Some people get destabilized by ‘inner work’:
Here’s why:
Here I care about two dimensions of internal development:
Awareness: How aware you are of sensations in their body/conscious experience. How embodied, perceptive, sensitive, and “feely” you are. This includes how intensely you feel beauty and pain.
Equanimity: How equanimous you are with situations and emotions, on average. This is roughly the fraction of their experience that feels okay, secure, and chill. The more equanimous you are, the less frequently you show anxious, triggered, or avoidant behavior.
Now, usually people get into inner work because they want to improve both their Awareness and their Equanimity. But sometimes people get Awareness++++ without Equanimity++++. This can create big problems.
Increasing Awareness is like turning up the volume on conscious experience. So if there’s suffering in your system and you turn up the volume enough, at some point you’re going to either get panic attacks, destabilization lasting years, anesthesia, or overwhelm.
Panic attacks:
Destabilization lasting years:
Anesthesia (reduced awareness):
Overwhelm:
To be clear, improved awareness can have benefits…
…it’s just not everything:
What improving Awareness and Equanimity are like
Where many people start: Low Awareness + Low Equanimity
Signs of this: 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 are unfortunately rare. It’s common for people to invest years and end up merely more aware of their bottlenecks. Almost no one tracks this.
In reality, 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 (?)
Which is also to say: I don’t really hear success stories from people who did not have Maslow’s safety, relied entirely on self-guided approaches, or exclusively followed advice from people who themselves are destabilized. My advice to be successful is to first make sure you’re not copying failure. Then, attempt to copy success.
Both: High Awareness + High Equanimity
Signs of this: 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.
so how to increase equanimity? first thought is metta