Mark,

I'm also curious where you get your information.

I'm currently studying for my Master's degree, and Friday I have an exam about more than 80 research and review articles, all related to sports and achievement psychology. (And obviously I've done a bit of reading before this course.) And your statements make me raise my eyebrows.

One thing you say is that a person's physiological response will always stay the same; only the interpretation of the arousal changes. Do you have a source for this? In my own life, 10 years ago the thought of kissing a girl twisted my stomach and froze my whole body in fear. Now, I kiss a girl in a bar without any difficulty. I do not feel anything close to the arousal I felt back then. You're basically saying the same with "Whereas my anxiety used to overwhelm me, now it's subtle. It used to scream in my ear, now it's like background noise." Sure, there's still a little bit of anxiety sometimes, but both the physiological response, as well as the interpretation of that response, changed, in my opinion.

What you say reminds me of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_theory
But that's just one theory about arousal/anxiety among many, with mixed evidence and no real absolute truths, just like every other fucking theory. (Frustration ) Although I do like the idea of reversal theory, and it makes sense.

I don't have the exact studies on hand, but the book I mentioned above "Nerve" covers all of the relevant ones.

Maybe not physiologically identical. But I know what you're talking about. Perhaps the conscious mind amplifies these physiological states when it doesn't process the anxiety well, and suppresses them in other situations. Because I know when you get paralyzed with anxiety, often the more you think about it, the worse the physical sensations get.

It FEELS like the anxiety is getting less. But what do you understand under anxiety? What structure? The one that detects "anxietious" situations? Or the one that raises your stress level? I don't think my stress levels are as high as earlier in certain situations. So I'm at least rewiring the emotional response to these situations. But I also think, in the beginning of this "rewiring" you rechannel and inhibit the anxiety signals, but later, this inhibiting will weaken the circuits responsable for these anxiety signals, finally making them disappear. It's not like these social anxiety circuits are genetically built in and when the neural structure we learned so many years ago won't really be used nor reinforced by our inaction anymore, there won't be no reason for it to exist. So it must weaken. Probably it won't go away, but it should decrease.

I think all the inner game one needs is this: "You want it, you do it, hope for it but don't depend on it." Not new and kinda Zen-nish, but I'm starting to really understand it.

And about getting rejected much: wouldn't someone get some kind of a mini burnout after much rejections in a short timespan? I mean, you put a lot of emotional work in it and don't really get a reward. Of course, if your reward is in just doing it, it won't.

(10-07-2011 06:07 AM)crazyhorse Wrote:  When I was working on my self-discipline It didn't really become that much easier. It just became easier to put myself to action and ignore the part that said "oh man I want to rest a bit". I can really see a link with other areas here.

This is something that I'm interested and working in. Can you share how did you go about it, how was your process, etc.?

(10-11-2011 10:39 PM)Ravla Wrote:  

(10-07-2011 06:07 AM)crazyhorse Wrote:  When I was working on my self-discipline It didn't really become that much easier. It just became easier to put myself to action and ignore the part that said "oh man I want to rest a bit". I can really see a link with other areas here.

This is something that I'm interested and working in. Can you share how did you go about it, how was your process, etc.?

Hey Man

I just saw your reply. Basically it's pretty easy: I used progressive conditioning. And I'm talking about work ethics now.

1) you need to know how much you can do today. So let's say your goal is to work for eight hours straight. You succeed one day and the next day you fail utterly and you can only perform 2 hours. That means that 2 hours is your baseline.

go to step 2

2) establish a solid baseline. Perform that activity for one week straight.

3) establish an improvement routine. Mine was every 3 days I up the ammount of work by 30 minutes. This means that my work time increased with 6-7 hours per week. That's quite a lot. After a while I went to increasing the ammount of time every 2 days.

4) This habbit is small but very effective. Whenever you feel like taking a break always push a little bit further f.e. you start to feel tired push yourself to do 5 minutes extra or to finish the page you're just at.

To give you an idea what I achieved with this. Normally I was the guy who worked one hour and took a brake for 15 minutes (if not longer). Now I can work 6-7 hours with 2-3 minute breaks in between. So while before I would have worked 10 hours and only performed 6 hours or so. I now perform the same ammount of work in 6 hours and 15-20 minutes maximum.

Keep in mind that when I'm referring to hours of work, I mean hours of work that I've timed. So I keep a log of the ammount of work that I've performed in a single day.

this one will help you a lot, it's definetly worth reading
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06...willpower/

a last bit of advice is your inner talk. What you will notice is this "pff why do I need to write this down, this is stupid" or "remember the last time you tried something like that". Ignore this, always ask yourself it this helping me towards my goals or not. If it's not the case, ignore it.

you can do the same for approaching. The more I'm actually working with this in my every day life. The more I'm convinced that this is by far the best way to condition yourself. I don't believe in the "dive into it all at once" attitude, again those are the people who will say "oh not on weekends" or will only be able to work when they truly want it.

the same is possible for approaching as well.

Two interesting things from psychological research:

First, self-control is a limited resource. Studies have shown that self-control or self-regulation works like a muscle, and that if you use it for one task, you will have less of it on a subsequent task that requires self-control. Even if those two tasks are completely unrelated. For example, in one study research participants had to sit in a room with both radishes and chocolate on a table. One condition was allowed to eat the chocolate, the other condition was only allowed to eat the radishes. After this, people in both conditions had to work on an unsolvable puzzle task (obviously the research participants do not know it's unsolvable. It's a common way to measure perseverence or motivation). People who had to use self-control to eat the radishes and not the chocolate quit the puzzle task sooner than people who could eat the chocolate. Similar effects has been replicated in different ways with different tasks. Making choices or exerting self-control will result in decreased performance and perseverence in subsequent tasks, because of "ego depletion". (Positive emotions are one way to fix your ego depletion faster, or so I've read.)

Second, multiple studies have shown that self-discipline can be trained, making you less vulnerable to ego-depletion. For example, in a study where people started working out regularly, they also started drinking and smoking less, eating healthier, etc. Another example, people who were taught money management also showed more self-discipline in other areas of their life (diet, exercise, less drinking and smoking, etc.). So apparently our capacity for self-control can be trained. By using self-control, you will get more of it, in ALL areas of your life.

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/74/5/1252/
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.11...x/abstract

(10-12-2011 05:21 AM)crazyhorse Wrote:  Hey Man

I just saw your reply. Basically it's pretty easy: I used progressive conditioning. And I'm talking about work ethics now.

1) you need to know how much you can do today. So let's say your goal is to work for eight hours straight. You succeed one day and the next day you fail utterly and you can only perform 2 hours. That means that 2 hours is your baseline.

go to step 2

2) establish a solid baseline. Perform that activity for one week straight.

3) establish an improvement routine. Mine was every 3 days I up the ammount of work by 30 minutes. This means that my work time increased with 6-7 hours per week. That's quite a lot. After a while I went to increasing the ammount of time every 2 days.

4) This habbit is small but very effective. Whenever you feel like taking a break always push a little bit further f.e. you start to feel tired push yourself to do 5 minutes extra or to finish the page you're just at.

To give you an idea what I achieved with this. Normally I was the guy who worked one hour and took a brake for 15 minutes (if not longer). Now I can work 6-7 hours with 2-3 minute breaks in between. So while before I would have worked 10 hours and only performed 6 hours or so. I now perform the same ammount of work in 6 hours and 15-20 minutes maximum.

Thanks for your reply, this was what I expected to hear. It's always useful to draw on others experiences.

I've been reading about motivation and self discipline on my own and I'm reaching similar conclusions to both Pavlina's post and Philip's comment. Willpower/self-control is a muscle, that can be trained to grow; on the other hand it is all about working smarter not harder, like in Pavlina's example, using willpower to sail through the ocean, instead of paddling across the waves.

I am, in fact, pretty well disciplined in some areas (no Tv, exercise every morning, health habits) and a dismay failure in some other areas - like studying, despite having good grades. Self discipline never helped me there and it probably won't until I get over my fear of success. In fact, I had an aha moment last week when I realise that I was pretty good at the above tasks but hide the fact from myself.

Some other theories that might enlighten you about your lack of discipline with studying:
Check out stuff about implicit theories of ability; do you have an entity view or an incremental view?

Also check out achievement goal orientation. Do you have mastery goals or performance goals? (task orientation and ego orientation are basically synonimous to those goals)

If this post makes no sense at all, tell me, then I'll clear things up when I'm not on my iPad.

Hi Philip,
I am familiar with Dweck's work. I grew up with very strong entity views and performance goals. I have changed my thoughts after reading her book but that is not to say that my beliefs have changed...
Indeed, while I noticed how I've changed some of my attitudes towards some minor tasks, I was surprised to find that I didn't believe that I'll ever change the traits involved - tackling the unpleasant aspects of my daily life at will and putting myself through continuous discomfort. Despite all the change that I have undergone in the last few years...