There’s a skill I’ve developed that seems like a subtle sort of superpower. Superpower in the sense that it’s a really useful thing I can do that I don’t see everyone around me doing, subtle in the sense that it really doesn’t “feel like very much”. Nevertheless I’m going to try to describe it in case it’s helpful to you.
I don’t know if the skill has a name in common parlance, but I will term it the very un-catchy “knowing what would feel good” for the purpose of this post.
Examples of “knowing what would feel good”:
“I can tell that my body doesn’t want to eat much meat today.”
“I can tell that some spinach would make me feel really good right now.”
“I can tell my body wants exercising, lifting some weight would feel really amazing.”
“I can tell I’d feel great if I talked to a friend.”
“I can tell I’d feel better if I had some time alone right now.”
“I can tell folding some clothes would feel really satisfying today.”
“Knowing what would feel good” has the same kind of outcome as another approach that you might confuse it for, which I’ll call “hypothesising what might be good”. Consider and compare the alternative thoughts:
“I had a big steak yesterday, I don’t think I should eat more meat today.”
“I haven’t eaten very much greens this week, some spinach would do me some good.”
“I haven’t done any exercise this week, I should lift some weight.”
“I feel like I’m sinking into a dark place, it would be the right thing to do to the talk to a friend.”
“I’m feeling overwhelmed, maybe I should find some alone time.”
“I’m behind on my chores and that’s overwhelming, I should fold some clothes.”
The latter “hypothesising” approach produces an evaluation of a course of action that’s synthesised from: a negative evaluation of the present state, a hypothesis about why that might be, and a logical deduction about how to move that in a more positive direction based on the models behind your hypothesis. In contrast, the former “knowing” approach is based on an embodied, almost instictual-feeling knowledge. The rational approach is useful, but I find the embodied knowledge to be more powerful. This is because a) there’s no second guessing about whether my hypothesis is correct, so I have more confidence I’m doing the right thing and b) the full-body knowing really helps produce a feeling of committed motivation.
In my twitter thread on motivation I talk about how the best form of motivation for creating the impetus for action is the type that is rooted in positive feelings.
When you have access to “knowing what would be good”, the entirety of the “knowing” is based on positive feelings. You consider the possibility that you are contemplating and your bodymind conjures up the exact direction of the nice bodily feelings you might experience if you took action in that direction. It’s hard to describe (as specific felt senses often are) but it really feels like an *urge*, a simple impetus - the path of least resistance would simply be to allow the urge and *have that spinach*.
In comparison, the felt senses involved in generating a hypothetical model of what “logically might be good” starts with evaluating your current state as deficient. The felt sense being focused on is a negative feeling - which is in itself applying brakes to your motivation. You will be able to overcome it with enough positive impetus, but the negativity generates an impediment to your motivation.
Another clue is that the phrasing for the “hypothesising” approach often involves the word “should”. In this context, “should” is operating as a kind of substitute for motivational impetus. It’s a way for us to persuade ourselves to drive harder in a particular direction if we don’t currently think we’re driving hard enough. The thing with persuasion is that if we need to be persuaded, then we were never really convinced to begin with - doing it is like buying something a pushy salesperson at our door is trying to convince us to purchase. Even if we like the item we carry a bit of doubt that we’d have chosen it for ourselves. (Hence why “should” is so damaging for the cultivation of motivation.)
Cultivating “knowing what would be good”
So how did I get access to this capability? I certainly didn’t always have it - I remember a time when everything I did operated on the “hypothesising” approach. Even now I only have this power in certain areas of my life. You can see all my examples are about food, exercise and socialising, and that’s because currently those are the only domains I can do it in.
Looking at these domains, and how I changed in relating to them, I think there are three key mental motions that added up to this skill:
Paying attention to inputs
Paying attention to what happens
Allowing my bodymind to connect the dots - and using this to strengthen the feedback loop in 1 & 2
Basically, the superpower is the result of the unconscious parts of my bodymind having a well-tailored evaluation ability in certain domains. It reminds me of a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm - it derives its feedback directly from evaluating the state-space after taking actions.
Taking food as an example, because it was the first place I made this work:
I made an effort to try mindful eating, to the best of my ability. Really taking my time to note (with words or wordlessly) all the flavours, textures and bodily sensations that happened during eating, and how I felt about them in my bodymind.
I was also developing a habit of gently attending to the ways in which my bodymind felt good and bad during the day, physical or mental, situated in different places, with different qualities.
At mealtimes, I allowed myself to honour my impulses of what I wanted to eat for this meal, or even what to taste next. Applying more of 1, this allowed me to notice things like certain foods and flavours tasting much “better” somehow some days than others.
Repeating this over many weeks and months, the subtleties of what I was able to note during 1 & 2 also became more granular and more sophisticated. Soon enough I was able to make specific and detailed predictions of how certain foods might make me feel on a bodily level. For most of these predictions I *could* generate a hypothesis for why they were (based on micro- or macro-nutrient balance, or emotional associations), but by no means all of them - which means the “knowing” approach was getting me further than the “hypothesis” approach.
Where I am with physical activity and socialising is similar, but less developed because I’ve spent less time and effort cultivating them. They’re getting there though. What prompted me to write this post is that earlier today, I impulsively wanted to lift a 10kg bag of rice overhead repeatedly before putting it away after going shopping (so I honoured that impulse, of course!) This is a bit of a milestone for someone who once found all physical activity distasteful (and with hindsight, triggering) - yay for progress.
Note on pre-requisites
As ever when I describe mental motions, I’m resigned to the knowledge that it’s just not going to work for everyone. There’s a complex and intricate of skill tree of prerequisite skills for every mental motion, such that you might be missing key ones to attempt or even understand what I’m trying to gesture at when I describe the target mental motions in words. Worse still, with a different starting point you might interpret my words to mean a completely different mental motion that isn’t what I would endorse doing at all. As a defence against this I can only encourage being cautious about doing things if you notice they feel wrong (in this and all other contexts).
But based on what mental skills I once didn’t have access to, and mental motions that people I know have struggled with, I can have a stab at a non-comprehensive list of prerequisites to the approach I’ve described.
I would not try to learn this skill right now if any of the following “feel un-good” or *BAD DANGER STOP* or *ICK GO AWAY* or “I have no idea how” to you:
Mindfulness and noting feelings.
Paying attention to your body and its physical sensations.
Revisiting evaluations, forming tight iteration loops.
Evaluating “good” or “bad” components of somatic feelings.
“Tightening” your evaluations, making them more fine-grained.
If this is you, know that there are many other ways to get there, involving learning mental motions in infinitely different orders.
“Knowing what would be good” is not mandatory
I really don’t want any mental motion I describe to be a totalising thing, and this is certainly the case here. There’s plenty of good that can come out of hypothesising what might be good - because if you correctly deduce the good actions you end up with better outcomes! And often the good this achieves outweighs the friction or the uncertainties this approach has.
In addition, hypothesising about good actions can be a very useful way of bootstrapping your “knowing”. Because I had a reasonably sound knowledge of nutrition, my diet was already pretty varied and healthy because from trying to cover a range of micronutrients - so when I started paying attention to what felt really good to eat, I was already pretty confident that the “right answers” were in my search-space.
There are also plenty of domains of my life where I’m still hypothesising, rather than knowing. When and how I want to write is one example. I trust that if I keep paying attention to what’s happening and allow my bodymind’s judgement to tune accurately to these domains, eventually I’ll gain “knowing what would be good” in them too.