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:
Interact with other people — and constantly feel horrible
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.
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 people I work with 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 incentivized by 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. They never knew their chronic mental issues were locally optimal strategies. (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 the incentives for having an issue 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 frequent 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??
Thanks to Brian Toomey, Kaj Sotala, Stag Lynn, Ethan Kuntz, and Anna Salamon.
