Locally optimal psychology

There’s no way that chronic depression, self-loathing, poor agency, or muscle tension could be optimal… right? 

Jake was depressed for 6 months. He also felt horrible every time he interacted with other people because of his emotional insecurities.

So without knowing how to outgrow his insecurities, his system basically had two options:

1. Interact with other people — and constantly feel horrible

2. Don’t interact with anyone unless absolutely necessary

So his system converged on the second option, also known as “depression”. 

Depression certainly wasn’t the globally optimal strategy, but given the options, it was a locally optimal strategy.

Depression, the best strategy known and accessible at the time.

Once he outgrew his emotional insecurities, however, he was no longer blocked on the better optimum of both interacting with others and not feeling horrible. 

And so with no need for the ‘depression strategy’, the symptoms evaporated — two years and counting. I know because Jake was me.

More examples of locally optimal strategies

Most chronic issues for the people I help end up looking like locally optimal strategies. For example, self-loathing often turns out to be a strategy for avoiding conflict with others. Lack of agency often turns out to be a strategy for avoiding judgements of failure. But ideally, they would both have self-love and be safe from conflicts; or have agency and be okay with judgements of failure.

I’ve seen people make significant and sometimes total progress in weeks on issues they’ve had for years. One of my tenets is that any persistent mental issue is probably a locally optimal strategy. (Again: if my mind had hit the “undo depression” button while I was depressed, I would’ve gotten hurt!)

In my own growth, my issues relating to depression, empathy, conflict avoidance, emotional numbness, eye contact, boundaries, neck pain, and more all turned out to be locally optimal strategies. Only once I fully understood what an issue was doing for me did I make a step change towards resolving it.

For example, I had neck pain for 3½ years. A few times it was so bad I couldn’t turn my head. Over the years, I had tried to counteract my neck tension with physical therapy and stretching but nothing really worked. Then, earlier this year I finally realized precisely how it was strategic, so I implemented better strategies towards the same goals and have had ~90% less neck pain since. 

Btw: Noticing how my neck pain was locally optimal was quite tricky, and even suppressed. So even if an issue IS a locally optimal strategy, it can be quite difficult to understand how. (This process may help.) 

How common are locally optimal strategies?

I have no hard data, but I suspect that when an issue has lasted years, local optimality is more probable than not. Why? Consider:

If there were no downsides to resolving a persistent issue, then why has it lasted so long??

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Thanks to Brian Toomey, Kaj Sotala, Stag Lynn, Ethan Kuntz, Anna Salamon, and my clients for support.

@ChrisChipMonk, chris@chrislakin.com, chrislakin.com/now