Why you don't need confidence

Many people think that in order to reach their goals and live the life they want they need to believe in themselves and be confident. Therefore they spend a lot of time and energy trying to be as confident as possible so that eventually they can do the things they want to do without feeling fear or self-doubt.

This is the wrong model. In order to pursue your goals and dreams you most likely have to go out of your comfort zone. Chances are, when you do anything that is new and outside your comfort zone, you will - by definition - feel uncomfortable and therefore not confident. The problem here is that if you think that you need to feel confident to pursue your goals, you will be waiting for a long time.

Now, I'm not saying that confidence doesn't help, it most certainly can be helpful. What I am saying is that confidence is just a feeling and that you don't need it do ANYTHING. Confidence is an extremely overrated concept. Even people performing at high levels will often admit that they were anxious and/or nervous during a performance. While you can't always control your feelings, you can always control your actions regardless of your feelings.

Ironically, once you realize that you don't need confidence to do anything, you will most likely become more confident.

I am by no means suggesting "faking it until you make it". If you are taking actions consistent with your goals and values despite how you feel, its exactly the opposite of faking it. You are taking actions according to your authentic values rather than your temporary feelings.  

Of course, all of this is a lot easier said than done. It is tough to take action despite feeling a certain way. But it is definitely possible. Taking consistent action despite how you feel is a skill that can be developed. Like any skill, the more you practice the better you get. 

 

How I fixed my insomnia and sleep anxiety

 A year ago, I was going through a tumultuous period of my life which resulted in me having issues with my sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night and be unable to sleep afterwards. Knowing how important sleep actually ironically made my sleep worse because I got increasingly anxious about sleep which made it harder for me to sleep. Not only was I anxious about the events happening in my life, but I became anxious about the anxiety itself because it would stop me from sleeping. This became a vicious cycle of sorts.

I did my best not to think about it but that barely did anything and might have made it worse. Even sleep aids almost made it worse because when they didn't work, my anxiety and hopelessness about sleep skyrocketed.

I started researching  ways to  deal with anxiety and stumbled upon something called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT is a unique in that unlike other models, it doesn't get a person to try to get rid of difficult thoughts and emotions. It doesn't even get you to distract yourself. According to ACT, the best way to deal with difficult emotions is to accept them and allow them to pass. 

I was honestly was quite skeptical of it and didn't even try it at first. After all, I knew my anxiety was the cause of my insomnia and if I didn't reduce it, it would just get worse. However, one night I tried out one of the ACT meditations and I shockingly was able to get to sleep.

Insomnia is interesting in that it can get worse the more effort you put into trying to cure it. Anxiety might initially cause you to have a few bad nights but then you get anxious about being anxious which exponentially increases your anxiety. Combine this with the fact that sleep deprivation itself can make you anxious and you get a nefarious  feedback loop where one bad night can lead to weeks or even months of insomnia. 

The only way to break this loop is to interrupt it and the acceptance of anxiety is something that accomplishes this. Of course, it takes practice and I still struggle from time to time despite practicing ACT for over a year now. However, the more I practice, the better I get at it. 

Here's a link to ACT meditations

I also recommend the book The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris for more information on ACT.

Emphatic Distress - Why Your Empathy Might Be Destructive

A common argument made against organized religion is that it's followers aren't genuinely good people or that their good deeds aren't done out of the kindness of their heart, but to receive some sort of reward in the afterlife. My go-to counter-argument against this used to be that nobody does good out of the kindness of their heart; people do good things because it makes them feel good. For example, a person might give money to a homeless person to avoid feelings of distress at seeing them suffer.

However, after listening to the audiobook The Science of Compassion by Kelly Mcgonigal, I realized my argument might have been less than true and that my entire understanding of compassion was flawed. The book outlined the difference between Emphatic Distress (described above) and Compassion.

Using the definitions, here, Empathic Distress is "the strong aversive and self-oriented response to the suffering of others, accompanied by the desire to withdraw from a situation in order to protect one’s self from excessive negative feelings." Compassion however,  "is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern, and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s wellbeing. Compassion goes beyond feeling with the other to feeling for the other"

In many ways compassion is the exact opposite of Emphatic Distress. While Emphatic Distress motivates a person to relieve their own suffering, Compassion aims to relieve the other person's suffering. The difference is that compassion aims to improve the situation while emphatic distress - or empathy - motivates a person to try to relieve one's own distress. Empathy can actually be destructive, so destructive  in fact, that there's an entire book written on how it can lead to cruelty

The difference between compassion and emphatic distress can be hard to parse out since a person can feel both emphatic distress and compassion at the same time but it's quite crucial. Studies have shown that empathy and compassion light up different parts of the brain.

An example that highlights this distinction would be the overprotective or over-controlling parent Overprotective parents shelter their children from danger to a degree that it's detrimental to them since the children don't develop the skills or confidence to handle life's challenges.   A common notion people have about overprotective parents it that their overprotective nature is motivated by love and that they are simply misguided at what is best for their children. This might be true in some cases, however I suspect that in many cases overprotective parents take part in their destructive behavior not out of ignorance, but because they want to protect themselves from the difficult feelings that come up when their children are in danger or take risks. Compassion in this case would look like allowing their children to do things beneficial to their well-being despite the distress a parent feels.

This is much easier said than done, especially given that it's easy to confuse the two. In addition, compassion is harder and actually takes courage since you are moving towards the suffering instead of away from it. I think a crucial first step would be to recognizing the difference between the two and acknowledging that just because an action is motivated by empathy, doesn't make it the right action in that scenario. It can also be useful to ask the question on whether or not an action is improving the situation.

The Case Against Free Speech Is Based On A False Premise

Recently, the controversial subreddit r/theDonald, a forum supporting Donald Trump's politics was banned off of Reddit due to violating it's hate speech guidelines. While there are several arguments for censoring of opinions, one of the most common and strongest arguments in favor of censorship is that silencing radical opinions stops them from spreading.

This makes sense. Ideas are similar to viruses in that one person can infect another person with an idea if they are persuasive enough. If we remove people with problematic ideas from a platform or our life, it will protect us and other individuals from getting infected.

However, this argument ignores several problems:
- Silencing someone doesn't make them go away, it most likely radicalizes them even more. This is partially due to the fact that they will go to other platforms that are more radical and will increase their confirmation bias. We live in the information age. In more medieval eras, silencing an opinon would make it disappear but now, no amount of censorship can make an opinion disappear. It can only radicalize it more.
- It weakens your own argument because not being exposed to different ideas weakens your own arguments. This makes you less in a position to "convert" others. Similar to how Trees that are exposed to harder conditions are less fragile if an idea is not exposed to counter-arguments, that idea will be weaker since it won't be as well though out.
- It's an admission of defeat of sorts. Silencing an opinion instead of engaging it is essentially saying that "we can't make an argument against you and/or are too lazy to do so." which makes your side look weak and radicalizes people who are prone to being radicalized.
- We live in the age of the Internet. All opinions have a platform of some sort now, like it or not.

The alternative to silencing an idea would be to engage with them. The common argument against this is that this does no good since radicals don't care and that it is just a waste of energy. I vehemently disagree. I've found that even with the most batshit insane people I've met, when I tried to genuinely understand their point of view, they were more open to listening to what I had to say. Of course, this is not the same as changing someone's mind but that's not the point. The point here is that this is simply more constructive than trying to silence them. Being able to have dialogue with radicals is quite miraculous by itself because it means that we aren't enemies. We are simply humans trying to figure shit out.

This sort of approach had remarkable results with the case of Daryl Davis who convinced 200 KKK members to give up their robes. Another remarkable example of this was the case of Megan Phemps-Roger, a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church who left the church due to exchanges she had on Twitter. I highly recommend her TED talk.

I think the reason that we have the temptation to silence others instead of genuinely engaging with them is that it is hard. It's hard to admit that an opinion we disagree with might have some legitimacy and it's hard to humanize people with completely different world views. One study found that when challenged by different political opinions, participants' amygdala,  the part of the brain that responds to threats would show greater activity. Put another way, your brain perceives different opinions as threats to you regardless of the content of those opinions. 

"What do you call people you can't talk to? Enemies."

This quote by Professor Jordan Peterson always stuck with me over the years. If we as a society cannot communicate with each other about the problems facing us, we can't progress forward.  Free speech is valuable and any type of censorship is not a decision to be made lightly.

On White Privilege

With the conversation about going on over the past couple of weeks, I was reminded of this article I read a few years ago. It makes a good argument that the idea of privilege is not a very useful one partially due to how many factors make up a person's "privilege". I agree with this.

I also feel that the term is now used in a way that is not constructive at all. Pointing out someone's supposed privilege due to something like the color of their skin brings the conversation to a halt. Unless your goal is to shame them for it, it's not really productive. On that note, it often also seems to come from a place of resentment and trying to bring someone down rather than bringing disadvantaged people up. All that does is divide people further.

 In addition, using a person's identity to determine their privilege or lack of it is also silly because identity is not privilege. What I mean by this is that there is nothing inherently special about something like the color of one's skin. For example, even if you benefit from having the color of your skin, your skin color is not a privilege. Privileges are things such as having wealth, living in a stable society and having good parenting. Therefore, the term "white privilege" doesn't even make any sense.

An argument against this would be that having a certain skin color automatically puts you at a disadvantage due to systemic racism and that not having to face racism is the privilege you get from being white. The problem with this argument is exactly what I outlined above:"racism" is an extremely broad category of actions that can take place from slurs to police brutality. There's no specificity in the term "White Privilege" and it's therefore not a useful term.

It's important to note that I'm not arguing the privilege doesn't exist. I am arguing that when a person points out someone else's privilege based on their group identity, it not only is illogical, but it serves no purpose except for making people feel worse and ashamed. You can argue that guilt is a good motivator and I agree. However, guilt is not the same as shame which is what is really occurring here. Guilt is feeling bad about something you have done whereas shame is feeling bad about who you are. Feeling bad about something you never chose to be born with and have little control over such as the color of your skin  is simply unhelpful. 

 It would be far more constructive if we started focusing on what a person does with (or without) their privilege rather than the privilege itself. We can't control the things we are born with but we can control how we use those things

First blog yay~!

Decided to create a blog to post my thoughts on random things because I feel like I need an outlet. I'll try to post semi-regularly or whenever I feel like it :P