Well, I may or may not already have found a solution to the problem I outlined in How do I robustly defuse triggeredness, enough to engage with agitations. Perhaps this post is overly optimistic? We’ll see, I suppose.
What happened
As described in the last post, I spent some time this evening playing around with breathing techniques and HRV readings.
Later this evening, I had a stimulus come into my world (a slack message, specifically) that was a little triggering.
I responded to that triggeredness exactly the way that I would want to respond to it. I could feel it in me, but there was also a strong feeling of spaciousness: I was containing the the trigger rather than blended with it. I took an HRV measurement just to see if the trigger would show up (As I expected, not really noticeable. HRV was 54.)
I sat with the sensation, for a bit. Then I went and did something else (checked in with my partner), while feeling in my body the place-holder token reminding me of the agitating situation. Within 30 minutes I came back and sat down and started doing Journaling / Focusing / problem solving about the situation. I spent about 30 minutes on that. I felt notably calm and centered in doing that.
(Some steps that were in my Focusing practice included starting my recommitting to, and announcing to all my parts, my commitment to defend all my values, however I can, as best I can. I told all my parts that I love them, and felt that love.)
I didn’t bounce off and distract myself. (There were a few times when I got up and started pacing, but I noticed this can came back to it. When that happened, I was actually lacking clarity about what the next step in the problem solving process should be.)
I took a 10 minute break, then came back and made a list of action items, and then proceeded to start enacting them.
Some speculations
My main, perhaps over optimistic hypothesis, is that I had high spaciousness, high capacity, due to my breath work training earlier in the day.
Also possible of course, is that I was just primed to respond this way, because I was thinking about how I want to respond to triggers earlier in the day, and this was only a minor trigger. Maybe this won’t be robust more triggering stimuli.
Also, it remains to be seen if I can do the breathwork to cool down, on the fly, after feeling triggered, rather than luckily having done it beforehand. Though if really settles my focus the way it seemed to today, it is probably worth doing daily. I feel spacious and centered in the way that I sometimes feel after mediation, but not with reliability. Hopefully there’s a practice here that does that reliably (and more efficiently).
Other data: I noted when I was journaling last night that I felt unusually centered and centered in love. (“[I feel more centered in openness and love these days.”]) That might be because of some ways things have shifted in my relationships, or it might be because I’ve been listening to Naval, who is a good influence for having a correct spiritual orientation. But it seems worth raising the hypothesis that it is due to the breathwork experimentation that I did yesterday. (This doesn’t quite add up since I was doing many more minutes of breathwork (RFB), over many more weeks, earlier in the year, and I don’t remember this kind of effect, but it is still worth noting.
I’m still feeling much more centered in love.
Also, I’ve been near-to-depressed for much of the past few months. But today, this hour, I’m feeling like myself again, in a way that I haven’t felt in months. Motivated and energized and taking actions with a momentum headwind. (I did take 1 mg of nicotine, but that alone wouldn’t be enough to produce this effect.)
(Worth noting that in addition to the breath practices, I did squats today, which I haven’t done in more than a week because of some injury concerns that I have. Squats have been known to make a big difference.)
Some policy updates from the past few days to reafiram
- I make way more personal progress when I’m writing blog posts than when I’m just writing journal entries.
- Trying to go for the throat, and figure out how to do the thing, in this one hour session, instead of grinding through some practice, with some vauge sense that I’ll have some skill or capacity or understanding in the future seems like a big deal. I think that second thing basically doesn’t work. I should always be trying to make discrete noticeable improvement, in a session. I should be trying to “make something happen”, rather than going through the motions of a practice.
- I got a sense of this from making discrete progress on 2048 earlier this week.
- Relatedly, getting the feedback so that I can just tinker, directly, instead of flailing around and hoping that I’m doing the right thing / something useful, is a huge upgrade. I should be steering for that.
Efficacy Engineering 