As an alternate theory, I’ve always thought that deliberate, controlled suffering gives you a mood boost. Or rather, the relief after the suffering has ended. The theory is that it’s not good for us emotionally to be comfortable continuously. Maybe fasting is an example of that?
That’s personality-specific. My Dad is like that and doesn’t understand why nobody else in the family gets off on self-imposed austerity. (He’s a great guy by the way — we all have our quirks.) He loves to say it’s a lack of discipline, but it’s not— I quit smoking after a decade-and-a-half of heavy smoking, lost 20% of my body weight on an 800 calorie per day ketogenic diet, worked many very difficult jobs, and did a number of other things that have required sustained discipline, as have others in the family. He doesn’t understand that the difference is that he enjoys self-imposed misery and the feelings of superiority he gets from it, which not only leads to a lack of balance in his life, sometimes strains his closest relationships.
> My Dad is like that and doesn’t understand why nobody else in the family gets off on self-imposed austerity.
My gut feeling: men of a certain generation seem to have confused the skill of seeming aloof-- like when meeting a stranger or thrust in a new situation-- for being emotionally unaffected in general. One sign I associate with this would be talking only in the past tense about having felt certain emotions, but you never really witness the person feeling or expressing those emotions (outside of anger/frustration). Alternatively, the person may never really engage in discussions about certain negative feelings, unless it's to offer low-effort problem-solving advice to others.
This is difficult because there are obviously times when a small, seemingly insignificant problem can trigger an outsized emotion. It's natural and helpful to be able to sit with that negative emotion-- to feel it, express it and talk about it as an emotion you are experiencing-- to be able to eventually come to terms and get to know better whatever it is that's driving it. It's scary to do, but most people have some techniques for doing it.
If you have few or no tools to do that, it must generate an immense amount of stress. Hence wacky alternative stress-relieving techniques that are more physical and less emotional in nature. (Plus the projection of "lack of discipline" makes me wonder if he'd feel shame from sitting with a negative emotion.)
I’ve seen that in people though I don’t think it really describes him, specifically. He just really enjoys a lot of things in life the way some people really love getting the most punishing workouts possible, and would probably do it even if there were no health benefits.
I don't find it difficult to talk about negative feelings, as long as no one is listening. Talking to other people is mostly useless these days, they're all busy hiding from themselves.
A good technique to help w this is "affective labeling" (sorry, citation needed, I think I got it from one of Anne Laure Le Cunff's typically awesome newsletters/posts). Set a 5m timer, start writing words that describe your emotions and don't stop writing for even 2s till the 5m are up.
As an aside, I miss the slashdot ability to optionally assign a property to a vote. It would be neat to have some sort of indicator in addition to the greying out of downvoted or flagged comments to show specific types of upvotes. This has obviously proven to be the better system overall, but it has its pluses. Too bad it also had a bunch of swastikas and 4-Chan-esque trolls.
I'm not sure I agree this has proven to be the better system.
Slashdot had, for many years, fairly insightful commentary with that system. The fact that it has since become less insightful is, I think, less a reflection on the voting system in comments and more on people moving from the site wholesale for various other reasons.
I don’t mean the more effective voting system — I mean the more effective system overall. I don’t really think that’s controversial. As I said, I like the Slashdot voting system
> One sign I associate with this would be talking only in the past tense about having felt certain emotions, but you never really witness the person feeling or expressing those emotions (outside of anger/frustration). Alternatively, the person may never really engage in discussions about certain negative feelings, unless it's to offer low-effort problem-solving advice to others.
That's really insightful! Thank you. Saving your words in a scratch note for later
That's a lot of psychoanalyzing of people you don't know.
If it helps give you some perspective, I've been through a decade of therapy and years of group therapy, and I haven't found that my interest in "discipline" lessened or became less relevant as I've come to grips with emotional issues and learned to relate to people in different ways. There hasn't been much interaction between the two, except that when I'm doing well at one I tend to do better at the other, for the obvious reasons.
An alternative explanation is that voluntary suffering is a comforting reminder that you can do it when you need to, as well as an effort to maintain that ability. My observation is that people who engage in "gratuitous" suffering are people who were raised by parents who didn't pass on the basic skills of discipline (among which are important emotional skills) and had to learn it from scratch later in life. Since they didn't grow up with it, they don't take it for granted, and they exhibit the "zeal of the convert." Or, if they never achieve it, the persistent lack keeps it at the front of their minds.
The parent poster seems to have quite a lot of discipline but doesn't feel any need to remind himself that he has it. Maybe that's because he learned it as a child from his father?
My father had a hard and restricted life growing up, and he wanted me to grow up in a more free and easy way. He wanted me to feel free to goof off and enjoy myself. I certainly learned that, but I also grew up with a lot of anxiety about my inconsistent ability to apply myself to things I cared about. Sometimes I did, and thrived, but very often I disappointed myself. I was especially poor at boring things and things where consistency mattered, such as taking care of my health, but often, even at the things I was good at, I failed to put in effort at a crucial time and screwed up something that was important to me. My easygoing father wasn't going to tell me I "lacked discipline," but my frequent underperformance and self-failure told me loud and clear.
So I spent years figuring it out and getting better at it. Like anything that doesn't come "naturally" (i.e., wasn't learned in childhood) it has always felt like an artificial bolted-on part of myself that could fall off at any moment. So I consciously tend to it. I don't show more discipline in my life than other people, but I certainly show more interest in it, and I do some things that probably seem weird to other people. Other people probably think it's a meaningless focus that has no impact on my life, since I'm not conspicuously different in my habits and accomplishments. But not being conspicuously different is the accomplishment!
A lot of people can relate to the effort required to maintain a healthy weight after growing up overweight. People who take a healthy weight for granted might think that an above-average amount of attention and effort should yield an above-average physique, or what's the point? They might feel amused or condescending towards their friend who thinks and talks so much about what they eat but looks very average. They might get annoyed that their friend declines an extra round of drinks or skips dessert. What's the point? It's not like they're maintaining a fabulous physique. They look like anyone else, even slightly below average. Clearly their obsession with eating doesn't accomplish anything other than annoying the people around them. But it does accomplish something. It lets them be closer to normal.
“Enjoys misery” is an oxymoron I think. He enjoys joy, which he gets from doing difficult things. I’m just taking your dad’s side on this because I suspect I share some of his tendencies :)
Austerity is not the same a misery. In some ways I live an austere life but I am happy. Misery comes from poverty not self imposed austerity; the first is often imposed by the outside world whereas your father's and my austerity are, as you say, self imposed and under our own control.
You’re making arbitrary definitions for those words. Austerity can absolutely lead to misery and some of the happiest times in my life have been some of the most impoverished.
Does he not understand the situation even when you lay it so bare in front of him? People tend to get off the course sometimes on their own, but smart mature ones prefer honest correcting feedbacks (to certain extent), if it means ie better more stable relationships with closest ones
He’s pretty hard-headed, but so are his middle-aged sons. These days we’re all grown-up enough to know when to sort of shake our heads and change the subject. My mom has her own way of setting boundaries which seems to work for her but unless she wants to talk about something specific, it’s normally nothing I need to even think about. She feels comfortable enough confiding in me though. To be clear he’s a 100% stand-up guy, doesn’t have an anger problem, and even though he can be frustrating to deal with sometimes, there is never a question about him doing what’s best for his family, even if that means swallowing something he’s annoyed by if it’s necessary.
> People who self-harm, writes Arnold, have “learned that, while the pain peaks with self-injury, it then comes down the other side. The physical pain lessens – as does the emotional pain.”
People don't self-harm because it hurts. They self-harm because it _feels good_. Pain is "pleasure", for lack of a better phrase.
There's also the not so constructive tendency to punish the body for what the brain comes up with and the feelings that come with it. It's really the only part of yourself you can harm.
Most of them self harm because the removal the pain feels good - and it takes with it some emotional pain.
Though there probably are some masochists that truly enjoy the pain, but that's a different condition than the more common I-hate-myself-so-I-hurt-myself.
Not quite. The pain causes an endorphin release. It's also addictive (not technically by the DSM sense, but those who do will often call it as such) and has been compared to heroin.
This interview about dopamine and homeostasis in the body would support the idea that resetting that system through suffering would likely be a valid approach:
When I learned about the hedonic treadmill I thought back to a number of athletic programmers I’ve known who always seemed to be a lot more put together than the rest of us. I always figured the relationship went the other way. That having your shit together meant more time for activities. It may be the other way around.
As a person who did 21km run in fasted state (didn't eat for 36 hours before) and then swam in a 7 degrees pond with ice, I can definitely say: NO.
I tried for 8 hours straight to code just a little bit, but was unable to. I guess that is burnout, or, in general, understanding that I am not interested in
all this computer stuff anymore after doing it for 15 years.
Interesting hypothesis. Mental acuity does seem higher while fasting. Is that a dopamine specific effect, or could there be a handful of hormones impacting mental state?
Anecdotally, I've observed I feel better with a certain amount of difficulty in my life and felt particularly bad when there was nothing -wrong- but I still felt depressed. If you don't have any problems you can attribute the bad feelings to, then you naturally start to consider the possibility that the problem is you and you're broken in a way that means you're going to feel bad regardless of how much your life circumstances improve. Which is a particularly despair-inducing thought to have.
Last year I cracked my hip joint and ended up in the hospital for a couple of weeks, doing physio to regain my ability to walk. I certainly don't want to repeat that experience but I was surprised that I felt less depressed during it, because there was clarity in what I immediately needed to do and I was focused on just getting through it, not existential angst.
I'm no stranger to discomfort. I enjoy it. Like, my bed is a piece of plywood with a blanket on it.
The increase in energy and clarity of my thinking, the tingly feeling in my body, and the improved sleep quality -- just to give you a few examples -- are hard to attribute to the mechanism you're talking about. To add to that, I regularly fast for five days at a time and I have not yet experienced the same kind of mental difference. This time I pushed it to two weeks because my energy levels continued to fluctuate upward until the 12th or 13th day.
You do feel a lot of relief that the boredom of fasting is over. But that effect lasts maybe a day or two or three. Certainly not months.
> Like, my bed is a piece of plywood with a blanket on it.
Other than the potential for mold accumulation (you definitely want some air to circulate), this is not actually a bad bed base for sleep quality. Depending on your size, it's likely better for you than some very expensive plush mattresses.
Plywood has give to it that a hardwood wouldn't, so what you're sleeping on isn't entirely rigid anyway.
But drill some holes in it :)
I fast somewhat frequently, and I don't really associate it with pain or discomfort, but I'm also doing it for 24-48 hours.
Extremely long fasts (like your two weeks) should come with a disclaimer, they're not for everyone.
Certainly, the highs feel better if you're coming from a low; but I tend to prefer my highs coming from mids. I will say that, although not a low, the sweet relief of getting through a stressful situation/project is great.
Anhedonia is sometimes used to refer to 'flat affect', which I guess could be taken as 'mid', but usually it is used to describe a lack of joy/desire that is quite common in major depressive episodes.
I believe this is a well-understood feature of the dopamine system? The sensitivity of the receptors is like a balance scale, and will correct to one side if the other is flooded.
Give yourself big dopamine rushes and the scale balances by reducing your sensitivity to dopamine and (crudely put) causes feelings of discontentment, and you’ll need more dopamine released to feel like normal. Alternatively, push down on the pain side of the scale by doing some controlled suffering — fasting, cold plunge, intense exercise — and the receptors become more sensitive, and you feel better.
I’m sure this is too simplistic of a model but it makes sense to me in terms of lived experience.
A two week fast is incredibly difficult, accomplishing it, taking part in etc is very meaningful. Consistently throughout time and history a sense of purpose has been remarked as key to human happiness.
The obligatory “To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”
