Mental Restlessness and some possible responses
[Note: This is a mental model purely based on introspection. I’m neither claiming high probability of this being generalizable to anyone other than me, nor that I will still be having the same model in 3 month from now, nor that the following is particularly original. Writing this up has been and is useful for me personally.]
This post depicts some of my thoughts on mental restlessness.
I’m interested in learning more about this phenomenon. In particular, I want to understand when and why it appears, and how to deal with it - because, at the time of writing, it is an important bottleneck of mine with regard to productivity, originality of ideas, clarity of thought and overall well-being.
I am determined to figure out and learn what to do about it so that, on the medium to long run, this cease to be a bottleneck. In order to do so, I decided to start an experiment [1] allowing me to look at the phenomenon (its Gestalt, facets, environment, related factors, their interactions, correlates and causalities) more closely, and to test hypothesis and possible remedies.
I use these observations to inform my reflection, model building and hypothesis generation. This might inspire new experiments in the future, in case mental restlessness remains or returns to being a bottleneck, or in case I simply stay interested in learning more in depth about it, regardless of it being a personal bottleneck or not.
The post is structured as follows:
Specification: I start by specifying the nature of mental restlessness and describe my observations on what forms and shapes it typically takes (for me);
Theory and mental model: I theories about sources, causal links and important factors contributing to the appearance and my experience of mental restlessness.
Interventions: I collect possible interventions for dealing or getting rid of mental restlessness and think about how/what exactly they might help with and how to apply them.
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(1) Specification
I’m affected - sometimes more, sometimes less - by what I came to call mental restlessness.
This is an umbrella term for a range of correlated phenomena. Some examples:
the inability to get myself into a deep work mode (allowing only for relatively shallow levels of engagement/concentration)
the inability to focus on a task for long and with a high quality of attention (clear-headed-ness)
the impulse to flinch away from/be avoidant towards certain tasks (typically, pivoting towards doing small and (pseudo-)urgent in order to avoid tackling the bigger, scarier, more ill-defined, fuzzier tasks)
the tendency to flinch away form non-embraced thoughts or ‘thoughts I’m not allowed to think (right now)’ (typically, something in my social life I’m worried about but don’t want to effect my work)
informational and/or sensory overload (manifests itself for example in the inability to hold a mental object in my mind; thoughts slipping through my fingers; really bad short term memory (what was that thought I just had 3 seconds ago?);
getting easily distracted
(much more so) being distracted: having a restless mind is a distraction in itself; there is no need for external factors. really, in order to be distraction; auto-distraction
mentally roaming around without being able to ever actually zoom into/focus on/hold one thought steady for deeper inquiry
Upon introspection and reflection, I came up with two general types of how my mind can be restless.
a) (Auto-)Distraction [Includes (from the above list): the inability to get myself to do deep work; to focus on a specific task (or to decide what task to work on in the first place); getting easily distracted; being distracted, the tendency to flinch away from non-embraced thoughts]
b) Mental Overload [Includes (from the above list): informational or sensory overload, mentally roaming around]
***
(2) Theory and mental model:
a) Auto-Distraction
Roughly speaking, the cause for problems related to auto-distraction can be external or internal.
External reasons include:
The task is ambiguous.
ill-defined: I don’t really know what the tasks entails, and, more importantly, how to start;
scary: The tasks seems ‘big and scary’ and, next to not knowing how to start, I’m unsure about my abilities to tackle it.
Generally speaking, this doubt (about how to start or about my abilities) is unpleasant and my mind wants to escape this sense by lowering the barriers for things to distract me. In more accentuated cases, my mind will even start producing distraction itself. [2] The reason remains the same, ambiguity is a unpleasantness-inducing that rather is avoided.
Internal sources include:
Energy management: I might lack some type of energy. I could be physically tired, mentally tired, emotionally tired or I might have been lacking purpose or meaning recently. My mind simply isn’t in the shape for doing that sort of ‘heavy-lifting’ I would want it to do, or wants to let me know/draw my attention to the fact that I’m lacking some form of energy (by being distracted, see above).
Sub-agents: I might also have some worries in the back of my mind, or thoughts that want to be thought, or fears that wan to be heard. In the language of IFS, some exile of mine is causing turmoil and firefighters are trying hard to distract from that fact.
This has been a hypothesis of mine for a long time, but I never had a really good grasp on it because I would never go investigate my mind in these moments. That’s pretty much the paradox - while these moments would benefit most from meditation, introspection or focusing, it’s also these moments where it’s hardest to make yourself do it. But recently (mainly thank to the set up of the experiment), I did, and the insights (and effects) were each time astonishing. More about this later in this post.
b) Mental Overload
Although mental overload leads to quite similar behavioral patterns (classified as mental restlessness) as auto-distraction, it’s nature, underlying causes and subjective experience of is pretty different. I view it as somewhat more ‘severe’ - I experience it less often, but when I have it, it’s effects are usually stronger and longer lasting. Finally, it is trickier to deal with, harder to nail down as a problem and more difficult to get traction with.
Mental overload largely feels like my working memory being overfilled. Any attempt to store new item/piece of information fails helplessly.
Mostly, mental overloads happens in the aftermath of a very insightful, inspirational and thought-provoking encounter (talks, read, interaction, event, …). My mind is still vividly producing new thoughts and ideas - and all of them make me really excited! - but at a certain point - when reaching informational capacity -, it is as if my thought suddenly became really, really slippery, slithery and fleeting. I struggle holding a single thought steady. Even my memorization tricks, that would otherwise work quite reliably, don’t help. By the time I thought about a trigger to help me remember, the thought has long past. My short term memory becomes so bad that I often wouldn’t even manage to retrace a thought I had only 3 seconds ago.
I think this phenomenon is significantly exacerbated my my emotional state, which usually is a mix of fierce excitement and increasing exasperation about the fact that ‘all my thoughts are floating off downstream, where I will never find them again’.
The analogy of a water bucket is fairly apt. If you fill a bucket to its maximal capacity, any additional drop of water causes the bucket to overflow. Not only will there be no space for the additional drop; because the surface tension has been broken, many more drops of water flow over the buckets edges and are lost. Once I’ve reached maximal information capacity with my mind,
Not only is my memory affected, I also find it more difficult to sit down and capture the thoughts that are floating around in my head. This has to do with the fact that my thoughts are more slippery and unsteady. However, this seems to feel more difficult than what it ends up being. When I do try writing things down, I normally manage to do so quite well and there usually is a strong sense of relief and alleviation. Like opening the outlet at the bottom of your water bucket and the pressure decreases.
While this allows me to moderate the urgency some, simply writing down some thoughts would often still leave me with a 'partially overloaded mind’, and a few hours or the next day, the bucket might be back at capacity.
***
(3) Interventions:
First, I will list all interventions that come to mind, before picking a few that seem most promising or that I actually consciously experimented with (and have something to say about).
Possible Interventions
Writing down or mapping out the thoughts
Shield/insulate myself from possible sources of external distraction
Checking my energy levels and responding to eventual needs
Reducing ambiguity
‘Getting traction’
Give in to the distraction, consciously, for a given time
Focusing
Increase awareness
Meditation, IFS, introspection
IDC
Goal and/or aversion factoring
Create positive pressure (eg. social accountability)
Details on interventions:
Writing down and mapping out thoughts
Already alluded to above. Seems helpful, especially when possible to do quite extensively (When I’m actually mentally overloaded, this might well take me several hours). Smaller time investments are still useful but, as mentioned, the positive effects are usually less and more short-lived.
Mapping is another way I achieve pretty similar things as with writing and it usually is more time effective. While it’s quicker to get an overview by mapping, writing down allows for more details.
2. Shielding/insulating myself from possible sources external distractions
This is only relevant for distraction caused by external factor. While it’s more obvious and less of an interest to me, it’s still good to have it on the list. An easy fix is still a fix.
For me personally, the most room of improvement in this category lies in :
installing rescue time
improve the rhythm/algorithm based on which I’m checking mail and other communication channels
only open the taps I use at the moment
3. Checking my energy levels and responding to eventual needs
Understanding the four main characters of energy as suggested here (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) has been pretty useful to me in order to understand (and name) in a more differentiated way, what sort of energy I’m lacking. I find it a useful prompt.
I’m planning to write a separate post on my personal thoughts on energy management and ideas how to expand my absolute energy capacity over time. A few very rough thoughts here:
Physical energy: lack of sleep, too much or too little sports, too much or too little or not healthy food, deficiencies, lack of fresh air/outdoors, hormones, sickness/infections, …
Prompts: check my routine (sleep, sport, outdoors), check whether I might be lacking some micro-nutrients, take rest (nap), energize (sports, outdoors, coffee)
Mental energy: overworked, overloaded, stressed out…
Prompts: take a break (chill, sports, call/meet friends), re-frame stress, meditation, focusing
Emotionally energy: lacking connection or lacking me-time (too many social events recently); lacking the outdoors; worries, internal conflict, self-doubt
Prompts: call/meet/talk to friends, go out (dinner? drinks? party? mdma?), date; go outside, for a stroll/walk/run/swim/bike ride, meditate, go to my room, write (my blog), music, poems; talk through with someone, focusing, re-framing (self-criticism)
Spiritual energy: (perceived) lack of meaning or purpose
Prompts: reconnect with what is meaningful to me, me goals and my achievements until now, bigger picture re-framing, meditation, watch/read an inspirational video/text (from the top of my mind: RGS), psychedelics
4. Reducing ambiguity
If the degree of ambiguity of a tasks makes you flinch away from working on it (for a possible model on why, see here), the most obvious thing to do is to actively try to reduce ambiguity (before starting with the actual task).
There are two obvious things I can think of here:
4a) seeking more information:
About how to do the task, about where to expect difficulties, how to confront them, about the underlying goals, …
4b) setting clear deadlines:
It has been often been immensely helpful to me to simply set a clear deadline to a tasks. This can be both until when I want to have it finished, or until when I will continue working on it (before taking a break, doing something else. This sort of re-framing (mostly the latter example) is a simply but surprisingly powerful way to appease those parts of my mind that are rebelling against me working on the task. (This framework draws some inspiration from the IFS/multi-agend model of the mind. More below.)
If, for example, some parts of my mind are wary of me working late and (again) not getting to do these other things I was wanting to do (eg. read, write, talk to x, …), they might try hard to distract me from working at all until I give up and go do something else. And they (often) have a point. By listening to them, just for a second, and agreeing on some sort of compromise (“What about this: I give this tasks another 30’. After that, whether I’ve finished it or not, we will do this other things you want.”), my mind suddenly regains a lot of mental space and focus and work flows again.
However, this needs to be a sincere compromise. If my only goal was to outsmart myself by promising something I' have no intention of keeping, it will either not work at all or my sub-agents will quickly learn that ‘I am not to trust’. I’m by far not sure about this but I have the impression that this sort of breach of trust is really hard (to quasi impossible) to remedy.
5. Building traction
[This could be a sub-point of decreasing ambiguity. But it seemed relevant enough to give it its own number.]
‘Getting traction’ is a handle I use a lot. There are many ways to do so, and they are usually pretty situation dependent. Some examples include:
a) detailing out next steps
The more concrete and tangible your very next step, the easier it is to take it. In fact, if you pave your way sufficiently well, the whole undertaking my (sort of) turn into a peasant ride.
b) visualization (of next steps)
If clarifying my next steps isn’t enough yet to get me going, I can introduce half-step (that is easy to take from where I am and already brings me halfway to where I want to be) by visualizing the logical next step: putting on my running shoes, opening my laptop, opening the appropriate applicaiton, picking up the first piece of clothing, … For some funny reason, I often notice myself realizing that, “hmm, that doesn’t feel too bad”, and then actually doing it becomes much less aversive.
There is one failure mode I sometimes run into: when I keep on visualizing (let’s say, I’m not only putting on my running shoes (mentally) but start running down the street into the woods nearby), I might discover some sort of obstacle (wait, what route should I take today? hmm, is this road still blocked? ahh, this fucking hill spring again…). If I stop my visualization at that point (and that’s the norm, since, again, minds like to flinch away from unpleasant thoughts), I’m left with a feeling of “yuck” or aversion. And don’t want to do the thing.
6. Give in to the distraction, consciously, for a given time
Sometimes, it might be okay or even conducive to just give in to a given distraction. Important is to not give in out of a sense of defeat (destructive) but out of an understanding for what I need right now (constructive). Indicating deadlines (when will I go back to this task and try again?) are probably very useful to not get properly side tracked.
7. Focusing
This is one of the interventions I’m most interested in. While focusing has always come really naturally to me, and I enjoy doing it, I struggle using it as often as I would like to (as often as I think it would be useful). As I mentioned before, the situations focusing is likely most useful are also the situation when it’s hardest to make yourself do it.
I have two thoughts on this, not entirely original though:
7a) Buddy system
I have recently installed an accountability with one of my co--workers that he would, for the duration of the experiment at least, be always available for me to do focusing with him. Now, the idea is to help myself push through the first defense wall of my psyche (making myself sit down and get in touch with myself) from where usually everything is just downhill.
However much I like the idea in theory, it is immensely difficult for me to ask someone to do focusing with me. It really feels like a huge waste of time for the other person, and I could as well just do it myself. Also, I think I actually prefer doing it myself. The only way I could imagine this to be useful to me is if my buddy could notice when I’m mentally restless and make me do focusing (with him). But as this is not possible, I figured that I need another mechanism to get myself to do focusing in those moments.
7b/8. Increase awareness
[This is partially a sub-point of 7. Focusing, and partially its very own point. I find this step super useful and thus deserving of its own number.]
I found inspiration for this step here:
At that moment, I feel the pressure of the “should”, the knowing that I’m supposed to/I reflectively want to be making progress, and also feel the inclination to flinch away, to distract myself with something […]
This is a moment of awareness. [...] I have the opportunity right now, to choose something different. I, in actual fact, will not have that opportunity in five minutes.
The point is that, when I am mentally restless, I do realize (at least after a while). I do know that I should do focusing (in the sense that, it would help). The hard things is the get up, drop things and make myself turn inward (especially if in there currently doesn’t feel very pleasant). What is not hard, however, is to deepen my awareness about the moment. About the fact that I’m mentally restless and should do focusing. That’s easy and comes without the impulse to flinch away.
And once, I’ve increased my level of awareness, the step towards actually doing focusing becomes easier. Maybe I need to iterate the increasing awareness one or a few more times. But that’s still easy, and thus looks like a fairly reliable route to actually doing focusing.
[add experience]
8a) Noticing
A prerequisite to increasing awareness, obviously, is being aware in the first place; more, specifically, being aware of my mental restlessness.
Noticing common bahavioural or mental patterns is a skill that can be trained. Meditation - improving my general level of meta-cognition - has proven extremely valuable hear. This is more of a long term strategy though.
On top of this, it has proven immensely helpful to me to write down an extensive description of the phenomenon you want to notice more, what forms and shapes it likes to take and in what sort of situation it often appears. Reification at its best.
I also liked this:
Keep this in mind: Your mind flinches away from ambiguity. But you can learn to notice, and counter-flinch.
(So, learning how to get good at counter-flinching should be another element on this list.)
9. Meditation/IFS/introspection
Basically the same story as focusing.
I tend to do an IFS meditation in more drastic cases of mental restlessness. I use these audios:
Otherwise, I might just do my usual practice (Vipassana Goenka-style, i.e. watching the breath and body scan) or use my Headspace app.
10. IDC
Internal double crux falls for me in pretty much the same conceptual bucket as meditation/IFS/introspection. Very useful. Quite a strong and heavy tool though. Again, I’m probably not using it (and especially it’s 5-second version) not often enough.
11. Aversion factoring
If an aversion is involved in making me flinch away from a certain tasks, a good way to increase my understanding of this aversion and find ways around it is aversion factoring. Recently taught this to people in my community (slides).
12. Create positive pressure (eg. social accountability)
Finally, one of my general go to methods : If your incentives are not aligned with what you want (or want to want) to do, well, change the incentives.
If I really want to get this specific tasks done and, after having tried some other techniques, figure that I’m probably just being silly, I like to let people around me know what my plan of aspiration looks like. This is usually surprisingly powerful and increases my affordance to do desired thing x.
It is important however to be fair to yourself. Don’t overload the system. Or it breaks. If you try to make yourself do a quasi impossibly task by putting more pressure onto yourself, you are likely not going to do it after all. And if you are unlucky, the efficacy of your external pressure system is damaged irreversibly. For example, if you promise to do thing x to a group of people to whom you really don’t want to loose your face, this is a pretty strong incentive. If you promise to do thing x to a group of people you have ‘let down’ a hundred times before, well, who really cares if this becomes a hundred and one.
***
[1] (Should I rather not use (and butcher) this term?)
I’m not so deluded to think that this ‘experiment’ will produce any sort of ‘scientific evidence’. Anything I find will only contain information about me (theoretically), and in practice, this information might have close to zero weight (as I simply cannot correct for all relevant factors, etc.).
However, my primary goal is to more to consciously commit to look at this phenomenon, closely. Having an experiment-type set up (and mindset) - including clear start and end dates, prior assumptions, daily tracking and written-up notes to look back to - helps me to get to more information and experiential insight in a shorter amount of time. It allows me to reflect on the ‘experiment’ more thoroughly what might lead to new, better hypothesis (to test) or insights.
[2] Ending up spending hours on fb, youtube, blogs, reddits or other internet sites is not really a thing for me. I actually hardly ever drawn into any of these attention-seeking applications. (I am largely unable to stop watching a series on netflix ones I started.) Instead, when I complain about being distracted, I find myself looking for possible distractions for example by switching between taps, searching stuff, looking up, following some random thoughts, checking whether I want coffee/tea/food, checking my calendar, checking my mail/communication apps. Rather than ‘falling pray to’ attention absorbing applications, my mind starts to ‘actively look for’ any acceptable source of distraction in order to avoid facing the ambiguous, unpleasant task.
Geneva, February 2019 - Clarity (of Mind)