Mental health topics for rationalists

Disembodiment, why emotions matter, meditation and more

0. Background: a bit of a life story re how this came about

I was lucky enough to almost accidentally quit the job I hated a year back, and started therapy a tad earlier. This was the best and most important year of my life. At the beginning I was more focused on the self-discovery and figuring out what I wanted career-wise. But towards the spring it started becoming ever more clear that I do have a lot of internal work to do before I can feel self-aware and mentally healthy enough to trust myself with big career decisions. Fast forward a few months, with Vibecamp and becoming aware of the TPOT (twitter community; you can start finding your way in by following the wonderful Christine and Visa) discourse around healing being some of the larger influences, and I got to a more thorough realization of just how traumatizing my emotionally neglected childhood was, even though it didn’t explicitly feel like that at the time, and to realizing healing is #1 priority and the main thing I should be focusing on. In parallel, as I let go of the self-judgment and overconscientiousness a bit more, I finally had to admit I never really did STEM for fun, that it was always something I was expected to be doing and told myself I should be doing, and that really I’m people » things. After a couple months of checking out various more conventional people jobs like management consulting or tech PM (and talking to people, online and in person, for 10hrs a day), I realized I’ve actually been doing something like therapy in various guises for quite some time, was always drawn to life wisdom books, hearing people’s stories and providing empathy and advice.. It’s funny as therapy and writing are the two things I put down as potential passions just after I quit my job, thinking it’s a complete joke and no way I will ever be serious about either. For a month or two since more or less committing to pursuing therapy as a career, I’ve been even more focused on consuming mental health content, for my own healing as well as out of professional interest. I’ve been also kinda addicted to doing “text therapy”/providing mental health support online (r/healthygamergg), and so by now have seen many many dozens of stories and talked at varying lengths with dozens of people about their issues there.

What follows is brief pitches of various topics I think are most likely to be relevant to rationalist-adjacent people (think STEM folks consuming a lot of intellectual content on the internet), as well as some observations of how implied worldviews/mental frames I discovered in the mental health/healing fields are different from ones I used to have during my more rationalist phase.

1. Disembodiment/alexithymia/left-brain dissociation: the most rationalist mental health conditions

Can you name five emotions you felt today? How many times you thought to yourself that the breeze feels nice on your skin this summer? Can you enjoy dancing in the right circumstances?

If you think you land on the “wrong” side of all of the above questions, chances are you are disembodied, which is a loose term referring to a range of possible related conditions (one of which is an “official” thing called alexithymia) characterized by consistently reduced mental access to one’s right brain, bodily sensations, emotions, artistic creativity (with neurological manifestations of reduced size/activations in corpus callosum left/right hemisphere connecting brain region). Typical story here is one had enough strong negative emotions as a baby/young child that caretakers didn’t take care of that the brain trying to protect the self decided to start pushing those feelings out of awareness (suppressed is an oft used term that is confusing: emotions can’t be killed and can only be shoved somewhere out of sight where they secretly wreak havoc, be it via self-destructive subconscious behaviors, or via psychosomatic pain).

While disembodiment is more of a persistent condition, there is also a notion of left-brain dissociation, which is a mental state/activity in which one subconsciously avoids some bad feelings by occupying oneself with heavy intellectual activity. Right-brain dissociation is when one escapes into daydreaming, imagination; videogames are a very common way to escape negative feelings which is usually more like right-brain dissociation.

2. Emotions: what’s in them for you

At this point a tru rat might ask: isn’t it good to be more rational? Isn’t it the rationalist dream, to turn the whole universe into rationium, or at least into GPUs?

The answer is, being overly left-brained and purely intellectual is not what results in the most rational behavior for human beings. There is a lot of processing being done and important information (as well as processing power, a la creativity/imagination) available in the right brain. Emotions are always there, and would drive your behavior whether you want it or not. The choice isn’t whether to have emotions or not, the choice is whether to be consciously aware of them and able to incorporate them into your thinking, as well as manage more efficiently, or to not be aware of them and let them run a lot of your life from the shadows. As some of us might know, it’s usually not the strength of the rational argument that decides whether you’re gonna study or play videogames at a given night. With emotional awareness we can at least see what feelings are making us averse to studying, and figure out a way to deal with them which isn’t a combination of avoiding them with videogames and judging/shaming oneself into studying.

Symptoms of alexithymia include, along with difficulty with identifying feelings and describing them to others, struggling with internal motivation and being more external stimuli driven, as well as struggling with imagining what they would like their life to be in a few yrs, and such: struggling with internal wants, short-term and long-term. Ultimately, whether we want it or not, our heart, what we really want, what actually makes us happy and satisfied, what we truly enjoy, what we really want from life, are all stored in our emotions and the right brain. When we cut ourself off from that, we end up flying blind, pulling goals and actions out of our rational ass, not feeling particularly happy or fulfilled by achieving those goals, living life if not of misery then at least of consistent dissatisfaction.

Of course diminished access to bodily sensations leads to a more bland and unsatisfying life in a more direct way as well, as the quality of a lot of joys of life, be it great food or great sex, is very much dependent on having a good left/right brain connection and access to bodily sensations.

3. Emotional coregulation and emotional connection: why walking left brains have no friends

The stuff above, despite its importance, can be hard to notice for somebody who hasn’t seen anything else. The domain where extreme left-brainedness oft wreaks real havoc is human relationships.

The way it works is roughly as follows. Most ppl have good access to their emotions, and need to regulate/process them - cry and get over sadness, vent and hit the wall and get over anger, dance when happy, etc. While self-regulation is possible and important, it’s both more efficient, and also a key fuel for building connections, to instead enroll others to help us and coregulate with us: this is us crying to a friend about a promising date ghosting us and such.

This level of connection - emotional, as opposed to say intellectual or physical - imo accounts for majority of human interactions. It can be micro-level, you mention appreciating bartender’s choice of music them smiling and saying “cheers” and both of you feeling good. Or it can be macro-level, you sharing something vulnerable like your feeling insecure about your slowly receding hairline and how she’d stop loving you to your gf and her convincingly reassuring you by mentioning some way she loves you in that you didn’t know about, and that interaction building yet more trust and taking the relationship further.

If one is sufficiently emotionally disconnected, they’d have trouble enjoying or even efficiently participating in a lot of such interactions that social life is built from. More importantly, they’d struggle forming deep emotional connections, and thus fulfilling their universal human needs of love and sense of belonging.

4. CPTSD: the mother of most issues

There is an opinion in psych circles that most of the more normal range mental health issues (so, not talking about real neurodivergence like autism/adhd, or stuff like schizophrenia; think some folks push the idea deeper and try to include some of that) is due to parenting being not good enough (this might be more or less obvious from the outside; usually clear enough for a literati who sees enough detail; but ultimately is about whether you as a baby/young child felt your emotional needs were fully met, not about whether your parents tried), and the condition that results from that is often CPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder; not trauma in psych can be “strain” trauma - persistent small things rather than a single dramatic event).

This is a bit more tenuously related to the previous, largely via “if you have something it’s worth looking at whether you have cptsd” and as disembodiment/persistent left-brain dissociation is a reasonably common CPTSD symptom. Also, from providing online mental health help, I find many of the typical symptoms come up a lot, whether everyone has CPTSD or not, so think it’s useful to list them regardless (learning concepts and realizing that that’s something I’ve been doing is one of the important ways I’ve been understanding myself). Though note it takes quite a lot of emotional self-awareness to be able to identify those and admit to those, plus often they are hidden by defenses and rationalizations etc and hard to untangle, not to mention they are often completely out of conscious awareness

Some common CPTSD symptoms

1. Toxic Shame
   ”I’m not worthy”, “I’m broken”, “I don’t deserve love and happiness like others do”; often comes with a defence of “I’m better than others”, and once oscillates between two extremes of feeling very bad about themselves and looking down on others; for gifted kids this is often tied up with smarts or success; not feeling worthy and trying to “prove” worthiness to themselves by external achieving

2. Self-judgment/inner critic
   what one judges others on is what one judges themselves on, consciously or not; for gifted kids self-judgment around intelligence/achievement is oft off-the-charts - ever seen kids telling themselves they are worthless when they got into Citadel and not Jane Street - this kinda reaction can come from excessive ego always comparing to others as well, the difference is the degree to which this is translated into being about inner worth

3. Sense of endangerment (oft implies persistent anxiety)
   it takes some emotional awareness to start noticing, but many are “hyperattuned to danger”, being on the lookout for who might say something critical, who might not like us, what can go wrong; this is a pretty deep level conditioning of the nervous system towards arousal/hyperactivation/stress response

4. Emotional flashbacks
   is the reason for PTSD part in the title - something would trigger us and we’d get emotionally dysregulated, which feels bad and heavy; we might have trouble realizing this directly if we’re sufficiently disembodied but often reaching out for soothing, overeating/drinking/gaming/intellectual content, to an unusual degree, is a clue

5. Some misconceptions around therapy

Just throwing this in here in case I inspired anybody to work on themselves. Note though that there are A LOT of things one can that can help with healing short of therapy.

One thing I see some left-brained people doing is thinking that thinking and rational knowledge is the solution to their problems (well, one’s got a hammer so this thingy must be a nail right), and that therapist’s job is to give advice and tell them something they didn’t know or see that would make it all clear and “solve” the problem.

Related is expectations about how long it’s gonna take. A year at 2 sessions a week or more has a good chance of yielding you a lot of good results, though likely not enough to fully heal something like CPTSD.

Related is expectations about when progress comes and how it’s gonna feel. For many folks with more limited experience with high trust and vulnerable emotional connections, it easily takes months of rapport building for them to even start bringing up really vulnerable stuff. I’d say it depends on the weightiness of the issue, but for me the experience with “therapeutic insight” was that it would take weeks and sometimes months of mulling over a particular topic/concern until noticeable change in perspective comes - and this is the kinda easy case of old belief that clearly outlived its usefulness and just needs to be processed properly to be removed. With trickier stuff one would need to actually take actions, and see results, and watch what feelings are brought up at various stages, to actually make progress.

Finally, to a large extent what you put in is what you get out. Nobody can make you heal if you don’t wanna heal. People who come reasonably committed to understanding themselves and finding solutions to their problems usually would make progress, though it might take finding the right therapist and approach, which is often nontrivial as it easily takes months before any results even in many good cases. Some would come because others or they themselves forced them to, and would be closed down and defensive or otherwise unhelpful enough that therapist might get frustrated with you after a while and quit.

6. Meditation: n reasons why you might care

Meditation at the layman level is simply the practice of training one’s concentration/ability to control one’s attention by trying for an extended period of time (say 10min or 1hr) to maintain focus on some relatively boring object like one’s breath and avoid getting distracted by thoughts and fantasies. Beyond just concentration one also learns to notice and distinguish finer elements of one’s perception and state of consciousness: many thoughts arising and passing, feelings and impulses and inner voice interleaving perception or engagement with a bigger though - there’s quite a bit going on in the brain at the frequency of 5-40 things per second that one can learn to notice with a bit of training.

There are two obvious reasons why people might want to do it:

• accessing jhanas: fancy pleasurable mental states one can get into by doing the right steps with sufficiently trained attention, with highs rivaling best drugs

• enlightenment: with many years of specific practice one can flip brain’s core priors around perception and start perceiving the world in a new way

See also Scott’s old book review for a similar and a bit longer exposition.

For the purposes of this note however we care more about benefits meditation practice for reconnecting with one’s feelings and healing more broadly:

• Increased capacity for awareness is one big benefit: similarly to snapping out from getting lost in thought during meditation, it becomes easier to snap out from being lost in rumination or overthinking or engaging in distracting behaviour be it reading a blog or gaming (I don’t rly understand this but meditation seems to enhance some kinda self-reflective capacity; default mode network is the word oft thrown around)

• Better ability to notice one’s fleeting thoughts and feelings helps to become more self-aware, bring things barely at the edge of consciousness like those fleeting thoughts into conscious awareness, help self-understanding as well as the therapy process

• Recovered ability to be present in the moment instead of escaping into thoughts or planning or fantasies seems important to being able to leave the left-brain and engage fully with bodily experiences, be it enjoying a sunset or massage or sex

• Some forms of meditation (eg body scan, yoga nidra) specifically involve focusing on the sensations within the body, as well as emotions, which seems to be helpful for the recovery from disembodiment, as well as an important tool for emotional processing and self-regulation

• Grounding: the most widely advertised stuff, even short meditation sessions tend to get one to a calmer, less stressed and more relaxed state, making meditation a great tool in one’s self-soothing toolbox helping one cope with bad periods in a healthy way without substances or games or intellectual distractions