PSY336H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Hitchhiking, Tantrum, Hedonism
PSY336 Lec 09
Tuesday November 22, 2016
Mindfulness
Prof asked Frederickson how to cultivate positive emotions. And she said it was basically what
Buddhism has been calling Metta-Meditation for 2500 years.
Prof story: 18 years old, living in Ottawa with a bunch of people. Was gonna buy a motorcycle.
He had $2500 on him. He planned to buy the bike and drive to Huntsville and have a party there.
Prof was gonna meet the motor cycle guy, but the guy didn’t show up. so he had to hitchhike.
Rules of hitchhiking: 1. Don’t start at the end of the day. 2. Don’t start from within the city. 3.
Don’t bring too much cash on you. 4. If the guy was going the opposite way and turned around
just to pick you up, don’t get in the car.
He walked to the outskirts, and hitchhiked for 2 rides. Then a guy who was going the opposite
direction turned around and picked him up, but the guy was trying to actually “pick up” on him.
So prof got off on the side of the street, in the middle of nowhere, weather is bad. Thunder is
going crazy; it’s gonna rain. He got a couple more rides. Then he met another guy who
hitchhiked with him. So prof and the weird dude started walking down the road. His day had
been awful. He was grumpy.
Aside – reframing: prof liked walking. He loved rain. He loved walking in the rain. He liked
meeting strangers. He loved adventures. So technically he should have loved this experience. But
he wasn’t. He was grumpy. He could potentially be having a great time. But he’s not.
Objective reality: he’s walking down the road etc.
Subjective Reality: he’s upset. Because he’s thinking about the past and future.
So his lived reality (subjective reality) isn’t even there because the past doesn’t exist and the
future doesn’t exist either.
Imagine if you were just walking down the fields in Greece. You would have enjoyed it even
though there’s nothing.
But in this case, prof wasn’t reframing.
The weird dude was in a humor mood. Once in a while he’d point out random things to prof. first
time, he pointed to prof a stump. Then he asked prof if he could “hear that” and prof was like no,
and then prof noticed the leafy wind. And then it started to rain. That was it for the prof. he
collapsed. But the weird dude just spread out his arms and stood in the middle of the road. Then
the guy turned around and shouted “where are you anyways?” Prof was like im right here. But
the guy said no, I am right here, but you are somewhere else.
It’s true. Prof was largely in the past, grumbling about the things that didn’t happen, and in the
future, grumbling about the things that aren’t going to happen.
The next car was a police car, and picked them up. the weird dude was like, hey, you have to do
all the talking. Prof was like, why? The dude was like I don’t like cops, and im on acid
(hallucinogen) right now. Lol.
The point is, for whatever reason, the weird dude was able to see a distance between himself and
the his normal construction/narrative. Drugs can give people the temporary ability to see things
differently and to step out of the normal frame.
Think of a kid in a grocery store. To the kid, he’s living entirely in his mind, he’s upset, mom is
not fair, he deserves the chocolate bar. But the mom is not caught up in the kid’s tantrum, so she
doesn’t freak out. She has some distance between herself and the kid’s mind state. So she can
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semi-rationally evaluate the options she has. She has some cortical distance. mom is partially
bound up in the situation too, she felt some embarrassment and stuff. The kid is 10/10 caught up
in his tantrum, mom maybe 6/10 caught up in it. Then there’s prof, just floating around. He’s like
4 aisles over. He has identity distance and cognitive distance and physical distance. so he’s
entirely dissociated from the emotions. He can rationally analyze the situation and choose what
to do. He can ignore, offer help, give moral support, text his friend about this funny anger kid, he
can judge the parent, feel compassionate, etc. because he’s not attached to it, he’s totally free, he
can do whatever the hell he wants. The mom has some freedom. The kid is basically the slave of
his emotions in that situation.
Prof once went to a mindfulness camp. At one point he went to the guy hosting it and asked a
bunch of questions cuz he was struggling with the theoretical ground. Then he guy was like, are
you struggling with anxiety or depression or other negative emotions? Prof was like yea, so
what? The guy said, well, what if you can just turn the volume knob of these emotions and tune
them down 15%? Prof was like that would be great.
If emotions are physio reactions to the environment, and they tend to fade unless we cognitively
retain them, then we can do 3 things to change our emotions:
1. calm down. Good posture etc. change physio.
2. Fix thinking processes.
3. Change your relationship to your emotions.
Most people only do 1 and 2. But 3 is most important. This is what mindfulness practice can do.
It changes a person’s relationship with his/her emotions.
In PSY100: “Everything is the same.” Everything is just a neural activation pattern.
So when you talk about depression, you are talking about a pattern. If you are talking about your
relationship with your emotions, it’s also a pattern.
Mindfulness can turn the volume of bad things down, and turn volume of good things up. and
this is really worth appreciating for a moment.
What if you approached mindfulness just as a pure hedonist? Just for the pure pleasure? imagine
ice cream tastes 15% better? Imagine sex is 20% better?
Simple def. of mindfulness: mindfulness = bare attention. Uncontaminated attention. Natural,
innate, unconstructed.
In cognitive psych perspective, bare attention is impossible. You can’t just think of nothing.
Especially if your self is involved, then you would be judging yourself, evaluating yourself etc.
so bare attention is basically impossible.
So you’ve told to practice bare attention, but bare attention is impossible, what are you supposed
to do?
This is important. If you don’t distinguish mindfulness/bare attention, then you might just co-op
it into one of your defense mechanisms, especially one of intellectual defense mechanisms. You
might replace the real mindfulness with what you have learned about mindfulness.
Analogy: imagine you just experienced a loss. There’s a difference between when you are in the
moment of thinking about the loss (how am I gonna deal with the loss, who do I reach out to,
why did this happen, how do I tell my kids, etc.) and when you are actually hit by the immediacy
of the loss (just overwhelmed by the grief, “I don’t know who I am anymore”).
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We are really good at getting out of immediacy of events and go into the cognitive, thinking
land. The problem is, when its taken too far, we can lose contact with our real, visceral
experience.
Think about the experience where you had to torture someone, or if you were at war with
someone. So you have to deal with this situation by derogate the victims. So training of soldiers
always involve homogenizing outgroup and derogating the outgroup. The more you can
dehumanize the victims, the more you separate from empathy for them, the more you separate
from your visceral reactions, and all of a sudden it’s way easier to do nasty things to them.
Take this into your own self-concept. If you do nasty things to yourself, it’s gonna be easier if
you can derogate yourself, and can see yourself as “other.” From previous classes, we know that
when you think of yourself as a individual person, when you separate yourself from your
thoughts, compassion comes out. It’s very rare for ourselves to just sit with our vulnerability; if
you did, we would be more compassionate about ourselves.
Bare attention is nearly impossible. But what if you just start paying attention? We will scaffold
you.
The eventual goal is “Be here now”: pay attention to everything in the present moment. You are
unable to do this now. So we will teach you and scaffold you.
We will first teach you “Attentional Modalities:” pay attention to some sub aspects of your
experience. It’s like training for bicep muscles. You use dumbbells. It’s not like u use dumbbells
in everyday life but it’s the training of the muscle for any circumstance where the muscle may be
used. So in mindfulness, first they usually teach you to pay attention to your sensory experiences.
There’s a difference between pure sensory experience (chocolaty awesomeness) and inner
narrative stuff (I’m a shameful person for eating this chocolate cake, im being a pig).
So you can go on a walk, and be a “seeing” being, and then a “hearing” being etc. after
practicing this for a while, you can realize “oh im switching between seeing and hearing”. You
are basically practicing having this “metacognitive” relationship with yourself. Sometimes you
can have all these experiences together. You can feel and hear and see and smell everything, like
a wild animal.
Imagine if you are sitting there and watching the sunset, and the dude next to you starts to chat
up with you. You’d be so annoyed. Because the more they talk, the less you get to see it. You
have to shut up to see sunsets or to hear good songs.
Imagine a sex scene. Objective reality is just 2 bodies doing stuff. Subjective reality includes
embarrassment, performance pressure, control, etc. So couple’s therapy basically tries to get
people to just experience the senses, instead of all these cognitive constructions. This is Sensate
Focusing Sex Therapy. The goal is to decouple Objective and Subjective Realities.
So coming back to bare attention. As you train for paying attention to sensations, you get to
choose which attention to use.
1. Things get better: just like flow. Simply paying attention can tune up hedonism.
2. Getting better at choosing sensations. You can choose your own adventure and way of
manifesting your consciousness.
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
Prof asked frederickson how to cultivate positive emotions. Buddhism has been calling metta-meditation for 2500 years. Prof story: 18 years old, living in ottawa with a bunch of people. He planned to buy the bike and drive to huntsville and have a party there. Prof was gonna meet the motor cycle guy, but the guy didn"t show up. so he had to hitchhike. Don"t start at the end of the day. If the guy was going the opposite way and turned around just to pick you up, don"t get in the car. He walked to the outskirts, and hitchhiked for 2 rides. Then a guy who was going the opposite direction turned around and picked him up, but the guy was trying to actually pick up on him. So prof got off on the side of the street, in the middle of nowhere, weather is bad. Then he met another guy who hitchhiked with him.
