can recognized this dynamic by just looking at the science and recognizing that we humans are in fact living code. Human beings are constructed through organic code of which the building blocks are DNA, which are instructions to build the physical architecture.
To take it a step further, individual people can be considered “cells” in progressively larger and larger constructions called a family, a tribe, a village, a city, a country, and so forth.
What is interesting today is that while organic structures are all around us, there are newer and “synthetic” (although I don’t particularly like the term) structures that are also growing and evolving such as digital communities, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.
While the “code” is different between more human-like and more machine-like entities and structure, my view is that they are evolving by themselves and evolving with each other.
This is the primary reason why I founded my company SelfHackathon, which works with both individuals and companies to understand their own code, to inspect it in real-time, and to rewire and upgrade it to the way that they aspire.
TOA.life: Is there a routine or ritual you do every day — and why is it important?
PS: First, I think routines and rituals, as well as habits, are enormously important because they habituate one to the process of doing.
I find mornings to be especially precious. Somehow, they set the stage for the rest of the day. I have had the same morning routine for many years now: morning meditation, visualization, planning the day (writing three priorities) and reading a chapter from a good book.
Meditation settles and centers the mind, visualizations expands the mind, planning sets clear priorities to be productive and not merely active and reading feeds the mind with inspiration.
TOA.life: In the area where technology and mental health meet, is there something that we might be doing in five years which we can’t foresee now — but won’t be able to live without?
PS: One of the things that I think will find itself into existence over the next five years is “psych-tech”, or the combination of psychology and technology. When sophisticated AI gets combined with deep psychology (emotions, humor, surprise, etc.) then the possibilities for new modalities of interaction, creativity, and communication.
We could very well see this kind of technology be embedded in other technologies like communications, AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) and find ourselves living in worlds that has been represented in fiction such as Westworld or Her.
Happiness is real only when shared.
TOA.life: We always like asking our interviewees a few of Proust’s questions — what do you appreciate the most in your friends?
PS: Being able to share the little, delicious life moments with them. As the movie Into the Wild so eloquently said, “happiness is real only when shared.”
TOA.life: One more — what is your main fault?
PS: In life, as Joseph Campbell said: “the cave we fear to enter holds the treasure we seek”. The faults sometimes contribute to phenomenal successes and strengths turn into blind spots. In that sense my curse and my blessing is my insatiable curiosity to understand human beings and their behavior.
TOA.life: And finally — what is your idea of happiness?
PS: Read good books, run in beautiful places, relaxing with interesting people. Rinse and repeat.
Patrycja led a workshop at TOA Berlin 2016, where she helped attendees create personalised tools to help them regulate emotions for a world that is filled with failures, disappointments and re-starts. Listen to it here:
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