There’s no way that social anxiety, dating insecurity, or self-loathing could be optimal… right?
Once upon a time, Jake felt horrible every time he interacted with other people.
Because he knew no ways of making interactions feel safe, this gave him an incentive to avoid interacting with others. Guess what happened next!
He became depressed.
Depression certainly wasn’t globally optimal for Jake, but it was locally optimal.
What Jake thought was a “problem” was actually a solution. To stop feeling horrible when interacting with others, he just *stopped* interacting with people!
This changed later once he unlearned his self-rejection and the insecurities that originally made interpersonal interactions feel unsafe.
With no more use for the “depression strategy”, his symptoms evaporated.
I know because Jake was me.
Locally optimal strategies are common
Soon I discovered it wasn’t just my depression and anxiety that were “locally optimal strategies”, but also my conflict avoidance, emotional numbness, eye contact, boundaries, empathy, neck pain…
In every case, I had hidden feelings that bad things would happen if I resolved these issues and felt better. The issues were locally optimal: they had incentives that needed to be addressed.
Take my chronic neck pain. For 3½ years I had chronic tension that was sometimes so bad I couldn’t turn my head. The first approach I tried was physical therapy and stretching exercises. This approach treated the tension as simply suboptimal, as if it was only accidentally tense. Even after years of this, my neck pain barely improved. It was only when I did somatic emotional work on “What if my neck did feel relaxed?” that I discovered the tension was, in a weird way, to avoid interpersonal conflicts. Once I found a way to be both relaxed and safe, my neck pain has triggered ~90% less frequently ever since.
Any issue can have any incentives, but here are some common ones:
Social anxiety often protects against interpersonal conflicts, rejection, or judgment
Lack of agency helps prevent perceptions of failure or disappointment
Lack of romantic confidence could protect against relationships one feels undeserving of.
Incentives must be integrated, not ignored.
When an insecurity has lasted for years, it’s likely locally optimal. Like the efficient market hypothesis but for emotional issues: “If there were zero downsides to resolving this issue, then why hasn’t it been resolved already?”
Note: A popular error is to attempt to think through incentives. No — you must feel.
Thanks to Brian Toomey and Kaj Sotala.