How inner work can destabilize your life
Some people get destabilized by ‘inner work’:
Here’s why:
Awareness := How aware someone is of sensations in their body/conscious experience. How perceptive, sensitive, and feely they are. How much beauty they perceive, how much pain they feel.
Equanimity := How equanimous someone is with situations and emotions. The fraction of their experience that feels okay, secure, and chill. How rarely they display anxious, triggered, or avoidant behavior.
Usually people get into inner work to improve both their Awareness and their Equanimity. But sometimes people get significantly improved Awareness without significantly improved Equanimity. This creates problems.
Increasing Awareness is turning up the volume on conscious experience. If you have suffering and you keep turning up the volume, at some point you’re going to either get panic attacks:
Destabilization lasting years:
Reduced awareness:
Or overwhelm:
To be clear, improved awareness can be really nice!
It’s just not everything:
What improving Awareness and Equanimity is like
Where many people start: Low Awareness + Low Equanimity
Signs: Burnout. Reduced agency. Frugality despite one’s wealth. Doomscrolling, vaping, porn, overworking, and other addictions. Stress despite ‘having everything’:
Also: muscle tension that keeps coming back, dating bottlenecks.
Benefits: Reduced variance of outcomes.
Improving Awareness:
What it’s like: Access to intuition and knowledge of one’s own desires. Noticing sensations within one’s body. Life is more vibrant and beautiful. Pain is more intense. Improved creativity:
Also: memory, dancing ability, pleasure, expressive speech and facial movements, less chronic pain; in extreme cases, psychedelics having any effect at all.
Downsides: Greater awareness of pain and suffering.
Improving awareness: Most inner work already seems to be focused on increasing awareness, so I doubt this is a common bottleneck conditional on effort.
Improving Equanimity:
What it’s like: In the limit, anxiety, avoidance, insecurities, and triggers stop happening. Fewer days lost after events that ‘should’ feel insignificant. Greater risk-taking → Greater potential for higher EV success.
Also: attractiveness, socializing as much as while drinking, handling conflicts well.
Downsides: Greater risk-taking → more failures. More people disliking you.
Improving equanimity in real life: Big successes from intentional effort seem kinda rare. It’s common for people to invest years and end up merely more aware of their bottlenecks.
Almost every big success story I’ve seen or heard seems to have involved ≥1 of:
Stressors or incentives disappearing: Mitigating a health issue, moving away, achieving financial independence, etc.
Supportive, loving relationships for years
Successful 1:1 work
Getting lucky with psychedelics on one of their first trips (?)
(I only very rarely hear of big success stories involving people who did not have Maslow’s safety, people who relied entirely on self-guided approaches, or people who exclusively followed advice from people who themselves are destabilized.)
Both: High Awareness + High Equanimity
Signs: Flow. Naturally high agency. Effortlessness; e.g., dropping addictions without trying. Charisma. Romantic success. Saying what you want. Caring better for others. Improved coordination skills. Better impact.
If you work on making superintelligence go well: I want your bottleneck gone before RSI.
Real stuff. I did “inner work” through 8 months of solo travel and a 10 day silent meditation retreat shortly after. I got some benefits, but they were also quite destabilizing in a way I’d like to see more discussion on.
Coping strategies are not evil—they're necessary, until they aren't. Sometimes it can be like a game of Jenga. Starting at the top is a much safer bet, a lot of the time: talk therapy, incremental improvements to one's life (e.g., get better friends; lower stress lifestyle including job and living situation; healthy coping strategies like exercise, nature walks, mind-engaging things like puzzles or learning for fun). That'd be my general recommendation, anyway.