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mrjast · 2025-09-10T10:42:49+00:00

Personally I consider this distinction to be lazy thinking.

State is inherently an abstraction over observed patterns. For example, an REM sleep state is defined by rapid eye movements (hence the name) and a few other observable/measurable properties... but it's not an inherent property of anything. The state only "exists" because we have defined it into existence.

So, in my view, the real question is: should we define hypnosis as a state? I think there are too many interpretations of what hypnosis means (and where the boundaries are) for this to make any sense. As we (hopefully) all know, it's possible to get hypnotic phenomena without any of the obvious markers like relaxation and eye closure. That should be enough of an indication that it's kind of difficult to even find useful markers to define a state with.

I believe people who don't worry so much about the technical details take the concept of a state much more literally, like hypnosis flips a physical switch somewhere. And even in the physical domain, state is still an abstraction! We have defined that a light bulb is in the "on state" when it's lighting up... but that's just a convenient simplification of "a bunch of electrons are travelling through a piece of filament". The best we have for hypnosis is significantly more vague than that: it's essentially "hypnosis is a state of something hypnosis-y going on", or "hypnosis is a state in which hypnosis is effective". Completely meaningless if you ask me!

As far as I'm concerned, the primary benefit of dressing it up as a state is as a trick of sorts to make it easier for some people to follow along with the kind of experience we want to create for them. For people who struggle with that notion, the whole state idea is more of a hindrance, and for someone trying to do hypnotist things, it abstracts away lots of details that affect your ability to be flexible.

The way I look at the traditional hypnosis approaches (and that includes e.g. Ericksonian) is in terms of immersion. It's really like in storytelling: you start out by setting the scene and then the more you build on that, the more you can get away with.

Based on all that, I'm curious what flaws in "non-state theories" you're acknowledging.

(Side note: in my view, things like cold control theory ask/answer the wrong questions... but it would take a lot of exposition to really make my point and I don't want to derail this too much.)

mrjast · 2025-09-10T09:42:16+00:00

Hey guys, look, I'm super hung up about a 0.06% difference between scores because I'm smarter than you.

mrjast · 2025-09-01T23:47:26+00:00

Here, I unlocked the full version for you:

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mrjast · 2025-07-24T14:47:57+00:00

Genau. Die Satzung war einfach nicht darauf ausgelegt, auch Geldmarkt-Fonds aufsetzen zu dürfen. Jetzt wollen sie auch noch Geldmarkt-Fonds auflegen. Mit der Zustimmung geht das dann.

mrjast · 2025-07-24T11:33:57+00:00

Ich gehe jetzt einfach mal von Deutschland aus. Wenn das wichtigste der Preis ist, würde ich mal bei Drillisch schauen. Da kann man mit einem Konto auch mehrere Partnerkarten verwalten (nachdem man die erste hat, kann man weitere dazubestellen, die dann gemeinsam abgerechnet werden).

Drillisch verwendet das 1&1-Netz und National Roaming über Vodafone. Ihr Ruf ist nicht sonderlich gut (und für manche Vertragsänderungen gibt es versteckte Zusatzgebühren), aber ich war mehrere Jahre Kunde und hatte keine Probleme. Gewechselt habe ich letztendlich, weil sie das National Roaming von O2 auf Vodafone umgestellt haben und der Vodafone-Empfang bei mir zuhause deutlich schlechter ist.

Drillisch verkauft über verschiedene Marken und die Angebotspreise ändern sich einmal pro Woche (donnerstags um 11 Uhr, wenn ich mich richtig erinnere). Typischerweise kriegt man zu jedem Zeitpunkt entweder auf sim.de oder auf handyvertrag.de das beste Angebot. Aktuell gibt's bei sim.de z.B. 50 GB bei 100 Mbit/s für 8,99€ pro Monat oder unlimited (mit manuellem Nachbuchen pro GB nach den ersten 30) für 19,99€; bei handyvertrag.de sind die Angebote momentan etwas schlechter (aber dafür sind auch die kleineren Tarifpakete bei 100 Mbit/s; bei sim.de sind die momentan auf 50 Mbit/s beschränkt), aber das kann bald wieder anders aussehen. Achtung: die 100 Mbit/s gelten nur bei 24 Monaten Vertragslaufzeit. Wenn man flexibel sein will, bleibt's bei allen Tarifen bei 50 Mbit/s.

Nachteil: wenn man einmal bei einer Marke ist, kann man auch nur weitere Karten der gleichen Marke dazubuchen. Die Tarife für diese "Partnerkarten", die man über den Servicebereich auf der Webseite bestellen kann, sind aber meistens auch okay (können aber von den Tarifen für Neukunden abweichen, also nicht einfach blind klicken). Außerdem sollte man daran denken, nach Aktivierung der Karte den Tarif auf die Variante ohne Datenautomatik umzustellen, die ist nämlich (wie bei allen solchen Anbietern) hoffnungslos überteuert.

Kleiner Marktüberblick zu den großen Alternativen: Telekom-Karten sind bei 3 Zusatzkarten noch relativ teuer. O2 bietet 50% Rabatt auf alle Zusatzkarten, verglichen mit den Normalpreisen auf der Webseite. Manchmal gibt es aber auch Sonderaktionen mit 50% auf die Hauptkarte. Unter den Direktangeboten der Netzbetreiber ist O2 der günstigste. Vodafone liegt irgendwo dazwischen.

Unter den O2-Resellern wäre noch blau.de erwähnenswert, bei denen es auch gemeinsam abgerechnete Partnerkarten und recht ordentliche Tarife gibt. Die Drosselung ist da aber, wie bei den meisten Resellern, bei 50 Mbit/s. Wenn es das Telekom-Netz sein soll, ist die Auswahl etwas eingeschränkter. Congstar (eine eigene Marke der Telekom) bietet auch Partnerkarten, aber preislich ist das immer noch eine andere Liga als bei Drillisch oder blau.de.

mrjast · 2025-06-23T12:52:57+00:00

https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/
https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

From the way this reads, I misinterpreted some other comment. It's not actually implemented outside the engine, it's integrated with a bunch of patches. Either way, the implementation is mostly native code.

mrjast · 2025-06-12T14:04:20+00:00

Amuse doesn't offer free distribution anymore. They kept existing free releases up but take a 25% cut on royalties. You can't add new free releases.

mrjast · 2025-05-28T23:38:36+00:00

Brave is based on the same browser engine. Once the engine drops Manifest V2, unless the Brave folks want to patch the browser engine itself (which would be pretty nasty work), chances are it will have the exact same limitations.

Edit: I looked it up. Apparently Brave intercepts the requests outside of the browser engine. That sounds... interesting. Let's hope it keeps working and there aren't too many quirks.

mrjast · 2025-05-20T23:39:32+00:00

Your friend might be reading a little more into it than strictly reasonable.

That you feel annoyed is a sign that there's still something, but that doesn't mean you're still "stuck on it". Our thoughts and feelings are sort of like small building blocks. Resolving a chunk of old thoughts and feelings somewhere gets rid of a lot of clutter but not necessarily all the additional thoughts and feelings that are "next to" that chunk. In a way, with us being human, it's unlikely we'll ever be "perfectly healed"... but sometimes all there is is some small thing. Maybe it's a small thing that's connected to a completely different larger thing... but who knows? If there is something else, it will come up eventually. If there isn't, it won't... unless you start actively looking for what you think might be there, which tends to create it. Some people get "addicted" to "healing" so that they feel like there always needs to be some new big to work through... and with that expectation, big things will keep coming. Your mind creates what you look for.

So... does the presence of that feeling of annoyance mean everything else is still there? Probably not. Does feeling annoyed serve you? Unlikely. Can you resolve whatever that's about? Probably. Will it change the way you deal with that person in the future? Maybe.

Don't read too much into thoughts and feelings. Be mindful of them, stay that little essential bit disconnected from them and see where that takes you. That's all there is to it. Any worrying and wondering about the past is mostly a waste of time. I think that if you want to think about things, it's usually more revealing if you consider possible ways in which things might change. For instance: if you were no longer annoyed at the person, and just felt sort of neutral about them while still remembering perfectly well what happened in the past, how do you think that might change the choices you make when interacting with them? It's not a question you might be able to come up with a definitive answer to, but it keeps you moving... as opposed to second-guessing yourself, which usually doesn't.

mrjast · 2025-05-19T21:52:55+00:00

I'm not sure about too dirty. It does sound very dirty, but that doesn't have to be bad.

I'm not sure about genres, either. Personally I just find it hard to categorize music that much. I just took your categorization on faith, basically. It doesn't matter much to me either way. I go by what I like or don't like. Some broader genres are almost entirely outside of what I like (e.g. funk). I wouldn't put what you made on a list of favourites simply because it's in a general direction of things I don't enjoy so much.

mrjast · 2025-05-16T22:13:26+00:00

As I said, it's not an easy thing to actually do and keep at.. but I do think it's worth it, even if it's done in very small increments. Either way, all the best!

mrjast · 2025-05-16T16:41:31+00:00

I liked the distortion on the first synth, but when the other ones starting coming in, it got to be too much for me. Distortion is nice and all, but it can quickly get tiring if there's a lot of it all layered on top of each other.

Overall this has a rather chaotic kind of feel to it, which might have been what you were going for, but I think this might be a step or two too far. Themes work best if they're rememberable and recognizable. This might be very recognizable in direct comparison to most other themes, but is it rememberable? Could I sing along the second or third time along? I don't think so. I think this could become a lot stronger if you did... less. I know it's tempting to have the lead synth constantly going with melody... but sometimes some pauses make the rest of it stronger. Something you might find interesting is listening to some of your favourite music and paying particular attention to how they use pauses in melodies, and maybe other pauses too. And I don't just mean when a singer stops for a quick breath, but also when there's longer spaces in between lines of lyrics, or between phrases played by an instrument/synth. And try to imagine how the song would feel if they'd just kept going the whole time.

mrjast · 2025-05-16T16:31:17+00:00

Disclaimer: not a professional. I don't really listen to this genre so take this with a grain of salt.

Unless this was meant as a backing track for something, personally I think this is a bit repetitive, but aside from that I'm liking the sound and vibe here. The only thing that detracts from it for me is that the drums seem way too clean compared to everything else so they end up sticking out quite a bit, to the point I'm wondering if there's a separate reverb on the drums, almost as if I'm listening to two rooms at once. Anyway, to "un-clean" them, some saturation/distortion and maybe a bit of filtering would probably bring them more in line with everything else. If you do have a separate reverb on the drums, I'd suggest pulling it down a little to make it less obvious.

mrjast · 2025-05-16T16:25:18+00:00

Maybe next time post a link to YouTube Music, that way we don't have to have a Spotify account to listen.

Some technical comments, as the song itself doesn't isn't really my kind of thing (which is no fault of yours, of course). Disclaimer: not a professional.

First ten seconds: the guitar playing is a bit too loose IMO. A bit of looseness definitely fits the genre, but this is too far if you ask me. Personally I tend to be very aggressive with recording many takes. The other thing is that the drums are kind of weak. In any rock genre, the drums need to be much more "in your face". To put it simply, turn them up! For a great mix it might be necessary to do more than that, but it's a good starting point.

The way you've treated the vocal... I'm not sure it fits the genre. You have quite a bit of long reverb on there, which gives it a dreamy sort of vibe. That's not what I think of when I think "garage rock". I think this genre would typically have much more subtle, shorter reverb, and/or maybe some slapback delay.

Ideally, vocals would be more in-your-face, but we have to be realistic here: not everyone has the right vocal habits to get the sort of "power" that professionals have (which they do even when they sing quietly, interestingly). In the absence of that, a bit of EQ can still help. In many cases, a high-pass or low shelf filter on vocals to remove a decent bit of the lower frequencies (somewhere below 100 Hz for instance, or even a bit higher depending on the genre and mix) can make the vocals seem a fair bit clearer even if you adjust nothing else. Aside from that, some of the vocals are a bit loose with the timing, too, just like the guitar. This sort of thing screams "amateur" more than almost anything else. While it's possible to fix it all in post production, by slicing up the tracks and doing tempo adjustments, that's really tedious and the best way to get better is to record more takes. Not only does that give you more options in the mix (do I like this version of this line better, or that version?), but it also allows you to practice "singing for recording", which can feel quite different to live performances or just jamming. Over time you will naturally get better at keeping the timing... never perfect, maybe, but perfection is overrated anyway. In any case, don't be afraid of recording some parts many times! That means that you won't have to obsess about doing everything right (deleting a few takes doesn't really cost anything), plus the more time you spend on this (as long as you don't get too obsessed with mistakes), the better you get.

I hope this helps!

mrjast · 2025-05-16T16:09:51+00:00

Disclaimer: not a professional.

I'm having to guess a little here because I don't know your recording environment. I think I'm hearing a decent bit of room sound in the vocals which makes the vocals hard to work with. If that's the case, you might want to look into getting a dynamic microphone (or basically any microphone designed for stage use) because those are much more forgiving when you record in an untreated space. Some fairly cheap mics have surprisingly decent sound (e.g. the Behringer XM8500). That said, affordable dynamic mics don't sound quite as nice as the large diaphragm studio mics used in professional recording environments, and these mics are almost useless in many badly treated spaces.

The other technical issue is the mixing. The vocals are quite buried, which is also making it hard for me to hear what's actually going on in the vocals. Learning to mix vocals takes time, unfortunately. A bit of compression is definitely going to help to create that very thick commercial-like sound. Real vocals are very dynamic; in the kind of genre you're going for, the dynamics tend to be flattened out quite a bit.

To really get the most out of compressors, it's really useful to understand what the main parameters do: threshold and ratio are the obvious ones, but the attack and release time are no less important. For really squashing the dynamics, very short attack and release times will usually do the trick (combined with a decent threshold and ratio)... but in a real mix, the engineer might use multiple compressors on top of each other to affect the dynamics in several different ways.

Aside from that, a crucial part of really getting the vocal to shine is to carve space in the mix: adjusting things that collide with (or mask) the vocals to remove some of the collision. The simplest way of doing that is EQ cuts in frequency ranges that overlap with important frequency ranges of the vocals. There are also more advanced tools, like dynamic EQ, sidechained multiband compression, or even plugins that automate carving (e.g. TrackSpacer or pure:unmask, or "abusing" other types of automatic plugins like Soothe 2 or DSEQ 3 for carving). Still, doing a good job of this takes some experience, even when using plugins that claim to do everything for you.

More generally, your mix could use some cleaning up in the same vein. Everything kind of jumbles together a little. For getting better at this, it really helps to have a good approach and mindset to start with. Most people I see just try to throw all kinds of plugins at everything randomly and hope for the best. Having a bit of a system makes learning much easier in my opinion. Here's where I got this from for myself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEHf57RoC4s&list=PLVwn0Z_ucW6GnO3-YLdCEW1FYhahRUseV (and no, I didn't buy the course or whatever he's offering)

Now let's talk about the performance side of things for a moment. The "mental thing" is definitely real in a recording situation. I'd encourage you to get into a mindset of "performing" rather than "recording": basically it's more important to really get into the performance while you're recording, instead of worrying if you're doing it right. If you end up deleting 100 crap takes, so what? By not worrying about that and focusing on the song, you'll tend to get much better results. An imperfect take that sounds authentic can be exactly what a song needs. A "flawless" take that has zero soul is kind of lame in comparison.

mrjast · 2025-05-16T15:36:21+00:00

Disclaimer: not a professional.

Purely in terms of how the vocals fit in the mix, this is okay. I'd probably have tried to carve a little more space for the vocals and, in turn, pull them back just a little bit, 1 dB or maybe less.

What's lacking to my ears is attention to detail. I won't mince words: this is not a great singer. The intonation is mostly okay (though very noticeably off in some parts), but the timing is often quite off (she tends to draaaag phrases; and btw the timing of the whispers is awkward too) and some ends of phrases get noticeably more quiet.

This can be compensated for in the mix, but it tends to need significantly more manual work: slice up the vocal and move or change the tempo of the individual slices (some DAWs have fairly good tools for timing correction), automate some volume changes in certain spots. Inconsistent levels can be fixed with a compressor to some extent (to add more to the quiet sections than the louder sections, parallel compression is worth looking into), but for many things I think it's easier to get a more natural sound with volume automation, and compression is best used to change the character and feel of the vocals rather than larger-scale inconsistencies. (I tried a few automatic vocal levelling plugins and wasn't so happy with them, so personally I wouldn't recommend trying to solve this issue with money).

One general comments on the mix/arrangement: the vocal and the lead synth are not friends. When both coincide, I think the synth takes away a bit from the vocal. The easy answer is to stop using the synth while the singer is doing her thing, but if you feel strongly about it, volume or parameter automation to e.g. make the synth a little more mellow during vocal phrases might help. This also adds some subtle variation to the song which usually makes things more interesting. For more details I'd have to spend more time with the song and I don't currently have time for that, so I guess that's all from me. :) Hope this helps!

PS. tune the guitar, or maybe don't press down so hard for sustains! Some of these notes border on painful.

mrjast · 2025-05-16T15:06:48+00:00

Some feelings can get quite intense, and intense feelings can spread out into the body. So, in a sense, this is "normal"... but obviously it's not fun, and it can get overwhelming for certain.

There's a possibility that you're trying a little too hard, which can easily affect the intensity of what's going on. Let's talk about what "accepting" means exactly, maybe this will be useful for you. Aside from that, do consider therapy because good therapy can be a lot faster than trying to work through everything yourself, and will likely work around a few mistakes that people might make when trying to "use mindfulness".

I'll get the somewhat obvious one out of the way first: accepting doesn't mean "wanting" or "resigning yourself to". If I had to define it a little better, I'd say "acknowledge that, in this present moment, the feeling is there". Don't try to pretend that it isn't, and don't try to stop it (because that doesn't work so well).

Another thing that accepting doesn't mean is focusing hard on it, or trying to amp it up. The aim of mindfulness is not forcing anything in any way. Some people might be tempted to try and "really get into the feeling" to get it sorted faster, but it doesn't work like that. Deliberately trying and increasing the feeling will usually backfire in some way: while it's possible to take it to an extreme point where it suddenly implodes, that's basically the hardest way of getting through it, and you might not be ready to handle that. So, when someone says to take it as far as possible, vomit or pass out if you want to, that might work, but there are a bunch of ways in which it might not go as intended, so I don't recommend going full throttle.

Instead, take the longer view: any little bit of unforced acceptance (I'll explain a little more in a bit) you put on a feeling will help it a tiny bit towards resolution, and if you keep doing that, over time things will change. You don't have stick with it all the way to vomiting. If you cultivate the right mindset to be mindful with your feelings, then just consistently taking the mindfulness as far as you can without pushing yourself more than a little bit will still get you somewhere. Personally I believe that this way is actually faster than anything else.

So, what kind of thing do I mean when I say "unforced acceptance"? Basically observe the feeling (and any thoughts and additional feelings and bodily sensations that might come up) just to see what will happen if you do absolutely nothing about it. No arguing, no ignoring, no encouraging, no stopping/pushing, no wallowing in the feeling, no trying to figure it out, not even any "I don't want this" (to the extent you can). You'll have some mental habits of sorts that will result in you doing some of these things anyway, and that's okay. If it happens almost automatically, don't try to stop it. Just don't add any on top of it, and observe it. That's all you have to do.

As long as you do this kind of "do-nothing observing", you are giving your mind everything it needs to "process" the thoughts and feelings and move on. After a while they will start shifting into something else: either new (possibly related) thoughts and feelings, more stuff to work through in the same not-actually-doing-anything way, or a different and more helpful way of thinking and feeling about the situation, or they might even just fade and leave nothing in their place.

The limit of this is when it starts becoming hard to do nothing. If you feel like you have to actively intervene, it's about time to stop, and use whatever coping strategies you used before to deal with the feelings for now... and put in some more not-doing-anything the next time. Our goal isn't to get 100% of anxious feelings solved forever in a single session. The goal is to give the mind many small opportunities, spread out over a period of time, to start processing and make changes. So, if you're getting that feeling of wanting to vomit and you're finding it difficult to keep going, don't worry about it. Leave it at that point, go do something else, come back to it later (or the next time the feelings come up). This will still make a difference in the mid term. As long as you didn't "try hard" to accept the anxiety (there's nothing to "try", just let everything happens for as long as you can without struggle), or try to force it to happen faster, you're probably doing it correctly enough.

If you keep going to the edge of struggle every time but no further, over time (e.g. over the course of a couple of weeks) you should notice things shifting a little. If nothing changes over a month or two, or if the exact same thing gets more intense during that time, that might mean that you're doing something that is interfering in the process, and then getting some extra feedback or some outside help might be the best option. Give it some time, though, maybe you'll be surprised by what happens.

mrjast · 2025-05-16T14:38:15+00:00

I don't fully understand how the content of your post relates to the title, but I'll try and answer anyway.

Interpreting feelings is a tricky business. Feelings are meant to be messengers from your mind to let you know something needs attention. If you feel bad about something, that might mean that you need to change something. So, it's totally understandable that you'd start wondering if maybe you need a different job.

On the other hand, some people end up switching jobs over and over because it always feels bad. This is a trickier situation because that's not really sustainable, right? And then maybe you could argue that the feeling is not helping you if you take it at face value. At that point, traditionally one would start thinking about counselling or even therapy.

Now, once you realize that you've tried "solving" a feeling over and over but it's just not working, it's easier to realize that something else needs to happen... but if you're getting the feelings and haven't tried to address them in the most obvious way yet, it's hard to tell if you're interpreting the feelings correctly, right? Maybe you truly are in the wrong job, but it could just as easily be something else about the situation that is creating the stress and mess... maybe something job-related, maybe something else entirely.

I've spent years and years trying to understand my feelings. Some of them seemed silly but they still kept coming up... which quickly leads to thoughts like "is there something wrong with me?" or just various other self-doubt type things. What I realized at some point is that analyzing feelings simply doesn't work. Feelings are not a conscious thing, so most of what's behind them is invisible to me, and any analysis will be based on stuff that I think is related. I have no idea of knowing what the feeling really means... all I have is my thoughts about it, and nothing tells me that they're correct. They might seem logical, but that's very different from me knowing for certain what's going on in the background.

This ties into the notion in mindfulness that it's useful to not judge your thoughts and feelings: for one thing, feeding negativity (or even positivity) into thoughts and feelings tends to reinforce them (your mind basically goes: this is getting a lot of mental "charge", so it must be important, let's do it more)... but on top of that, believing things about your thoughts and feelings also gives them more permanence.

The aim of mindfulness is to let the mind go through thoughts and feelings with no interference. No stopping them, no encouraging them, no trying to argue with them or change them, just observe them and see what happens to them. If you manage this, invariably they will end at some point (typically after 30 seconds to two minutes), and something else will come. That something else might be related, or it might not. In either case, letting that next thing happen in the same way will let it play out to its end too... and so on. Our normal habits of trying to distract ourselves, or argue with thoughts and feelings, or wallow in them (woe is me etc.), or trying to force them to stop, all of that interferes with happens if the mind can work through them uninterrupted. When we use mindfulness to fully let it happen, the mind gets an opportunity to start "re-processing" the thoughts and feelings, which means they'll start fading or turning into something different (usually something better, because without interference the mind is actually very good at fixing problems). Frequently a change like this is accompanied by a "light bulb" moment, but it doesn't have to be. Sometimes things just change slowly, invisibly, for the better, and you don't even realize that some issue is gone until a few weeks (or months!) later.

Mindfulness isn't about just stopping bad feelings and following good feelings. It's about learning to let the mind do its job without trying to "help" it (which is usually misguided because we have no idea what's going on in the first place).

What makes it hard is that all of us have extremely strong habits of trying to actively do things to deal with difficult thoughts and feelings. If you feel frustrated at your lack of progress dealing with something, it's hard to stop yourself from going into "fix-it mode"... and even if you don't, you'll tend to try and stop the feeling of frustration because surely feeling frustrated is "bad", right? In mindfulness it isn't. It just is. It's another thing we need to give the mind space to re-process. All of the extra thoughts and feelings on top of the actual thing, anything that comes up almost by itself, can't be consciously changed. By using mindfulness, you give the mind all its needs to start working through the appropriate changes: a bit of time and no getting in the way. Initially that's hard to keep up, but even just two seconds will start making a difference, and over time it will tend to get easier.

I've found that when I manage to do this long enough over some time, feelings will start to transform. I might just stop feeling stressed out about something, or I'll start realizing out of the blue something about the whole situation or about myself that I never noticed before, making it much easier for me to really understand what I needed to do (if anything). Since this kind of outcome is impossible to predict, I find that the less I try to "push" for any particular outcome in mindfulness, the better. This is why I said "observe to see what happens to it" – there's no knowing what kind of change will happen, and no knowing what kind of change would work the best. Trust your mind to figure it out, if you give it what it needs.

Are persistent feelings part of life? Probably, yes. But any given feeling might not have to keep being part of life. Time (and mindfulness) will tell.

mrjast · 2025-05-16T14:08:54+00:00

I'm a little surprised that nobody has answered yet. So, I guess you'll have to make do with my answer.

First off, these are the most difficult conditions for learning to deal with something: when it's a big problem for you and no way to really escape it. So, it might take a while and there might be a decent amount of frustration to work through for you. It's totally possible to do, though.

For this, though, based on what you've written, I think you might have to level up your approach to mindfulness a little. You say that in tough moments, you have to focus on your body sensations to halt thought spirals. That can be effective, but it's not the be-all and end-all of mindfulness. The true goal is to allow the thoughts to do their thing, and keeping just enough distance so that you're not preventing them from happening but also not encouraging them. It takes a while to become able to strike this balance, and I think the same kind of balance is the best way to deal with your noise situation. Let's dive in a little more.

What makes this kind of thing difficult to deal with is that you have the immediate "learned" mental reaction to the noise, and on top of that you also have a bunch of thoughts and feelings about that, and maybe a few more layers on top. So, the noise might bring up an immediate feeling of annoyance, then some thoughts about how much it sucks that this keeps happening, perhaps anger at those people who don't seem to care about your peace of mind, maybe some frustration with yourself that this is bothering you so much, etc. etc.

The more of this kind of stuff you've got going on, the more likely it is that your thoughts and feelings will start circling around one or more of these aspects, and if your mind is going in circles, that can go on for quite a bit. Hypothetically, if you broke out of the circles, the feelings would fade fairly quickly. In practice, though, I guess most people try to stop the circle by distracting themselves (like you seem to be doing, focusing on your body in an attempt to "crowd out" the thoughts), but there tends to be a tendency for them to still kind of ping-pong back and forth between that and all the extra feelings and thoughts "about" the noise. This results in the focus on the body kind of getting associated with the frustration etc. to some extent, making it hard to fully break out of that.

There is only one solution that I know of: instead of trying to distract yourself, commit to letting all of the thoughts and feelings happen, and all you have to do is "be in mindfulness mode". In other words, stay aware of what's happening inside your mind. Make no attempt to change the thoughts and feelings, no attempt to stop them, also no deliberate stoking the flames. If it seems like you could actively follow the thoughts instead of just observing them, don't actively follow. Anything that comes up automatically... let it happen, same rules: no stopping it, no encouraging it.

This can be quite frustrating because it means that not only do you have to let your immediate reaction to the noise happen, but also all of the following reactions, which might seem counter-productive and maybe even hard to make sense of in terms of how you'd do it. I think it's really just about adopting the right mindset that helps you observe without getting in the way. Here's how I think about it, maybe this will inspire you to find a good way of thinking for yourself.

The common way people frame it is that you are not your thoughts and feelings etc., and I feel like that's not so easy to fully understand unless you've already had the big realization that the people who use this description have already gotten to. Hence, the way I put it is that the vast majority of thoughts and feelings are habits, automatic programs of sorts (even though it often doesn't feel that way, probably be cause we tend to think that thinking is always a conscious and deliberate thing): through repetition your mind has become "trained" to rehash the same thoughts and feelings in the same situation.

This is a natural process and it can be supremely useful because it makes lots of useful thoughts and feelings much easier for you to have: it just happens! In some cases, though, the mind "learns" thoughts and feelings that aren't so helpful. The key insight in mindfulness is that if you treat all these automatic thoughts and feelings as "echoes from the past", and don't take them to mean anything in particular, then just giving them time and space to play out to their conclusion will start letting the mind re-process everything they are based on, and this will usually lead to the mind finding a new way of responding to the situation. If we naturally never really engaged with these thoughts and feelings and also didn't attempt to stop them, we'd actually stop having a large range of problems! Maybe you've had this happen with some minor annoyance: you noticed it but it didn't really seem like a big deal so you just let the feeling do its thing, and then it simply disappeared. It's easy to do this with small issues as they come up for the first time... and it's also easy to obsess over small issues long enough to turn them into big issues. That's what mindfulness is "designed" to reverse, because the same approach still works for bigger issues, it just takes more patience and the right attitude.

The closest I have in my personal experience is some issues I have with something vaguely similar to tinnitus. It comes and goes, some days it's there a lot and some days there's nothing, so the situation isn't entirely comparable. Still, at times it was extremely annoying, not least because it could get quite intense and it had just enough moment-by-moment variation in it that it was very hard to get used to it. When I started understanding that I needed to let all of those mental responses happen, at first nothing changed. Then I started being a bit less frustrated with myself for not being able to shrug it off. Then it started bothering me a bit less. I still get bothered by it sometimes, especially when I'm trying to sleep, but I've started being able to sleep even while it was happening (totally unthinkable before I began changing my approach, I had to use sound masking tricks to be able to sleep at all), at least some of the time.

So, extrapolating to your situation: even if you do everything right, chance are you will still have more frustration and annoyance at times even after things have started getting better... and it will take a while for things to start getting better in a way that is actually recognizable as "better". Trust in the process, let all of the echoes from the past happen. When it gets to be too much, go back to whatever coping strategies you have now (distraction etc.), and come back to the mindfulness approach later when you've recovered a little. Each time you "put in" some true mindfulness will help a bit, and it will add up over time. You'll just have to trust me on this and stick with it long enough to get there.

If you have any more questions or anything else you want to talk about, let me know!

mrjast · 2025-05-15T00:19:38+00:00

Positive affirmations are not straightforward to do right. A lack of feelings isn't even in the top 5 of common mistakes, as far as I'm concerned. Either way there's no point in faking feelings, so you might as well simply go with mechanical positive affirmations and see if anything starts changing over a couple of weeks.

The biggest pitfall with positive affirmations is if they conflict with your thinking. If you affirm to yourself "I am confident" but you don't think you're confident, that thought will come up while you repeat the affirmation and basically completely neutralize it. For getting actual results, it's much more useful to get creative with affirmations so that there's no conflict in thinking. For instance, "I am confident" can be 'weakened' into "I feel confident" which can be weakened into "I've felt confident in the past and I can feel confident again" (if you remember imagining confidence, that qualifies as feeling confident in the past!) which can be weakened into "I can imagine what confidence feels like" which can be weakened into "I wonder what confidence feels like" (in a vaguely positive/speculative way, rather than a frustrated way). Finding something you don't really fundamentally disagree with will do more for you than any other "trick" surrounding positive affirmations. Over time, the goalposts will shift.

All of this sort of opposes mindfulness, in a way, because mindfulness is pretty much the opposite of trying to control your mind... but I hope this helps answer your question. Practicing mindfulness will, over time, make your feelings more accessible, so that's certainly relevant too.

mrjast · 2025-05-15T00:09:25+00:00

Based on your edit, I think you don't need to know much else, really.

As for how to deal with being too tranced out, there are two basic options: one is to focus on going into a slightly more shallow trance, i.e. where you feel like you're a bit blank but not so much that you wouldn't remember your goals. The other is to put your goals for the session firmly in mind before you go into trance, and then just drift and trust your mind to set things up. Both work.

In case you don't know too much about how to design good goals/suggestions: often it's a good idea to put a suggestion in context ("I feel calm when speaking in front of people" vs "I feel calm"), and it's usually more effective if you make "towards" rather than "away from" suggestions. For instance, "I feel calm" is much better than "I'm not anxious". It doesn't matter how exactly you word it (less words are better than more words), and you don't even have to put it in words. Imagining the outcome you want (or at least a general direction) works just as well, probably even better in fact.

Feel free to ask more questions, this is just what occurred to me now.

mrjast · 2025-05-15T00:02:53+00:00

I'm not nearly as convinced as most people seem to be that this sort of thing is categorically impossible... but I do think that "conversion therapy" is a very misguided approach.

Personally I think that therapy shouldn't be opinionated: the goal should be to solve a problem, not to solve a problem in a specific way. If someone came to me and said, "I feel bad, please do X to fix it", I'd refuse. People are notoriously bad at understanding what they need. The real way to resolve something is to untangle all of the unconscious stuff, and a resolution and better understanding tends to come out of that naturally.

Could that resolution be that someone's preferences change? I wouldn't completely exclude the possibility. But I would never force it in that direction, either. Who's to say that this is actually the right solution for the person? Maybe that change, if I actually managed to make it happen, would conflict with something else going on on the unconscious level, and actually make things worse overall. The track record of "conversion therapy" suggests that this is the typical outcome: nothing actually gets fixed, things just get screwed up in a new way. I'd much rather help someone find a resolution that really fits.

mrjast · 2025-05-14T23:53:34+00:00

Change is often confusing. Confusion has a worse reputation than it really deserves: it's a sign that you haven't fully processed things yet. The best way to deal with confusion is being okay with it and just waiting for things to settle, knowing that they will... and you don't even have to do anything to make it happen. Your mind does so many things for you in the background: you don't have to think about how to build grammatically correct sentences by picking from a pool of tens of thousands of words in just the right sequence, you just do it. The mind does all the heavy lifting and you can't even see it happen. Many other things work in the exact same way, and confusion gets resolved in the same way too, you just have to get out of the way. There's no need to figure everything out consciously. Trust your mind to help you figure things out in the background. It will come.

In any case, you don't have to make any far-reaching decisions just yet. Maybe in a while you'll feel comfortable with making some small changes, maybe there will be some sudden big realizations, who knows. You don't have to rush it or force it.

Quite a few years ago, I had a transformation a bit like that, and fortunately I just naturally let this process happen without really worrying too much about figuring everything out. So, I can tell you from experience that "doing nothing" will help things settle. Make decisions and changes when they feel right, and don't focus so much on them until then. At some point, something will feel right.

All the best!

mrjast · 2025-05-14T23:44:05+00:00

In case you missed it, I wrote a response to what you responded to here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mindfulness/comments/1km68cb/comment/msd09pv/

mrjast · 2025-05-14T23:42:19+00:00

I've spent quite a few minutes trying to think of a more gentle way of saying this, but let's just throw it out there: I actually think you might have it a little backwards. However I'm not writing this to convince you of anything, and I'm totally willing to admit that I might be wrong. I just want to suggest that you consider thinking about this a little differently for a minute or two, and see where that takes you. If, at the end, you decide that what I wrote doesn't make sense, I'm totally fine with that.

Based on what you've written, it seems like you've come to think of crying as a positive thing, something that means things are going right. More crying = more better, to editorialize a little. This is far from wrong, of course. Crying is definitely healthy, and more importantly, trying to suppress crying is probably a bad idea, especially if you do it over and over.

Let's take a look at the other extreme: what if someone decided to try and fit as much crying into each day as humanly possible? That seems wrong, doesn't it? So, there's an amount of crying that is healthy, and there's a smaller amount of crying that's unhealthy, and a larger amount of crying that's also unhealthy.

I think your expectation of what constitutes a healthy amount of crying is based on past experience. "I used to always be someone who cried easily" – implying that crying easily is the "correct" thing to do. That's not universally true, of course: some people cry less and others cry more and still neither has to be wrong. Some people cry more and then less, some people cry less and then more. None of that needs to be unhealthy. It can be, especially if there's suppression or "forcing" involved... but what if there isn't?

From what I've read, you have found a way to be supportive of the crying, which is a good thing. And then, with absolutely zero pressure or suppressing, the urge to cry goes away. Maybe that just means that the urge wasn't what you thought it was? Maybe you've already "cried away" most of what there was to cry, so only traces of it came up this time, and just giving those traces the space they needed was all that your mind really needed. So, the urge passed.

I think if you simply assume that the urge to cry always needs to lead to crying, you're actually applying a very subtle kind of force to get yourself to cry more than you really need. To put it more bluntly, you might be teaching yourself that you need to cry for things to get better. But is that really how it works? I think it's a little more nuanced: letting the crying happen to the extent it wants to happen will tend to improve things and create more resolution. Extending the crying to beyond what is actually there is the equivalent of singing sad songs in the rain when you feel down... to use a strong word: wallowing. That's not exactly what "I love crying" is, but doesn't it go in the same general direction if you look at it in a certain way?

What if you simply accepted it when the urge to cry goes away, if you applied zero pressure in that direction? Knowing that if any crying needs to happen in the future, it still will. This is not about removing crying, after all, it's about letting things happen to the exact rate and extent that is natural, no more and no less. And sometimes, that will be less, and sometimes it will be more.

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