Notes on my squat form

November 7, 2023 ~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

I went to a personal training appointment today. I had been getting a crimped / pinched / tingly feeling in my arms when doing squats with heavy weights, and I was concerned about joint damage, so I’ve been doing much lower weight while I figure it out.

I think I fixed the problem!

The basic story is that if your back wobbles or flexes during squats, your arms need to do more of the work of holding up the bar, not just stabilizing it. So you want to keep your back and torso flat and rigid.

Here are the form tips that I got today:

Look down instead of forward (I’m actually skeptical of this one. I probably won’t maintain it.)
Push my butt back, instead of down. I should be flat on the soles of my feet the whole time, with no shifting of weight onto the balls of my feet.
Don’t pause at the bottom of the rep. (Also skeptical of this one. I’ve heard conflicting advice.)
Proud chest: push my chest out and and lock my back. Reset this form after every rep.
Pause, breath, and reset, after every rep. Don’t just go into the next one.
Don’t let my shoulders / upper back sag or dip down, when coming up on a heavy squat. I want to keep my whole back flat and rigid. My butt and lower back shouldn’t come up faster than my upper back, and my

Also, if I’m feeling elbow pain or strain, one recommended thing to do is 30 reps of neutral (ie vertical) curls, with very light weights, 5 or 10 pounds. This is not for getting stronger, it’s for increasing blood-flow in the area around the elbows. Tendons aren’t innervated by blood vessels, so anything to increase blood-flow helps. You can do this immediately after experiencing a twinge of elbow strain.

A note on emotional processing

October 11, 2023 ~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

[I wrote this up as part of a longer document last night]

The most important factor for my personal energy and intentionality is being emotionally-energetically unblocked / unstuck.

Sometimes my low energy is strictly physiological.

Any time I feel low energy or unmotivated, I first check if I’ve been exercising recently, if not, I make a point to exercise, and especially to do weighted squats, before anything else.

If I’m feeling low energy in a way related to being sleep deprived, or tired, I’ll intentionally raise my arousal for an up period, and then intentionally lower it and take a long nap, as described below.

But aside from that, if I’m feeling low energy or uninterested in work or otherwise unenthusiastic about getting up and making progress, I’ll sit down and make space to listen to any parts of me that might be sad or scared or hurting or stuck.

I’ll sit down, possibly starting by reducing my arousal with regular breathing techniques, and explicitly dialog with whatever parts of me are needing something, and reaffirm my commitment to serving them, serving all my goals and values, as best I can.

See my Focusing Moves document, for some of my more specific procedures.

Almost always, if I’m feeling low energy or unmotivated or unfocused, it’s because something that I care about is unhandled.

In the easy cases, I’ll do Focusing, surface the priority of mine I hadn’t been tracking consciously, and make a plan that attends to that (now conscious priority). It’s a simple handoff of goal-relevant info between a non-conscious part of me to the conscious deliberate planning processes.

In the harder cases, there will be a problem that feels stuck and intractable or a motivational knot, multiple goal-threads in tension, pulling against each other. That double bind is painful and I’m dulling or numbing or distracting myself from it, one consequence of which is my overall feeling of low energy or unmotivation. That might be expressing itself as depression, or as anxiety or agitation that can’t focus on much of substance, my attention flitting from distraction to distraction.

Unsurprisingly, especially to the extent that the problem or tension seems intractable, I’m apt to develop a strong aversions / ugh field around engaging with it. I don’t have a solution to this except recommitting to serving all my values, having faith in my own problem-solving ability, and starting at the top of the stack, by dialoging with the avoidant part and building lines of retreat as I go. I wish I had a much more robust solution, it seems like that would be transformative for me.

[Maybe the thing that I should be doing here is core transformation, to better get to the root, of the things that are in tension? And overtime, I would learn]

Friends, who can gently hold space, having compassion for me and all the parts of me, can make this easier.

Aiming towards better attention absorption / attention span and better prioritization

May 13, 2020May 13, 2020 ~ elityre ~ 3 Comments

Full absorption or getting “hooked in”

There are some classes of generative work that require long uninterrupted stretches, during which your mind can be exclusively preoccupied with a single task. Much has been written about this idea. For instance, Paul Graham’s excellent essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“, and Cal Newport’s Book Deep Work [1].

For the most part, those resources focus on the dimension of scheduling: when you are allocating time, you need to plan long uninterrupted blocks to focus, or you’ll never have enough mental space to make progress “maker time” projects. This is absolutely correct.

However it also strikes me that this is only part of the equation. In addition to scheduling long work blocks, there’s a psychological component. If you’ve cleared away all the interruptions, but you’re distracted by considerations coming up in your own mind, or you procrastinate for the whole period, you’re not going to get the benefits. You’re not going to create very much. You need to be able to become engrossed in what you’re doing, so that it takes up your full attention.

Whether a person becomes engrossed in this way, is mostly a matter of the task and of the person. People tend to become fully engaged in domains that are compelling or interesting to them. [2]

But I also posit that there is a learnable skill in this area: a skill of learning to find what’s interesting interesting in a domain, figuring out how to get “hooked in”.

I think that this is the key skill for learning new things. If you are engrossed in or “hooked into” your subject matter, you’ll keep churning on it, or tinkering with it. You’ll work past the things that you’re stuck on. Making progress is far from effortless, but it is automatic. You’ll end up spending a lot of hours working in your domain, just as a matter of course.

(Certainly I find, that when I am in this state, I’ll get up to take a break, but I’ll keep thinking as I do, and soon find myself back at my keyboard typing out the new ideas I just had.)

In contrast, if you don’t have this kind of engagement with the material, learning anything substantial is near impossible. Learning anything hard requires many, many hours of cognitive effort. Trying to slog through, force yourself to focus, hour by hour, is a losing game.

You need to be pulled by your subject matter, not be trying to push yourself into it.

</digression>

I’ve started trying to learn more math and programming, lately, and to build up enough facility that I can learn those subjects in a reasonable amount of time. I think that my ability to get hooked in, and keep churning on the material is the first order factor of my success.

So I want to explicitly build this muscle.

Plan

Here’s my initial plan.

1. Daily habitual work

I’m going to start working every day at 9:30 AM, if not earlier. I’m expecting to start earlier than 9:30, most days, since I’ve been waking up around 6:00 AM. But I’m intentionally setting a back-stop start time that is much later than my intended wake up time, so that I can build a habit that is robust sleep disruptions. I’ll have several hours of slack in the morning.

I’m also making a point not to take any meetings (with the exception of tutoring), before 12:30 PM. So at minimum, I’ll have a 3 hour uninterrupted block every day, and often longer, for starting earlier, or for going later into the day (when I don’t have meetings).

I just have to start at or before 9:30, though. If I’m not feeling it, or I don’t want to work, for some reason, then I’ll stop.

2. Journal, every day, about the quality of my focus

After every long work period like that, I’m going to take some notes, maybe only a few sentences, about how it went and what was different about today. My goal is to become conscious of and feel out the gradients and contours of my full absorption.

My hope is to first increase my capacity at getting hooked in, and then to gradually increase my attention span.

3. Prioritize my projects, with another person, on a weekly basis

(I think this is probably mostly idiosyncratic to me.) One of the biggest blockers that prevents me from getting fully engrossed in any one thing, is that I’m usually trying to make progress on a number of projects, all of which are important to me, in the same period of weeks.

Often, I’ll start to feel deeply into a thing that I’m working on (say, some math), and I’ll get a sense of how much of it there is to learn or do. And I’ll experience some agitation and resistance, as some part of me is trying to “hold onto” all of the things that I want to do and accomplish over the next week, or month, or year. Part of me has a (reasonable) fear that if I drop the tracking of those other learning goals (in my mental/physiological “cashe”), then they won’t come to pass. This leaves me unwilling to let go of those goals to give my full attention to any one of them, and so I default to a sort of “skimming the surface” fantasizing that can, in some sense, hold all the things that I want to do.

(This, of course, rhymes with the problem that Getting Things Done aims to solve. But I have decently robust GTD like capture systems. But I in fact have limited capacity, and many priorities, and I can’t actually hit them all, and I’m not sure what to do about that. This is a contender for my top Hamming bug.)

My current, somewhat stop-gap-y plan for this, is to take some time once a week and make space for all of those competing desires and goals. And then, having made space for all of this, I’m going to prioritize which smallish goals I’m going to focus on for that week, and also, which goals I specifically deciding not to focus on for that week.

I expect this to be hard for me on a number of counts. But one of the main problems is that by default, the container of “a week” will sort of fall apart and become leaky. More or less, I’m apt refactor my local goals in the middle of a week, and/or extend them into the next week.

So to maintain the container, I think that I provide this some structure by meeting with another person once a week, first to review the previous week, and then to prioritize for the next one.

Ultimately, I think that I want to be doing this kind of prioritization on longer than the timescale of a week, but I’m going to start with this.

[1] As as side note, I’ve been pretty unimpressed with Cal Newport’s books. They seem to me to be mostly fluff. However, the topics that he writes about are often extremely important. I’d almost say that you shouldn’t bother to read his books, but you should absolutely read the titles, and enough of the first chapter to know what he means by each title.

[2] “Interestingness”, of course, isn’t some fundamental essence. It’s made of parts, like “How good are the feedback loops here?”, or “how much facility does the person have in this domain?*” (this may just be a subset of the “feedback loops” consideration), and and “how viscerally goal-relevant, is this domain to this person?

* – eg if every step of every proof is a struggle, then math will feel frustrating, not worth the effort for the reward. In contrast, if one is sometimes able to fly through steps rapidly, and get to some elegant truth with only a little work, learning more math becomes more interesting.)

Replaying my typing samples

May 2, 2020May 2, 2020 ~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

I’m reviewing my typing after each one, to look for error patterns, like I suggested yesterday.

Samples

Sample 1

Text:

He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.

Scores:

53 wpm, 55.7% accuracy.

Errors:

In “as it floated away”, I put an “i”, instead of an “a”.
- I think that this is me getting ahead of myself and starting to type “it” instead of “as”, ie a cognitive error, trying to type the wrong word.
In “He thought very”, I failed to capitalize the h.
In “impulses being”, I typed the “l” before the “u”, a standard transposition error.
Then I tried to add an “e” to the end of “impulses.”
In “starved of”, I hit a “c” instead of a “v”
- It seems that I am still not distinguishing these, and I should train on sets of words that all include a v or a c.
In “expression”, I put a “t” as the third letter instead of “p”. I’m not sure what to make of that.
I left out the “d” in “dying”.
In “floating”, I put the “o” before the “l”.
Also in “floating”, I added a “u” between the “a” and the “t”?
Had some problems with “dryly.” I tired to start it with “a”…
…and then with “t”

Note that 9 out of the 11 errors were in the last line, which seems to indicate that there was an error cascade effect, or that something was decaying over the course of the sample.

Sample 2

Text:

Gonna see the river man, gonna tell him all I can about the ban on feeling free. If he tells me all he knows about the way his river flows, I don’t suppose it’s meant for me.

Scores:

56 wpm, 96.4% accuracy

Errors:

In “the” on the first line, I put an “i” instead of a “e.”
- Maybe because I was anticipating the “i” in “river”?
In “way his river flows”, I tried to add an “s” at the end of “river” for some reason.
I left out the apostrophe in “don’t”.
- I remember that when I was typing it, it felt more like I reached for the key, and didn’t press it hard enough and kind of brushed it, than that I cognitively dropped it.
I tried to capitalize the “i” in “it’s meant.”
Had a some of issues with “meant”. I tried to start it with a “k”…
- k is next to m on the keyboard.
…and then I put the “n” before the “a”.

Transposition error: I typed “somewhere” as “somewhree”.
…and then again as “somewe-“
Instead of “I”, I typed “a”
I ended “life” with an “i” instead of an “e”
- Substitution error

Analysis

Over these 10 samples, I made 50 samples.

In many cases, it’s unclear of which type an error is, because I can’t tell if I dropped a letter or transposed two two letters. But given my best guesses, the breakdown of errors is as follows

Error type	Number of Errors of that type
Transposition errors	20
Adding extra letters to words (which sometimes seems to be spelling errors, and sometimes seem to be more-or-less random)	7
Substitution errors (typing wrong letters that aren’t nearby on the keyboard), including “importing” letters from words that are coming up	6
Dropping letters entirely	6
Incorrectly guessing the next word	4
Unnecessary capitalization	3
Precision errors: Hitting a key that uses the same finger as and is nearby to the correct key, failing to distinguish two keys	3
Doubling the wrong letter	1
Straight up spelling error	1

(Note that the first, third, and fourth categories are easy to mistake for each other.)

By far, the most frequent kind of error is transposition errors. And on particularly good (high speed, high accuracy) samples, I might not make any other kinds of errors, but I will still make transposition errors. So they seem quite resilient. Maybe there’s some kind of training program that would train them away, but I’ve tried a number of things, and so far, none of them have even made a dent, as near as I can tell. I’m tempted to conclude that these are nigh-unavoidable.

I don’t have any good ideas for training any of the next 3 most common errors either.

I’m kind of at a loss for this.

r/learntyping on getting over my hump

April 14, 2020April 16, 2020 ~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

I’m a little stuck with my “learn to type fluidly“. My speed doesn’t seem to be improving, but is stable at around 59 to 60 wpm.

So, I went to the subreddit r/learntyping, and searched for “plateau” to see what advise came up.

Here are some of the answers / suggestions offered to folks who are stuck at various speeds:

Since your accuracy is pretty high, try focusing more on speed for the next few days. Then try and maintain your new speed while improving accuracy (slow a little and improve accuracy then increase it a little and repeat).

wizardpaninis, here

The brain needs time for what you learn to sink in. You can brute force it to an extent to begin with but a plateau is pretty common. You’ll probably notice after a month or two that a boost will seemingly come out of nowhere. In the mean time you don’t really need to spend an hour a day. I would cut it back to maybe 10-15mins and if you must, do several short sessions instead of one long one.

nemoj_da_me_peglas, here

if you have problems, go to 10fastfingers, sellect custom and put a lot of words that make you use that pinky until you eventually get better

FranBer10, here

Push yourself, try to go fast no matter how many mistakes you make. Then after a while go slow a bit and focus on accuracy. And then go for speed again.

danknissan, here

Honestly bro… just keep doing sites like 10ff and typeracer. Practice builds slowly. I was typing at 53 wpm last year. I now type at like 100. Keep it up.

piggo1228, here

If there’s any theme here, it seems to be alternation between speed and accuracy practice. So one thing that I could try is to do both speed and accuracy practice each day, and see if that causes improvement.

Another thing that I could do is back up, and focus on spelling / accurately typing words that I regularly mess up.

I could practice “pivoting” my right hand to hit keys like 9, 0, -, and ; (p on QWERTY) with my pinky finger, as is proper instead of using my ring finger.

I could Figure out what keys I’m weakest on, and do exercises that focus on those keys.

Update on using a chess timer to manage work/break time.

April 7, 2020April 12, 2020 ~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Over the past few days, I’ve continued to use a chess timer in the middle part of my work day.

By many of my metrics, the recent week has been one of the most effective and productive in recent memory. I think that this is due, first and foremost to my waking up earlier and going to sleep earlier, but I think the chess timer is also helping, if for no other reason than it spurs me to get started in the morning, because I can feel the scarcity of the time I’m wiling away.

But there are two bugs in how I’m using it:

So far, on most days, I’ll forget to switch it from break to work or from work to break, at some point during the day. When this happens, I’ve been keeping track mentally, that the ratio is off by some amount. This is probably very imprecise, and must have some cognitive cost, and probably mutes the felt-scarcity impact of using the timer in the first place.
1. I could solve this with some behavioral intervention, for instance, a TAP to hit the rocker at the right moments, but I would mildly prefer not to.
2. I already reliably track my time with toggl. It seems like the best solution would be to get/write some simple software that acts as chess timer and imports my data from toggl: tasks that have the tags “Deep Work” or “tasks” (or maybe just “main goal”) count as work, and everything else counts as break. I can foresee some issues with this, but it also has a number of advantages, most notably, that I wouldn’t need to track my time separately with two devices.
Secondly, as I am currently set up, with 4 hours on each side, I get to the end of four hours of work in the middle my afternoon session with Elizabeth van Nostrand. This isn’t terrible, but again it seems like it dulls the psychological impact if I regularly keep working on pre-determined (as opposed to in-the-moment discretionary) work for several hours after it rings.
1. I think that I should more carefully be simulating how long it will take me to do my work for the day, and trying to get my allocated work time and the amount of work I have to get done be commiserate, by either increasing the time allocation or decreasing the work commitment.

Day-level review for April 6, 2020: How do I settle into deep focus?

April 6, 2020April 6, 2020 ~ elityre ~ Leave a comment

Today was pretty good along most metrics. I would (and did) mark it as “well executed.”

The biggest blocker was that my attention was pretty “jumpy”. I didn’t really “settle into” my work (particularly my research work for Elizabeth Van Nostrand), so that it was absorbing my full attention and I was engrossed and engaged in what was happening. Rather parts of me were flitting towards other priorities, and my attention was unfocused.

I would like to improve this. If my work time entails me “sinking into” a task or project for at least an hour or two at a time, I think I will be much more productive (in the literal meaning of producing more value rather than working more).

Some ideas that have occurred to me:

Again, meditation is supposed to improve this, but that’s a long term, fairly fragile solution. Furthermore, meditation seem to be a good general boost, but that for every specific skill that I have wanted to get from meditation, I’ve found that I can get a lot more mileage, with a lot less effort, by just training the relevant TAP directly.
I think maybe I should take inventory before I start work: make space for all of the things that have some pull on my attention, and then decide, before hand, if I want to commit the next [whatever length of time] to a specific task, and put aside all the other things for that time. That maybe entails scheduling, so that they can rest, confident that they’ll happen.
- (I notice that if I want to have a practice like this, that means that I have to maintain slack in my schedule. I already “knew” this intellectually, but I feel like I can see more directly that it is true here: if I don’t have that space a “taking inventory” practice / system can’t work. It’s missing a necessary component.)
I’ve heard that starting a work session with a 5 minute mediation can be good for this.
I think that I should seriously amp up my practice of noting and logging every time I get distracted or feel the urge to get distracted.
Actually exercise. When I noticed this happening today, I responded by going to dead lift (man, it’s really great to have a barbell on my premises). I think this was a really good choice. Exercise intense enough to leave me perceptibly pooped in the evening, and sore the next day, is I think, way more efficacious than meditation at inducing this kind of attentional stability, in both as a general supporting practice, and as an immediate intervention.

I’m going to review this post in the morning, and try these interventions tomorrow. We’ll see how that goes.

Reviewing my day, April 3, 2020: morning compulsiveness

April 3, 2020April 23, 2020 ~ elityre ~ 1 Comment

[This post focuses on my own idiosyncratic (I assume) bug, followed my stream-of-consciousness work trying to solve it.]

What happened

Today, I had a pretty unproductive day, for a very clear reason. I spent the whole morning, from 7:26 AM (actually, probably earlier than that, 7:26 is when I started time-tracking) until 12:54 PM, neurotically trying to get a good price on some graphic novels.

[toggl data goes here]

I had an early signal of something. When I woke up, I felt distinctly low energy, in an emotional way, rather than a “poorly rested way”. I felt sort of “ughhh” and didn’t feel interested in getting up for the day. (I distinctly remember noting the feeling, because I had the fleeting thought that I should record it in my log, but didn’t this time.)

I started with random web browsing, and then got a hankering for some specific out of print graphic novels. Being out of print (and having had limited print runs), they were pretty expensive, up in the $60 to $300 range. I wasn’t going to pay that much, so I started searching used bookstores for better prices. Which, overall, was fine.

But eventually, I got to the point of finding a few ebay sellers who had what I wanted, and then obsessively trying to figure out which ones to buy from which sellers. This was not entirely straightforward because…

if I bought multiple items from a single seller, I could get a discount on shipping.
some of the items were “buy it now” but some were auctions. Auction prices tended to be lower than “buy it now”, but I would have to account for the risk of the price rising higher and overshooting the “buy it now” price, or of missing out on the item entirely.
there were different editions, and some (overall dis-endorsed) part of me was concerned about the sets matching, and in particular, my not ending up with a book that said “volume 2” on the back, if that wouldn’t match the other ones I was getting.

So I was neurotic and compulsive about this for about 5 hours(!). I even finally made a decision, and then immediately tried to cancel the order, because I had a moment of compulsive not-quite-panic, and thought of a “better plan.”

I was mildly self-conscious of how maladaptive this was, while in the process. In my log (spelling errors in the original):

11:12 – I just spent multiple hours carefully trying to get the best possible price on some comics that I was buying. Even now, I feel the urge to cancel some of my purchases, to buy them less expensively a different way (I just did that).

This is crazy, given that I bought and sold thousands of dollars, and most of my net worth, more-or-less based on impulse over the past few weeks. I should have spend hours carefully considering _those_ transactions, and not worrying about these ones, which at worst would cost me an extra $30 or so.

Can I make that switch somehow?

This is crazy

current plan:

Buy Knights of the Old Republic + Freedon Nad rebelion

Bid on the lowest “Dark Lords of the Sith”

Buy a copy of “Sith Wars

I think this counts as #compulsive #compulsiveness

This kind of thing happens to me sometimes. I occasionally get obsessed with trying to complete some task. Its as if I have an itch and I just have to scratch it. I once spent ten hours trying make a text-to-speech audio-book of a book that I had bought, so that I could listen to it as I was walking. (Despite many set backs, I eventually succeeded.)

I speculate that one important part of the structure is something like feeling, at every moment, that success is imminent. (This also accords well with my model of human motivation, which I’ll write up one day.)

I call this state “compulsiveness”. It might also be described at “neurotic”, and is related to, but distinct from, my term of art “urgey”. (When I’m urgey, there isn’t a single obsessive focus. I’m just sort of compulsive in a general way.)

[Also, I did recover, and then had a pretty excellent second half of my day.]

What should I do about it?

[this part is pretty stream-of consciousness]

So, what should I do so that I never have this problem again?

Meditation is supposed to help with this sort of thing, by “extending the space between stimulus and response.” But that’s a long run solution, and a very fragile one: the months when I am under the most strain and pressure, are the months when my meditation habit is most likely to break down.

(I also predict that this doesn’t happen when I have strength trained in the past 2, maybe 3, days.)

Similarly, one thing that would have forestalled this situation, in this case at least, is if I had an iron habit regarding what I do when I wake up, and it isn’t look at my computer. But that solution runs into the same problem: it is most likely to fail when I am most likely to need to rely on it.

One thought is to try Frame-by-Frame debugging: step through the moments in sequence, noticing the places where an intervention would have been effective.

Doing that…

One possible intervention point was the moment that I noticed that I felt kind of “ughhh” / unenthused.
Another point of intervention is upon noticing that I’m compulsive (though at that point most counter actions would be pushing against a strong psychological force.
- One solution might be to go exercises, immediately, as soon as noticing the compulsion, but then allow myself to decide to go back into into it after exercising. (Exercise clears the “physiological short term memory”, and seems to have a major centering and stabilizing effect, for me at least. When I booted up today, after this whole thing, the first thing that I did was deadlifts.)
  - Maybe I should greet the compulsiveness first?
  - In order for this to work, I need to have a really robust strategy for exercise. I don’t want to be held up because of some trivial inconvenience, like that I would need to change my pants.
- Or maybe my TAP should be to just become more strategic about serving the needs of the compulsiveness. If I had spent some time doing meta, clarifying what my goals were and which thought processes were most likely to meet them, I think I would have done much better.)

One problem that I have will all of these is that I’m unlikely to encounter this situation again for a while, so I’m apt to forget any policies I come up with now.

…which suggests that I need to induce this state somehow, under controlled conditions, so that I can practice the responses I want?

(In many cases, I would not want to have any set response at all: I would just want to become conscious and reason about what’s best in the moment. The problem is that some states are particularly low on consciousness, and I have to have a solution that doesn’t depend on me magically being sensible or strategic in the moment.)

I need something like a smooth off-ramp. What actions could I take while in the midst of compulsiveness that aren’t in resistance to the compulsiveness?

(This skill might be the same skill that I need for falling asleep when my mind is churning. )

Maybe I want to go with the flow of the compulsiveness, at least at first? The “strategically serving the neurotic need” seems to do that. Maybe start, by listing what count as the win conditions?

[Pete would tell me about “leaning out”. But I don’t know how to do that.]

I want to have a robust solution here, and then murphyjitsu it, but I don’t have enough…data(?) for that?

What’s blocking me from having this bug solved forever?

Well, all solutions depend on either 1) having a lot of consciousness available to work with or 2) having something like a detailed enough sense of what the thing is that I can work with it “from here”, where I’m not in direct feedback-y contact with it.

So maybe I should aim to get more feedback-y contact, while I have some consciousness? So I should be looking for small versions of this problem, that are not overwhelming to my capacity.

What might those include?

When I’m wanting to sleep but my mind is churning?
When I feel antsy
When I feel urgy.
When I have a literal itch?
When I feel antsy during a meditation?
When there’s something that I want, and I want it right now.
- (When I put it this way, it feels like the obvious solution is to take pleasure in waiting, at being stronger than the urge.)
When I’m horny?
When I’m doing some kind of endurance training, and I want to get up from my wall-sit.

[That’s 8. I should force myself to get to at least 10.]

When I’m flipping through Tinder / Bumble uselessly (I don’t do this much any more)
When I’m watching, anything, on youtube? (Not anything. I think when I check, most of the time when I’m on youtube, I won’t have much of this phenomenology.
When I feel like I need to sneeze?

Ok. So what are my next steps? To look out for when something like this is happening, and observe it? I feel like that’s not going to actually happen. I could try and arrange for a situation in which one of these things will be dominant, but I don’t really feel like it’s worth an hour of planning and an hour of execution right now.

I know that I will have the urge to masturbate sometime in the next two weeks. Maybe I should study that?

TAP: notice “motion towards” masturbation -> . . .

Then what, study it?

What’s the specific response?

TAP: notice “motion towards” masturbation -> Freeze and be alert…then note it in my log.

Is that going to fire? Maybe, but I’m out of steam right now, and want to go to sleep. We’ll see if any of this percolates anything in me.