I used to internalize my emotions a lot. The result was, I was a ticking time bomb.

The problem in these situations is that you don’t realize it at first. The tension in your body grows. You become frustrated by the slightest things. In a way, you also become afraid of your own emotions. In fact, when you block emotions for so long, you don’t even feel anything anymore. It’s bizarre.

We, especially in the Western world, often view emotions as a sign of weakness. Somebody explodes in traffic? Weak. A man crying? Soft.

What we don’t see is that behind that, there are people constantly readjusting everything they are every second of the day. It’s a drop every day. Those drops of sadness and frustration become a depression, and that loneliness becomes an extremist view. Meanwhile, you feel like absolute garbage because you carry an immense amount of tension in your body.

I fixed it like this:

I started practicing to:

  • become as angry as possible
  • cry
  • allow myself to be frustrated for hours
  • get in a state of panic

I literally had to relearn these things since my default reaction was internalizing, pushing it away. So I basically had to make it worse first. It felt better from the start. The depression faded.

Another very common thing people do is this:

You make the emotion something else. Having a panic attack, and then doing breathing exercises. If I have a panic attack, I am going to make it ten times worse. Bring it, show me what happens.

Don’t make things that you don’t like things you do like. It’s like fake smiling. If it’s not funny, it’s not funny. If I am by myself and I am scared, I am scared.

Lots of emotions are layered

You can see anger as one very direct example of an emotion. But a lot of emotions are extremely layered. You don’t really know what you think about certain things. But you have to shy away from them, especially if you are by yourself. Who are you hiding from? Your own past?

Right now, I am slightly amazed, but I am also slightly annoyed, and slightly on edge, and slightly shy. You can always pin down emotions you don’t like within yourself.

The cheetah is right

If I look at a cheetah, I don’t look at how it can hunt, how fast it is, but how it cycles its energy.

How many runs does it have? How does it decide whether to take the shot or not? Because running and missing is spending energy.

These decisions, you call intuition. Intuition means that sometimes you do something, and sometimes you don’t.

We often see spending more energy on something as good. I once read a book by somebody — who actually won a Nobel Prize with this — who managed to put words like this on paper:

‘’A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?’’

This is a very good example of where this goes wrong.

The right answer is 5 cents. But the right answer was not the question.

First of all, you could argue the answer is 10 cents, because if you calculate the amount of times you have seen a question like this, the answer is always 10 cents.

1 dollar bat + 10 cent ball = 1.10

The reason why that answer is wrong is because the question is framed in a cheap-shot way, so you have to overspend in figuring out what the question is. Everybody understands that 1.05 plus 5 cents is 1.10.

So, you have to spend extra energy because the other party couldn’t frame the question properly.

The real choice is: do I want to solve it or not? The leopard says no and immediately says, ‘’the ball costs 10 cents.’’ Which objectively is not true, but is still the 100% correct answer.

AI is a little bit like this. You can spend all the energy in the world on figuring out all the exact answers, but you still don’t understand what the original game was.

* By the way, there is no System 1 or 2 thinking. It’s a conscious spectrum, a decision on how much you spend in any given situation. It’s a choice.

** Have you ever wondered how amazing it is how your body distributes energy within a body? It cycles perfectly to the amount of energy that is necessary per organ.

*** Social media gives you a lot of decisions where you want to spend energy on. Be careful with that a little bit, because there are a lot of decisions.

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In the cheetah example, the answer is sometimes 10 cents, and sometimes 5 cents. Therefore, things never have a defined answer. But that doesn’t mean it’s probabilistic.

A rigid thinker will say the answer is always 5 cents. And that’s why you only see a fraction of reality: one dimension, focused too much on correctness.