Mental Strength Testing

What is a potentially effective method for strength building of mental capabilities?

To continue from my last post about ways to implement learning by using conscious awareness and subconscious drive to their advantages, another method for boosting mentality should be an aspect of strength building. By intentionally testing your limits in a controlled environment, with the confidence of capabilities to handle the circumstances, useful skills can be learned.

By mentally testing yourself, this should allow a simulation of a potentially risky situation, but to gain knowledge of the cause and effect of influencing factors. Besides the conscious knowledge, positive results of controlling the circumstances should additionally contribute to influencing your subconscious that controlling the situation is a positive result, therefore causing you to be more inclined to repeat that positive result of control.

As an aspect of “Self-Conscious Self-Coercion”, intentionally putting yourself in a difficult situation that tests your abilities to handle the situation, should create positive results, as long as the test is not too difficult. With the positive results, you can then implement the methods of “self coercion”, by being consciously aware of the positive result, and or by rewarding yourself, to influence your subconscious and steer you toward obtaining that positive control without you even knowing it in the future. In order to test yourself without making it too difficult (and potentially failing, with a counteractive result), you can analyse what your capabilities are at the present time, based off of past results. Then, place yourself in circumstances where you are confident you will be able to handle the test.

The test can often be circumstances which you dislike, but want to have better control over, so it will often take that initial conscious comprehension of intentionally testing yourself for the purpose of building strength. Also, it should take will power to overpower your subconscious preference, in order to force yourself into the testing scenario. 1 example is attempting to control social anxiety. I used to have fairly significant social anxiety, and subconsciously preferred to avoid social situations, as well as acted nervous while in social situations. After consciously analysing this annoying mental disorder of social anxiety, I hypothesized that conditioning myself could be an effective way to overcome it. Then, after intentionally putting myself in social circumstances, despite my subconscious or instinctual utter despise of such a setting, I slowly gained conscious knowledge of affecting factors, and perhaps more significantly, influenced my subconscious to associate positivity with a social environment, from repeated positive results.

After you’ve tested yourself successfully, you can incrementally increase the difficulty of the test. Each time you accomplish the intended result, you can consciously comprehend various factors, in their cause and effect on you or the other factors in the circumstances. This will give you valuable information to predict similar future circumstances more accurately, as well as potentially apply that knowledge to further testing of increased difficulty. The accomplishment of each stage of testing, should additionally make it easier to conquer the circumstances via subconscious desire to succeed, which will likely be a driving influence behind actions, even when you don’t know it. Subsequential tests of increased difficulty should build mental strength to control similar circumstances for the future. Even without increasing difficulty, testing should still cause similar (though, likely less) strength building, by repetition more strongly affecting subconscious drive, and consciously remembered causes and effects of factors.

Another example of mental strength building, could be; testing control over addiction. I’ve also done this myself with addictive substances, such as caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine. The tests involved intentionally subjecting myself to the substance, then quitting for a minimum time period. The quitting period would be the opposite of my subconscious desire (as addiction is virtually entirely subconscious appeal), so forcing myself into the dis-preferable quitting period of the test took some will power, but the success caused my subconscious to be more geared toward the ability to stop when I consciously decide to.

Intentionally putting yourself into uncomfortable circumstances is the contrary to your subconscious inclination, but using that as a test to consciously control the situation can be effective. Using a situation which you’re confident that you will be able to control, should cause a positive result of success, to counteract your subconscious drive to prefer control, as well as gain conscious knowledge of various causes and effects of the situations. Your subconscious is an important muscle, which can be worked out, to test and build strength.

Self-Conscious Self-Coercion

Considering the concept of the function of learning (as in my last post; Learning Learning”), which involves the 2 types, being subconscious and conscious learning, what effective methods can be implemented by utilizing both types?

Since the human mind seems to function by regularly using both types, there should be methods to effectively use each in its advantageous situation. Subconscious learning can be understood as basically, the experience of a scenario causing negative or positive feedback for the individual to avoid or pursue (respectively) those basic circumstances in the future. Whereas conscious learning can be understood as actively accessing multiple memories relative to the circumstances, to distinguish more accurate positive or negative factors within the scenario.

In a previous post “Conscious Conditioning”, I hypothesized 1 method, of utilizing conscious awareness and consideration for generally most new scenarios, to be aware of and focus on certain negative or positive factors of the circumstances. Doing this multiple times should cause the negative or positive feedback repeatedly, until the subconscious is manipulated to automatically take the beneficial action for that scenario. Once the subconscious is conditioned, reactions to that scenario can be faster than alternatively always using conscious analysis. This is likely a slow method of conditioning your subconscious, since being consciously aware of the negative or positive cause or effect of a specific factor, usually doesn’t create profound feedback for the subconscious to remember quickly and easily.

Another very similar method of consciously conditioning your subconscious, would be to intentionally reward yourself using an external element, rather than mindful internal focus on negative or positive factors of the scenario. Using an external source for positive feedback is likely to have more of a profound influence on the subconscious memory. The external source can be basically anything that you enjoy, which creates positive feedback for your mind. Examples: good food, alcohol, relaxing, fun video games, good music, or even nicotine. Using the similar methodology, of consciously analyzing an action that you do, to be aware of specific positive effects (that your subconscious would not be aware of, or have a positive reaction to) of that action, you can then use this specific method of implementing an external positive reinforcement element. While implementing this method, it may seem unobvious that you are changing anything, but that is because it’s a manipulation of your subconscious, of which your active comprension is not aware. An example of this method that I often use, is; after I complete 1 of these “philosophical” writings that I do, I intentionally cause positive feedback by having a beer or glass of wine, & or eating a tasty snack or meal. I consciously analysed that, I believe completing these writings is a positive action. Since my subconscious would not necessarily give profound positive feedback for this task accomplishment, I use an external source for more profound positive feedback, to manipulate my subconscious into the drive of pursue writing.

These 2 methods of self-coercion, should be an effective way to cause yourself to automatically pursue something which you’ve analyzed to be beneficial, or avoid situations which you’ve consciously determined to be harmful or less preferable. Once you’ve conditioned your mind, you will have that drive without even knowing it. With this subconscious drive, it is likely to also affect subtle influence on other actions to pursue or avoid that circumstance, where as you wouldn’t have consciously considered to take that direction otherwise. Being consciously aware of circumstances, of yourself, and of this concept, can be an effective method of self-coercion.

Learning Learning

What are the components involved in learning?

What advantages are there in the unique method of learning humans have?

As I derived some aspects of learning to be a benefit of freedom, in my last post; Free- Be, learning more about learning seems that it should be an important and relevant topic. If “learning” is considered to be basically, gaining relevant knowledge, then it should be the function which allows mostly any intelligence, intellect, and therein intended progression in this world.

The function of learning is gaining knowledge through personal experience or acquiring information. Gaining knowledge can be as simple of a process as any animal experiencing something, then saving that information as memory. The benefit of this simple knowledge is that in the future, with similar circumstances, the animal will react in a way of pursuing or avoiding the circumstances. Its reaction will be based on whether the memory of the experience resulted in positive or negative feedback, and likely cause a beneficial reaction to the circumstances.

The more advanced method of learning would be gaining knowledge through acquiring complex information (which excludes sensory input of personal experience). A single bit of information can perhaps be interpreted by an animal, such as a certain sound (communicated from another, of its species) communicates info to do a certain action, but acquiring multiple bits of information is mostly only done by humans. In order to interpret complex information, it seems an ability of advanced memory access is required, which likely only humans consistently use, at this point.

If more than 1 bit of information is being communicated, the individual needs to use active memory access to accurately access memories of multiple bits of information, before acting. Animals generally receive 1 bit of information, then subconsciously react based on memory of the closest resembling experience. With advanced memory access, humans can pause and access multiple memories, making the connection from 1 to the next, by simultaneously accessing the memory of a factor and its relative cause and or effect (based on my hypothesis of “consciousness” :). With this ability to actively access and connect multiple bits of memory, humans can interpret multiple bits of information. Ie. language.

With the advantage of language communication, we are able to learn by acquiring complex info, without the need for personal experience. We can interpret complex info by accessing multiple memories of that which each of the multiple bits of info are intended to be connected to. Using this advanced memory process, we can then learn by saving a new memory (in a way) of how each of the factors (represented by information) interact with each other.

The key effective function of learning by method of advanced memory access, is that we can comprehend the cause and or effect of anything, by actively accessing memories of any given factor, and the effect of that factor in it’s relative circumstance. With this gained ability, a massive advantage is unlocked for the potential to learn how any factor will affect its relevant circumstances. Therefore the potential is enabled, to access memories of information of how every specific factor within a situation will affect it, to then accurately predict the outcome, and make any decision which is most beneficial to the individual.

With our unique capability of comprehension, which unlocks the potential to accurately analyse cause and effect of any general situation in life, it seems it would be exceptionally self-beneficial to take advantage of learning and applying this advanced process of learning.