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I think you speak here to an important potential misunderstanding about self-distancing. It shouldn’t be about eliminating emotions, it should be about seeing t

I think you speak here to an important potential misunderstanding about self-distancing. It shouldn’t be about eliminating emotions, it should be about seeing them clearly. Even the first example quote about LeBron makes the point... he says he doesn’t want to make an emotional decision... he wants to make a decision that will make him happy. Happy is an emotion too, and a totally valid goal. “Emotional” is really being used as a shortcut to “unconscious”. Even (perhaps especially) as inputs to the decision, emotions are valuable. If you feel joy at the thought of learning Scala and Clojure, that’s an important piece of information! If you feel depressed and apathetic when writing Java code, that too is very important. Make conscious emotional decisions, should be the take away here. And self-distancing, to see your own emotions clearly, will help with that.

afarrell 7y ago
> I think speak here about an important potential misunderstanding about... Meta feedback: This strikes me as a great way to open a comment like this. You’re clarifying that you think someone’s wrong on a point of fact/interpretation but that they’ve thoughtfully contributed to the conversation.
lame88 7y ago
I had considered this but I felt my comment was getting too long, and I still feel pretty opaque about it. And I might need to read the study itself to get a clearer picture - the article didn't quite answer all my questions. Basically I feel some friction between distance and self-awareness. It seemed that this study was about choices and action, and that this technique is effective when you have a clear picture of what you want. But to me, that's the catch: knowing the subjective part of finding out what I really want (beyond the immediate sense) is the hardest, and I feel that the critical self-reflection that requires is something you don't want to be distanced for (how can you understand yourself if you're thinking of yourself as someone else? You can understand your patterns of behavior this way, but that's a small piece of the puzzle). Hopefully this gets you to the point where you come out with exactly that set of emotional criteria, and then you can make well-reasoned decisions based on that, possibly using techniques like distancing. So there's definitely potential for harmony between the two steps. Trouble is, it seems all too easy to skip or cut short that self-awareness part and go right to the decisions, which is usually what is prompting us to go about these efforts in the first place. So certainly, I can see how a technique like this can help people make objectively better decisions, by some objective criteria. But without that clear picture, applying distancing on its own seems like it would make someone even more prone to neglecting their desires, since they are separating themselves from the decision. But this is all conjecture of someone having only read the article with little background in psychology and being prone to making emotional short-term decisions all the time. Sorry for the post length; since I feel so conflicted about it it was hard to really distill my thoughts.

afarrell 7y ago

> I think speak here about an important potential misunderstanding about... Meta feedback: This strikes me as a great way to open a comment like this. You’re clarifying that you think someone’s wrong on a point of fact/interpretation but that they’ve thoughtfully contributed to the conversation.

lame88 7y ago

I had considered this but I felt my comment was getting too long, and I still feel pretty opaque about it. And I might need to read the study itself to get a clearer picture - the article didn't quite answer all my questions. Basically I feel some friction between distance and self-awareness. It seemed that this study was about choices and action, and that this technique is effective when you have a clear picture of what you want. But to me, that's the catch: knowing the subjective part of finding out what I really want (beyond the immediate sense) is the hardest, and I feel that the critical self-reflection that requires is something you don't want to be distanced for (how can you understand yourself if you're thinking of yourself as someone else? You can understand your patterns of behavior this way, but that's a small piece of the puzzle). Hopefully this gets you to the point where you come out with exactly that set of emotional criteria, and then you can make well-reasoned decisions based on that, possibly using techniques like distancing. So there's definitely potential for harmony between the two steps. Trouble is, it seems all too easy to skip or cut short that self-awareness part and go right to the decisions, which is usually what is prompting us to go about these efforts in the first place. So certainly, I can see how a technique like this can help people make objectively better decisions, by some objective criteria. But without that clear picture, applying distancing on its own seems like it would make someone even more prone to neglecting their desires, since they are separating themselves from the decision. But this is all conjecture of someone having only read the article with little background in psychology and being prone to making emotional short-term decisions all the time. Sorry for the post length; since I feel so conflicted about it it was hard to really distill my thoughts.